Hello, I'm Gabe Strom, and I am the one who will be buying your facility.

I run Seedhouse Capital out of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. What we do is buy small self storage facilities in the interior of the country, the kind that serve a town rather than a metro area, usually from the person who built or bought them a long time ago.

I should be straight with you about where I am, because you are going to wonder and because I would rather you hear it from me than find out later. We are not a fund with a hundred properties and a website full of logos. We are building this deliberately, one facility at a time. Every purchase is funded with our own capital alongside partners around the country who back these deals with us, and there are partners in every deal we do. That is what lets us close without a bank, and it is also why you will be told exactly who is buying, and which partners are involved, before you sign anything. Over the past year I have sat on the phone with dozens of owners across these six states, gone through their numbers with them, and told several of them honestly that they should not sell right now.

What I do bring is the underwriting. I can take your rent roll, your county, and your buildings, and tell you inside of two days what the facility is genuinely worth to a buyer today, and show you every assumption I used to get there. Most owners have never been shown that arithmetic, because the people who normally run it want a listing agreement signed before they will share it. I give it away because the owners I most want to talk to are the ones who would rather understand their position than be sold on one.

Before storage I built software and ran a string of online businesses, most of it direct response marketing, which is a long way of saying I spent years learning to measure whether something actually worked instead of assuming it did. That turns out to be most of what running a storage facility well requires: knowing which rent increase held, which sign brought a tenant, which expense was worth paying for.

Which raises a fair question: why is a technology person calling you about a storage facility outside a town of nine thousand people?

The honest answer is my kids. I have spent my working life in an industry that tears itself down and rebuilds every few years, and right now I am watching artificial intelligence pull the floor out from under a great deal of it, faster than most people in it want to admit. Steel buildings on land that people need in good years and bad ones are not that. They were needed in 1985 and they will be needed in 2045.

So I came to storage to build something durable, to hold onto what I have earned rather than watch it get outrun, and to have something real to hand to my children. That is close to the same reason most of you put up your first building, which is probably why these conversations tend to go the way they do.

If you own a facility in one of our states, I would like to know you before you ever need to sell. Sometimes that means I send you a valuation and we speak once a year and nothing ever comes of it. That is a perfectly good outcome and it is most of what this is.