Does anyone offer online rentals?
We have been researching this for awhile and have come across many road blocks. As a smaller company (6 stores) we haven't found a financially reasonable solution.

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Danielle

I just came back from the Selfstorage expo in Nashville.

I spoke with a lady there resprenting emove.com. Related to uhaul I think.

Basically they offer a very resonable online reservation service. I was impressed with the low costs. The way I understand one option they have is a free listing and when someone makes a reservation thru the web site I pay a flat fee of $20.00.

I'll give $20.00 for a move in any day.

Of course there are paid add ons. I think about $5.00 a month for pictures and map to your facility, and then a "all bells and whistles" for about $45 a month.

For a small faculity, like I have, I like the basic service they offer.

Some others I talked to were flat monthly fee services, but I liked this one the best.

Since I just talked to them you may want to research them and get the information.

Handy

NebraskaStorage,

What management software are you using? Some of them offer the ability to take payments and make reservations.

Offering your tenants the ability to make a payment or view their account information online is a "Value Add" to your marketing. You can justify it in your next market rate increase and recover some of the expense.

What sort of costs are you seeing for adding this to your offerings?

Michael

We used the service from U-Haul here in Florida - we paid a lot of money for one referral every 4-6 months. We have our website set up so we receive emails regarding rentals. Also US Self Storage Search has been very good about referring to us. We have full control of what is advertised on their site and they are quite reasonable. New start up, but they shot up like out of a canon! www.usselfstoragesearch.com. Good Luck!

Hi,

We are able to offer you online rentals that connect directly from your website to our management software. You are in full control over what your potential customers see and are able to rent in real time. This also enables you to design the whole page and customers never need leave your website so you maintain your branding.

All that is required is your PC to be connected to the net 24/7 and our service enabled.

The cost?? This is the best bit, it is included in your annual support fee and there are no per reservation fees.

Please let us know if you need more information and we will be happy to help.

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Best regards
Aaron Alsweiler
StorMan Software
(951) 343 7169
www.storman.com

Nebraska,
I think the web version of most management software packages includes that ability. You do have to have a website, but I'll go on a limb and say that with six sites, you are already on the web.

And Handy, you are correct - emove is related to U-Haul.

Thanks for all the input. We are on emove and usstoragesearch.com. What we really want is the ability to rent a storage space when we are closed on the weekends. This is where we thought online rentals would come in. We've talked to some web developers about integrating this with SiteLink but it is going to cost lots of $$ and it looks like we might be the first to do this (which is also risky for a small business).

For now, we will continue to rely on our trusty kiosks at three stores and hopefully our owner will install at the other three

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Danielle

Danielle, I'm with you...I'm looking forward to the day that customers can make a reservation on the website and redeem it with some sort of code at my kiosk. My understanding is that SiteLink and OpenTech (Insomniac) are working on that solution, so hopefully it is coming soon.

I love EMove.com (I am not affiliated in any way with UHaul). I signed up less than a month ago, and they have already sent me 3 customers. The $20.00 referal fee is $5 less than I offer someone off the street.

This is by no means a jab at Sitelink, but from my experience, what sales people tell you what their software can do, and what it actually does are two very different things.

There is also a reliability issue, it could kinda, probably do something some of the time, and they tend to market it as a product feature.