Self-storage has become one of the most attractive asset classes in commercial real estate, but not every deal is built to succeed. Mistakes in market selection, underwriting, financing, and operations can quickly turn a promising investment into a costly lesson.
In this episode of Build It to Billions, Brett Swarts sits down with Jacob Vanderslice, co-founder and Principal of VanWest Partners, to uncover three of the biggest self-storage investing mistakes that can cost investors millions. Jacob shares lessons from years of investing in self-storage and explains what investors should look for when evaluating opportunities, protecting capital, and building a disciplined real estate investment strategy.
Episode Highlights Here:
Intro
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Brett
Welcome to the Build to Billions podcast, where we guide successful entrepreneurs and investors on their journey from millions to billions. We believe the key to scaling and compounding your wealth in life starts every single day with the mindset and practice of stewardship over ownership and applying billionaire biblical principles. Our ultimate goal is help you scale and compound your wealth in life, so we can give more all of it away to help MVPs. My name is Brett Swarts, and I’ll be your host today. By the way, we’re also streaming on Capital Gains Tax Solutions podcast and YouTube channels. You may be also picking up on expert CRE secrets as well. We bring on guests every single week who are experts in real estate. They’re entrepreneurs, millionaires, or billionaires, and they’re sharing their secrets with us, so we can all level up and make a bigger impact. I’m excited about our next guest. He’s out of the Denver area, and he is going to help us get a little more insight on the self-storage business and investing. In fact, he is a co-founder and principal at Van West Partners, and it’s a Denver-based real estate company specializing in the acquisition, development, and management of self-storage facilities. Under his fundraising leadership, Van West has strategically deployed over 375 million in capital and value-add self-storage facilities across the United States. Please welcome the show with me, Mr. Jacob Jacob Vanderslice. Jacob, how we doing?
Jacob
Brett, afternoon. Thanks for having us on. Appreciate it.
Brett
Absolutely. Yeah, and for our listeners getting to know for the first time. Maybe give them a little bit about your story and your current focus, and then we’ll dive into some of the top mistakes you know maybe some operators have made and some lessons they’ve learned the last couple of years, and what the best are doing moving forward with mindset and practices.
Jacob
Yeah, we’re Van West Partners. We’re a self-storage owner operator based out of Denver. We’ve got about 21,000 units across 42 facilities under ownership, fairly scattered throughout the country. Decent concentration in the Midwest and Southeast. Been full-time in real estate for about 20 years. I got it in 2006 and started off doing a lot of residential. Did some adaptive reuse retail, and then we fell into the storage business back in about 2015. So, call it 11 years-ish in that asset class, and we like the fact the industry has been historically downside protected, fairly durable, recurring revenue streams, does well in good times and bad times. So, we did our first deal back in 2015 and went okay, and just kind of kept going thereafter. And over time, accidentally evolved into being primarily a self-storage owner operator.
Brett
Excellent, and I’m curious. Growing up, was even real estate in the family, entrepreneurship in the family. What was kind of like Jacob’s gifts growing up, or strengths, and then how you know, and that led to where you’re at, and how do how do how do you use those gifts to bless people today?
Jacob
Yeah, yeah, not. I guess the short answer is not really. I was when I was in high school. I was flying airplanes, working on getting my pilot’s license. I did that in college. Always wanted to be a fighter pilot, and it’s funny how life, you know, takes you different directions. I ended up being a firefighter instead of a fighter pilot after college, so I had some time on my hands, and you only work 10 days a month, so that’s kind of where I discovered real estate. I started just kind of reading books about it and dipped my toe in and bought a couple properties when I was in my early 20s, and really just learned by failing. You can find good information in books and on podcasts, but you’re just not going to learn this stuff unless you’re actually going out and taking the risk. And we like to say we little get we geta little bit less dumb every year. We can’t tell you what to do, but I can I can sure tell you a lot of what not to do, just from making mistakes over the years. And hopefully our big ones are done, but I’m sure there’s a few lefts to make.
Brett
That’s good. I think it’s a great approach.VanWestpartners.com. Everyone, if you want to connect with Jacob right now, it’s VanWestpartners.com. So, let’s talk about that. I mean, what are the maybe the three either biggest lessons you’ve learned or the three biggest mistakes that you see operators of self-storage facility investors or operators in the last couple years, and then what you know what’s gleaned some wisdom from that.
Jacob
Yeah, the market, obviously, the real estate market shifted a lot. We’ve all seen a lot of downward pressure depending on our markets and our asset classes, but no one’s escaped some of the pain that we’ve seen out there. And I think in self-storage, the primary reason for some of the pain that people are experiencing is the introduction of new supply. Self-storage is a very, very much a three-mile, five-mile business, and when you build a lot of new supply at the same times, you can create downward pressure on consumer demand because you’re chasing a finite. Customer base with a lot more supply. What happens? Prices goes down, go down. Occupancy goes down. So, I think the main mistake that I mean we’ve made on a handful of our deals, but we’re still seeing some operators make out there is under appreciating and under quantifying the risk and the impact of the introduction.
Outro
So, if you like this little, short clip of the interview I just did, click over here to watch the full interview, and please don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks so much, everybody
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About Jacob Vanderslice
Jacob Vanderslice is the Co-Founder and Principal of VanWest Partners, a real estate investment firm specializing in self-storage acquisitions, development, and operations. Since beginning his real estate career in 2005, Jacob has built extensive experience across residential and commercial real estate and has helped deploy more than $375 million into value-add self-storage investments across the United States.
At VanWest Partners, Jacob focuses on building the firm’s self-storage investment portfolios and leading investor relations. Before entering real estate, he served as a professional firefighter and arson investigator in Colorado. Today, he brings a disciplined, risk-focused approach to investing, capital preservation, and building long-term value for investors.
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