Inside the Self-Storage Industry with Jacob Vanderslice of Van West Partners

 

Guest: Jacob Vanderslice is a real estate investor and entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience in the industry. He is the founder of Van West Partners, a real estate investment firm that specializes in self-storage facilities. Jacob has an extensive background in residential fix and flips, multifamily, adaptive reuse retail, and town-owned development, but his passion lies in the self-storage business. Jacob explains the reasoning behind his shift towards storage, the company’s investment philosophy, and how they create value in their facilities.

 

Big Idea:  Real estate investor and entrepreneur Jacob Vanderslice shares his expertise in self-storage investment. Jacob discusses his journey in real estate investing and how his company, Van West Partners, moved from single-family rentals to self-storage investments. He emphasizes the importance of creating value through income streams and optimizing unit mix for maximum revenue. Jacob also talks about his investment philosophy, which centers around value-add investments in growing markets.

 

 

    

 

Dan: This is a pretty quick return, right? 6 months later, here we are. I don’t recall if we did it when we were on the call live recording or when we were spending some time before or after the episode, but we were talking about a fund you had set up for self-storage that had a pretty big dry powder dollar amount looking to allocate. I think my comment was, “Do you think you can actually allocate that?” I think that might be a good place to start so you can divulge the details as you see fit there and some adjustments to the playbook for VanWest going forward to get us started.

Jacob: Yeah, well, hopefully, six months ago my answer was the same as it is now. Because we could start to feel the shift back then. We had targeted a pretty large equity allocation when we launched this in January of 2022, which might as well have been 10 years ago relative to the history of the real estate market. Not much has changed, but we’ll end up closing the fund with 11 assets, just over 80 million in total capitalization leverage in the low 60s. We love the assets we’ve bought. We started acquiring in April 2022, and our last acquisition was in June of this year, so we’re raising our final round of capital. We’re going to close out the fund by 1231. Really, the reason for that is, first of all, we’re a closed-ended fund, and we’ve been open for a little while. Secondly, deal flows have substantially diminished. The bid asks spread is still very wide. It’s been widening, it feels like the last year or so. Sellers are just not transacting and you’re not seeing as many deals come to market. Buyers are having a harder time making their assumptions work, just give them what the interest rate environment has done. Bank financing is more difficult to get. You’ve got this incrementally declining transaction volume, and I think it’s going to just continue through the end of the year and we’ll see what 2024 looks like, but I think there’s going to be some opportunity coming up.

 

This Episode of The REI Diamonds Show is Sponsored by the Deal Machine. This Software Enables Real Estate Investors to Develop a Reliable & Low Cost Source of Off Market Deals. For a Limited Time, You Get Free Access at http://REIDealMachine.com/

 

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Resources mentioned in this episode:

https://www.VanWestPartners.com

 

For Access to Real Estate Deals You Can Buy & Sell for Profit:

https://AccessOffMarketDeals.com/podcast/

 

Jacob Vanderslice & I Discuss the Self-Storage Industry:

  • The evolution of Van West Partners’ investment strategy
  • The state of the US real estate market and the impact of COVID-19
  • The role of technology in the real estate industry
  • The potential impact of government policies on the market
  • The outlook for the real estate market in the near future

    

Relevant Episodes: (There are 232 Content Packed Interviews in Total)

 

The transcript of this episode can be found here.
Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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