Unpacked Webinar: Preparing for Economic Uncertainty

 

0:04

Good, morning. Good afternoon, everybody. We’re gonna give everyone just one minute to get connected, and make sure their audio videos working, all that kind of stuff. And this goes, and hang out for us. We’re gonna get started right at 12 0 1 central.

0:46

Alright, we’re starting to see things stabilized, So we’re gonna go ahead and kick it off. So, like I said, good morning, good afternoon, depending on where you guys are at. We know everyone here that’s joining us is incredibly busy, and we’re very appreciative of you guys making the time to come join us today for our annual State of the self storage Industry Webinars. So my name is Matthew Beal, I’m the Director of Product Marketing here at Storable, and I’m gonna walk you through just a couple of brief housekeeping items and just make sure that everyone kind of knows what to expect over this session. But I’m going to be moving as quick as I can. So that we can get to the star of the show here. Mr Chuck Gordon, So, Chuck, if you don’t mind going to the next slide.

1:22

Couple of things I just wanted to mention before we jump in. Today’s session is about 30 minutes in length. We might take a couple extra minutes, because we do want to make sure to get to everybody’s questions, which we’ll get into that here in just a moment. If you guys do have any sort of technical issues of which the most common, or audio issues, so, if things are a little scratchy or were kinda cut in and out and it’s lagging. I would recommend that you use the phone call option on the audio settings. It’ll give you a phone number to dial into. And what we’ve heard from most folks is why the quality is a little bit lower, it’s significantly more reliable, and you guys will get a little bit of a more stable connection.

1:57

And if you do have any tech issues other than that, please use the chat feature. And I’m going to be standing behind the scenes to be able to help you guys diagnose that, and make sure that you guys can see and hear everything properly. And then, lastly, this is an interactive session, so we’ve intentionally built a good chunk of time, and today’s 30 minute block to be able to answer your questions. So please submit questions as you go either through the chat or the questions feature there and goto Webinar and we’ll be throwing those Chuck’s way at the end of today’s session so that you guys can kind of better wrap your heads around. everything you’re going to be covering today.

2:28

And so, without further ado, if you’ll go to the next slide for me here, Chuck. I’ll introduce, like I said, the Star of the show, Mr. Chuck Gordon, CEO here at Storable, who’s going to be walking us through this, the state of the industry. So, Chuck, take it away.

2:40

Awesome. Thank you for the intro, Matt. Hey, everyone, I’m super glad to be here today. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to join us.

2:48

My name is Chuck Gordon and I’m the CEO of storable. As Matt mentioned, our team has spent a great deal of time tapping into economic and industry data to understand what is currently happening and what might happen in the future. I’m looking forward to sharing some of those insights with you today.

Specifically, I’d like to spend our time diving into factors that we think will influence and even shape the trajectory of our industry.

And the first line is going to be the macro economic environment. So I’m going to cover the changing market conditions that set the context for the performance of our industry, overall, kind of outside factors.

3:27

Next will be the storage industry trends, where I’m going to go through how that macroeconomic environment that we’re experiencing is impacting key performance metrics across our industry.

3:38

And then finally, I’ll share some practical takeaways, which break down what everything means for operations like yours.

3:46

All right? So we’re gonna start by deep diving into a very high level overview of the broader US markets.

3:53

There are a number of forces that we’ve been tracking, including inflation, various capital dynamics, unemployment and wages, and the emergence of AI.

4:03

So the first is inflation.

You can’t turn on the news or read a business journal without hearing about this one, and rightfully so.

There are ways that economists look at inflation, but we’re going to be discussing core inflation today.

For those not familiar, core inflation removes highly volatile products such as food, energy, and fuel, to get a more stable view into how the economy is performing.

Last September, we saw a core inflation peak at 6.6%, significantly, from the stable 1.5 to 2.3% that we experienced over the previous decade.

And while many news outlets have reported that inflation has significantly dropped over the previous six months, they’re mostly referring to headline inflation, which does include those volatile products I just mentioned.

By contrast, core inflation continues to remain high at 4.35% most recently in September.

To combat this, the Fed has continued to raise interest rates through August.

Early signals suggests they might be halting those increases going forward. However, it’s a bit too early to tell for sure, And I think it’s pretty unanimous in terms of people’s thinking. The rates are going to remain high for a long time.

Over the last 15 years, the weighted average cost of capital has hovered right around 6% for S&P 500 companies, and while the exact translation to rates for storage owners has depended on a wide variety of factors, generally speaking, access to capital has been very favorable to our industry.

And we certainly saw the impact of that, but both record new construction and M&A numbers during the last 15 years.

But with the Fed raising interest rates from 0.25% to 5.5% over the last year, the rates operators get for these same projects have been directly affected.

5:56

As a result, the weighted average cost of capital rose from approximately six to 9%, or a 50% increase, and you might be personally experiencing even greater increases than this.

So it’s truly no surprise that we’ve seen the rates of M&A slow down significantly as a result of these macroeconomic factors.

More on this in a moment, these increases also impact the banks.

6:20

As federal rates increase banking the liabilities increase in the value of the investment securities used to back those investments decreases.

These losses, even if they’re unrealized, can have substantial negative impacts on the bank’s liquidity, often causing them to limit the number of new loans that they issue.

Then, as a result of this Inflationary environment, you would typically expect to see a subsequent increase in unemployment.

But, surprisingly, we have not, it’s remained relatively steady between 3.4, 3.8% throughout 2023, which is consistent with previous decade lows.

By itself, this would typically contribute to an accelerating inflation rate.

However, wage rates have started to slow down over the last few quarters, and this has helped to keep inflation in check.

The most recent wage growth came in at 4.5% in September, which was down from 9.1% year over year.

As a result, employers no longer feel the need to increase prices as much to make up for these rising wages, and this drives down inflation.

Ultimately, it’s just too soon to know the long term effects, because of all the macroeconomic trends. Most economists anticipate that this one will continue to shift most significantly.

7:43

And then the hottest topic over the last six months or so has been the emergence of artificial intelligence or AI.

Chat GBT has been the face of this emergence, but many companies have been developing AI solutions for years.

AI will impact many industries and disciplines over the coming months and years, and the self storage industry is certainly not going to be an exception, in my opinion.

Some challenges that AI will help address include: optimizing or automating operational workflows, elevating the customer experience, and providing business intelligence insights.

This is something that we’re laser focused on here at Storable, including the launch of our dedicated AI investment, the Storable Labs team.

8:28

Each of the previous macroeconomic forces have had an impact on the storage industry.

So pull back the curtain on some really interesting data analyzes to see exactly how these are manifesting in our industry.

8:49

First one, wait for the slide to load here, is the move-in to move-out ratio.

Throughout 2021, and especially 2022, there were more move-ins than move-outs across the storage industry, peaking at a ratio of 1.5 move-ins for every move-out in May of 2021.

But over the last six months, we’ve seen this ratio drop below pre-pandemic levels. Most recently, it was at around zero point ninety seven in September meaning, there are more move-outs than move-ins.

We anticipate that this trend will continue in the coming months.

And as you’d expect we’ve seen occupancy rates mirror these trends.

Throughout 2021 and 2022. We saw record high occupancy rates, approaching 92% across all nearly 32,000 facilities using storable, FMS products.

And over the last six months, we’ve seen occupancy rates drop down to pre-pandemic levels closer to 87%.

And if you look at the regional breakdown of this, these trends are mostly consistent across the country, with the exception of the Western region.

You can see here, seasonality trends, remain consistent across each region, but they’re all consistently lower than last year.

And then, as you might imagine, we’re also seeing these occupancy pressures impact average rental rates, but there’s an interesting tennant dynamic at play here as well.

Over the last few years, many of the folks rushing to get a storage unit we’re doing So. As a luxury for life changes, such as home remodeling or moving into bigger homes.

And by contrast, we’ve now started to see a shift toward more needs based tenants. These folks are typically downsizing. Maybe they’ve lost their job, or they’re moving back home with family.

They typically are more price sensitive, and we believe we’re seeing an impact of both of these forces play out in average rental rates.

As shown here, new unit prices have, essentially increased month over month, throughout the entirety of 2020, 2021, and all the way until July of 2022.

There was a great run, wasn’t it?

Unfortunately, those days are behind us.

Since then, we’ve seen a fairly consistent drop returning back to 2021 levels, but honestly continuing to drop, you know, on a monthly basis, and we could see it go lower than what we saw back then. We will see.

11:26

And while rates are obviously different across the country, the trends by region are quite similar.

The Midwest and South seem to be just slightly less affected by these drops in the early months of this year, but not enough where I’m comfortable drawing any substantial conclusions just yet.

11:44

So even though we’ve seen these rates drop fairly steadily over the last year or so, it’s certainly not all doom and gloom.

This is an interesting chart that shows the total rental rate, or the average rate of occupied units compared to the new unit rental rate or the average rate at which new tenants are moving in.

You can see that the total rental rate continues to increase even though street rates are dropping.

The delta between what new tenants are paying and what existing tenants are paying is now nearing the record high we observed pre-pandemic.

12:20

The big question here is at what point will existing tenants start making noise about new rents being so much less than theirs?

And I don’t think anyone really knows what the elasticity here is but it will certainly be an important trend to watch.

12:37

And this next slide here shows the exact same data, but in price per square foot form.

Interestingly, it’s basically the inverse of the prior slide.

The price per square foot of existing tenants is continuing to climb, and may actually exceed the price per square foot of new rentals if these trends continue.

12:57

But this trend cannot go on forever. As more and more units are replaced with lower paying tenants, the total rental rate will inevitably come down.

Then perhaps most importantly, we’ve seen tennant demand in aggregate, drop fairly significantly recently.

13:18

Here you can see a consistent year-over-year drop in demand for some of the core storage search terms like storage near me.

But most concerning is that normally we’d expect to see an increase in demand during the summer months that tapers off into the winter. Unfortunately throughout September and until now, we’ve continued to see a decline, we basically didn’t have a real busy season this year. It just didn’t happen.

And a primary factor influencing this behavior is rooted in housing trends.

As we all know, relocating is a huge reason why people need self storage, and due to factors such as inflation, increasing interest rates, limited access to capital, consumers moving and buying homes, at notably lower rates, compared to previous years. And that is having a direct impact on how many people need self storage.

14:06

Similarly, M&A is slow.

Over the last 5 to 10 years, much of the growth in the storage industry has been through mergers and acquisitions.

And given the kind of capital dynamics we just talked about, where debt rates were very low, it’s made a ton of sense.

Not to mention that the cost of facilities, especially compared to, say, 10 years ago, was significantly less compared to today.

But with the cost of debt rising, we’ve seen these acquisitions slow significantly.

We anticipate this trend to continue until the costs of capital return to normal or seller price expectations adjust.

14:39

There is one noteworthy exception to this trend, of course, and that is at the very top end of the market, we’ve continued to see significant consolidation.

Most notably Extra Space acquired Life Storage for approximately $12.7 billion dollars earlier this year, in case you missed that memo.

14:56

And then our last graph here illustrates another behavior that we have discussed many times over the last few years.

Tenants are shifting their shopping and engagement preferences away from traditional methods, such as phone or walk-ins, towards digital.

Obviously, Covid has had a significant impact on this, but these trends have remained and in some cases amplified.

So what you see here is the percentage split of traffic across millions of reservations on the square foot marketplace.

Over the last three years, we’ve seen online reservations, as opposed to phone reservations, jump from a 60% share to nearly 75%.

We have no reason whatsoever to believe that these trends will light up.

So if you’re not laser focused on optimizing your digital experiences for your customers, you are likely falling behind.

15:51

We’ve talked through a lot of data today.

But what does it all mean?

Based on what we’re seeing across the industry, we’ve distilled a of couple practical takeaways for everyone to think about.

So earlier, we talked about how M&A is down across the industry.

Over the last few years, this has been one of the main drivers of growth across many of your portfolios.

So, operators need to shift their focus toward growing in other ways by looking internally at their own operations.

From our perspective, there are three key opportunities for operators to do exactly that.

16:29

The first centers around operational efficiency.

With the rapid growth over the last few years, many operators haven’t had to think much about this one.

But getting more operationally efficient can reduce your expenses and refocus your staff on delivering value back to your business.

For example, we’ve talked to several operators who are deploying a number of technologies or services to refocus their team on growing their business, instead of handling mundane, repetitive tasks.

And for folks with multiple facilities, they’re even reducing their overall headcount by finding ways for managers to support additional locations.

17:05

Second, as both street rates and occupancy continue to drop, operators have been experiencing a drop in revenue that we haven’t seen for many years.

To help offset that, operators need to either find new, incremental revenue streams, or optimize their existing ones.

That can be done in many ways, including implementing value based pricing, enabling automated insurance or tenant protection technologies to drive enrollment rates, or offering valuable products and services to your tenants directly.

17:35

And then, the last opportunity to shore up your internal operations is to focus on enhancing the security of your technology stack.

For those of us who attended SSA fall last month, the recent headlines of cyber attacks hit close to home.

MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment both fell victim to organized threat actors serving as a wakeup call for businesses everywhere.

These attackers have demonstrated an alarming level of sophistication and refined social engineering tactics, and self storage businesses are not immune to this. Operators must take proactive measures to safeguard their data and systems.

18:14

OK, so, before we wrap up the content and get to questions, I wanted to mention a couple of things briefly.

The team here at Storable tracks and discusses this type of data regularly to ensure that our products and services innovation strategy aligns with helping operators solve their most critical business challenges.

And, in that spirit, I wanted to briefly walk you through a few of the more impactful innovations that we’ve released over the last year that are directly aimed at helping you increase revenue and lower cost.

18:46

Across each of our three facility management software products, storEDGE, SiteLink and Easy Storage Solutions, we’ve made a number of enhancements that result in valuable time, savings, incremental revenue, or both.

For storEDGE, we’re about to release price tiering.

This feature empowers operators to charge higher prices for units with premium attributes, such as climate control, proximity to elevators, or being on a certain floor.

This helps recoup some of the revenue losses that we’ve been discussing today.

19:18

For SiteLink, we focused on reducing the load time of the program, while maximizing product reliability. We released a number of enhancements to move our configuration settings. And next up, we’ll be launching a brand new, mobile friendly site experience.

19:33

For Easy Storage Solutions, we’ve recently made a number of enhancements to the monthly summary report to centralize and streamline your accounting processes.

Instead of pulling multiple reports and figuring out where to pull key information, the monthly summary report now serves as a single source of truth for operators reconciling your books.

19:53

Next is Auto-Protect for our insurance customers.

Auto-Protect is our fully automated insurance offering that maximizes your insurance enrollment rate without requiring any manager intervention.

By adopting it, our customers have achieved, on average, a 65% enrollment rate across their portfolio, significantly above the industry average of 20%.

It’s another great way to help offset losses in revenue.

20:18

And then, last, is online move-ins for our Marketplace customers. Another way to help bolster your bottom line by streamlining your operational processes to help cut costs.

And online movement takes one task off your manager’s day to help with exactly that.

Over the next couple of months, we’re going to be rolling out a fully embedded online move-in directly into our Sparefoot Marketplace offering, making it easier than ever for your tenants to move in your facility.

20:46

We also recently announced our exciting acquisition of CallPotential.

These products serve as an extension of the storEDGE and SiteLink software to supercharge both your collections and lead management processes.

Collections Manager Pro fully automates the collections process, without any need for manager intervention, resulting in more than four times delinquent revenue capture on average.

Lead Manager Pro provides a streamlined lead-to-lease user flow and automated tenant communication tools that ensure you never miss the chance to convert a lead into paying tenant.

Customers utilizing this product, on average, close 250% more leads than their peers.

21:30

And for anyone running your own internal call center, our Contact Center product is a massive driver of operational efficiency.

Users of this product have seen time on phone reduced by 30%, which results in significant headcount savings.

You can also leverage this product to have one manager cover multiple locations.

21:49

All of these products helped directly address the challenges we discussed today, because that is our focus here at Storable.

If any of these new innovations sound interesting and you want to learn more, please do not hesitate to reach out. Also, feel free to use the questions feature built-in to GoTo Webinar and we’ll have someone from the Storablel team reach out over the next couple of days.

That concludes today’s content. I look forward to staying in touch with more of these in the future. In the meantime, I’d love to spend a few minutes hearing from the audience, though. So, Matt, did we have any questions come in?

22:23

We had a ton of questions, a lot of really, really good stuff. So, a lot of them come in the last couple of minutes, so, I’m gonna kinda parsing through and maybe change it up here Chuck.

But I’ll throw a softball first, which we had a number of people just ask, will today’s session be recorded and shared back out so that they can share with other key stakeholders, their ownership group, you know, whoever it may be? You want to take that one?

Yes, it will.

22:48

Yeah, pretty straightforward. I probably should have just answered it. So, OK, here’s, here’s a good one that came in. There was a question to come around regulation from states as it relates to rental increases. So, I know there’s been a lot of conversation about that, especially in the last year. Whenever rates where occupancy and rental rates are increasing significantly. Is that something that you guys are discussing or you guys are tracking, Chuck?

Yeah, good question. So, I’m definitely not a legal expert and would certainly refer you to one of the self storage legal minds, of which there are several really good ones.

But, you know, I know that there were restrictions put in place by certain states during the pandemic, most of which I think have been lifted by now.

But I haven’t heard of any additional regulation coming as of yet. But I would definitely go leverage the self search, civic legal resources for that one.

23:43

Perfect, thank you. Another one that came in is around the data, some of the data that we saw, Chuck, So I think it’s probably a good exercise real quick to just kinda review where this data came from. So, there’s some questions. For example, was, I saying same store facilities. How many people are in this dataset, all, that kind of thing. Would you mind just kinda walking them through where this data came from?

Yeah, absolutely.

So this is the highest level view of basically consolidated data across every single FMS facility that uses a Storable. Sorry every single facility that uses a Storable FMS product.

So that is almost 32,000 facilities and represents, you know, more than half of every single storage facility in the United States, so In my opinion, It is the most accurate data that exists about the true state of the overall storage industry.

Very good.

24:40

We also had a couple of questions come in about portable storage in general. And so just if, you know, obviously what we looked at today is kind of the more traditional self storage segment. But just kinda seeing if there’s anything you would share in terms of how you’re tracking the portable units and that businesses that, you know, we still do run a good chunk up on the SiteLink side of the house.

Yeah, So, on the portable storage side of things, we obviously have a number of great customers who use our products, who are portable storage operators.

I haven’t really heard too much about that product going one way or the other.

As far as I know, it’s steady as steady as it goes.

25:17

Very good. There was also a few questions that came in around interest, around Auto-Protect, and so some of the questions that came in, for example, are, you know, how are we getting our older customers on Auto-Protect and so on? Auto-Protect is a suite of technology that kinda runs the gamut, as, you know, Chuck. So, would you mind walking briefly through the three main pieces of technology that we’ve implemented there, and what that does for operators?

Yeah, sure.

So, basically, Auto-Protect is a suite of a few different things that helps you enroll, auto enroll, your customers who are new, who are existing at the same time without having manager intervention. So, if you want to learn more about that, we have ways of accomplishing all of that.

So, you know, reach out to us whether it be through support, your CSM, we can get you set up. It’s live in both storEDGE and SiteLink today.

And looking forward to that, helping with that. Like I mentioned, we’ve seen operators who just turn on this feature, and, I mean, it is literally just flipping a switch, increase their enrollment rates from 20% to 65%, and you don’t have to do anything. So, it’s a pretty magical feature that can definitely help you make more money.

Absolutely. Yeah, and just to add onto that, it’s like, when what Chuck is referring to is that to your existing users too, which is, I think where the question came from, So you turn this thing on, boom, your entire base within 45 days you see that level of penetration, so very exciting. Exactly, and the key part is that we’ve done it in a completely compliant way, Right, so, using a storable insurance product, we were able to make sure that the way we built this technology was done so that you know you’re completely covered from a legal standpoint, we’re completely covered from a legal standpoint. Your tenants have the opportunity to opt-out and prove that they have their own coverage if they want to. But, again, the entire process is automated.

27:12

Great, I’m kind of grouping a few other questions here, Chuck. I think thematically, one of the things I’m seeing from a lot of folks, is around this idea of as a mom and pop, or maybe even just like a 2 to 4 facility portfolio, there’s a lot of questions around ‘how can I compete with the big box stores’. So things like there’s some interest in some of the Sparefoot features, the online move-ins you discussed, there’s also some folks asking, how do I adjust my pricing strategy? But I think, again, just an aggregate. What would be some advice you offer some of the smaller operators in a way to be able to compete against the big guys?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I think the advantage that one has, as a small operator, that you can be nimble and hyper local.

So, if you think about someone like a publicly traded REIT, they are managing thousands of properties across the entire United States and they are not dialed into the neighborhood of your location.

So, you can be more specific in your ad copy. You can be more specific in your research of your competitors pricing, and therefore, adjusting your own promotions and pricing. As a result, You can form relationships with those other local companies who might be good sources of referrals in the community.

All of these things that, you know, you can do, as a more local business, are the ones that I would focus on, honestly, compared to what any big player would ever be able to do.

28:44

Good stuff.

Another question, Chuck is around this idea. I think this is a really astute, kind of, natural question to ask after hearing some of the forces we heard today is, you know, deciding on whether to grow larger or sit tight and optimize their own portfolio right now. So, I know this is something that we spent a lot of time talking about it Storable here, Chuck, and, you know, just trying to figure out the question also includes, like, looking at alternative revenue streams, other kinds of things that they can be doing with their operations.

Do you want to offer a few suggestions to this attendee?

Sure.

So the question is, do I think you should buy more stores, build more stores, or sit tight and focus on increasing operational efficiency and driving more revenue from existing tenants. I would say that it totally depends.

If you can put together a deal and acquisition deal, where it pencils out to solid return and you’re not making overly aggressive revenue assumptions then why not?

If you can build one in an area where there’s clearly not enough supply and again, you can forecast conservative revenue assumptions that make it pencil, why not?

But if you’re risk averse, and you want to wait for things to change a little bit, then why not focus internally?

Now, think about what are the right tools you need to get the job done.

If you’re using one of our software products call us and ask, how can I do more? What are the features I’m not using yet?

What are the different things that can explore in our knowledge bases to understand what other people are doing too?

Save time, save money. And also increase revenue like the insurance features we were just discussing.

So, I think you could spend a long time working on your own operations.

You know, if you just did decide that, you didn’t want to be more aggressive in this type of environment.

So, again, the answer to that is, it depends.

But my personal, I guess, view is, I always like to look for deals, and if there’s a deal that works, and then why not? But also, if there’s no deal that works, don’t force yourself to do it.

30:54

Great answer.

One little quick softball, but I’ll just take is, and I think it’s a great point, we’ve thrown around the phrase M&A a lot today, and a few people have just asked what M&A stands for. That’s mergers and acquisitions. So, growing your portfolio through acquiring other facilities to be able to expand. So, we’ve talked about how that’s kind of become a little bit prohibited with the situation of capital that Chuck covered earlier today, and so that’s kinda where the implications of the conversation you’ve heard today come from

Chuck. I get two more questions, where we’re at time, so I want to be mindful of that. But we have two other questions that I’m seeing a lot of folks asking in different ways that we’re going to cover real quick, and then we can go ahead and wrap it up.

I’m also gonna mention, real quick, I’m gonna throw a poll up on the screen of, in the interest of time, that’s something that we’re very interested in hearing from you guys about at Storable, if you guys could take a moment to answer that while we are working through these last couple of questions.

So, the other question. Chuck, is more around kind of, data sharing, in general, is where I wanted to bring this, but we’re getting it at a number of ways of, just, for example, being asked, hey, would you mind sharing, you know, specific data about my competitors in a very specific city, or, you know, what is the situation like in Canada, versus the United States, or you know, it kinda, can I get more granular? Essentially from what I’ve seen today? Do you want to kind of cover on what Storable’s stance is on that and how we think about the data sharing?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, we have gotten that request many times.

We have also gotten lots of requests to be incredibly diligent stewards of your data. And we take that responsibility extremely seriously.

So, when it comes to data sharing, I mean what you guys saw today is the extent of what we share. The very highest level view, not trackable down to, you know, any geo or anything like that. Um, If we ever did something like that, I think it would need to be more on an opt in basis.

Know if that’s something you want, feel free to tell us that that’s what you want. If we have a lot of people telling us that they want to opt into a data product and they’re willing to share, then that’s fine. But we are very very steadfast in not sharing your data unless you have given us permission to do it.

So that’s kind of where we stand on that issue.

33:12

Perfect. Thank you. And then one last question is you got a lot of ears that perked up when you mentioned the AI section a little bit earlier, Chuck. And I know we briefly breezed over this concept of Storable labs But with a number of follow up questions, we’re getting around just AI in general. Do you want to give just kind of a quick overview of how we’re that investment that we’re making and what that can mean for operators?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I think my perspective on AI is there is a lot of potential and opportunity with many different AI technologies that are coming to market right now. And I don’t exactly know yet what the right implementations are going to be for self storage operators. You know, is it going to be tools that live within our FMS that enable you to do certain things you couldn’t do before?

Is it going to be net new products that kind of work as part of our product suite, like CallPotential, for example, that enable some new functionality that didn’t exist before? We don’t really know yet. But, what I do know is that where there’s focus, there’s progress.

So, what we decided to do was invest in a dedicated Storable Labs AI team, who’s going to be doing nothing, but working on new ideas, that our AI powered and AI driven, to figure out what makes the most sense. And what products we can bring to market for all of you, to help increase your efficiency, and hopefully unlock some really cool, new functionality that will enable you to do things you never could do before.

34:46

Very good.

Appreciate it. I will share one last, just, quick housekeeping item, and then I’m Chuck, I’ll throw it over to you to close out, but we got a ton of questions we did not get a chance to get to. So we very much appreciate you guys engaging and submitting these questions. That said, they are logged, so we, over the next couple of days, we will follow up with you guys via email and chase down the answers for anybody who didn’t get a chance to have their responded to by Chuck today. So, but Chuck, I will throw it over to you to wrap us up.

Awesome.

Thank you, Matt. I want to thank everyone for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us today. This was a great session. Great questions. Love the engagement. Thank you Sincerely.

If any questions come to you throughout the week, please don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected], and we will get you an answer.

Otherwise, we look forward to continuing the conversation with each of you soon, and thank you again, Have a great day.