We sat down with industry professionals, such as Albert Morales, Vice President of Construction and Development for Simply Self Storage, to find out what they really think about Nokē Smart Entry. In his interview, he discusses bottom-line impacts, how they manage a staff-to-customer ratio, and so much more. Watch or read his full interview below.
Morales: Several different things. One is the persistence of the awesome sales team at Janus. And secondly, the innovation. I mean, I really believed in what Hayden was telling me about it. My wife is a realtor and a real estate broker, and she says something that's always been profound to me and that is, "You can't chase the market". You always have to be in front of it if you want to do anything in this market, and the same goes for self-storage. We want to be in front of the market, we don't want to be chasing the leaders, we want to be the leaders.
Nokē has that pop-and-flare that we have where we can actually track the customer data and matrix. We know whether the customer is satisfied when they're coming and when we need to have more or less staff, and so there are a hundred reasons why I pushed my company into doing our first store with Nokē.
Morales: The ease of use. It basically takes away all of the guesswork. There's no more trying to find a key. There's no more losing the key. There's app sharing. If one of our commercial tenants has four, five, fifteen, or thirty employees and they want to send them to one of our units, they can just share the app for a twenty-four-hour basis, get in, get out, and they no longer have access. There's just so much convenience that my customers love.
Morales: What I love about Nokē, and I do think like is a weak word because I love a lot of things about Nokē, and what I love the most is that Nokē allows me to leverage our staff's time. No longer are the days when we have too many members and not enough customers at the store. Now, as we're getting the data back, we know when we need to have our staff there. If we have two at the wrong hours, we know. For us, it's more about managing our money and managing the assets a little bit better.
Morales: Again, it goes back to one money. It's easier to make money when you can leverage your employees. Instead of them running night checks to make sure every door is locked, they're now doing something else in the office because at a glance we know if there is a door open or not. We know who's been there. We know how many times they've been there, and so for us, it's just allowing us to micromanage without micromanaging. The team member feels a lot more engaged in the process because they have a lot more control.
Morales: We haven't been with Nokē long enough to recognize large numbers, but we are starting to see a premium rental rate in using Nokē. We've had a couple of assets valuation done and we're recognizing that the add to Nokē is also increasing, you know, a potential sale of one or two of the assets that we've considered selling in the last couple of years.
Morales: Working with Hayden, he sent me over some data on some previous stuff that he had done, and using that, we're looking at probably about a 10% premium charge. We haven't sold any of the properties yet, but we've put the premium on it to see and we haven't gotten any resistance yet on it, so we'll see how that goes.