We sat down with industry expert, Travis Morrow, to see exactly what he thinks about Nokē Smart Entry by Janus International. Morrow is the President of National Self Storage, which has ten locations throughout the United States. In his interview, he explains how Nokē has improved their business and why he'd never build a new facility without Nokē. Read his full interview below.
Morrow: I looked at the customer experience that our customers, as storage customers, were experiencing with other businesses. We use our phones for everything today, so why can't our customers do the same thing at our facilities? I saw that's where the industry was going and I was lucky enough to be an early adopter of Nokē Smart Entry.
Morrow: My managers love the efficiencies that it creates for them, especially with the auction process. They have the ability to share keys with people who won the auction and control how frequently they can access the unit. You can set access for certain hours or you can actually set the number of locks and unlocks of an individual unit. The auction winner has to come in, take their stuff out, and then we regain control of the unit.
Morrow: It's a huge time-saving for managers. They used to be out on the property a couple of times a day, on the golf cart or walking around with a bucket of yellow and red locks. They'd have to put them on and take them off and it was really a part of the day that they didn't look forward to. With Nokē Smart Entry, that happens automatically. Now, they can just go walk the property, clean the property, do other things, and it's been a big time saver.
Morrow: Customers like the fact that they don't have to remember to bring their keys to the facility, which is a frequent occurrence. I've done it myself at my own self-storage unit. You drive all the way down to your facility and realize that you forgot your keys at home, turn around, and come back. That doesn't exist now with Nokē, because we all have our phones with us all the time.
Morrow: For the customers, they have visibility into what's going on with their individual unit door. They can see any time that door is accessed. If they have shared a key with someone digitally, they can see when that person is accessing their unit. It gives them a warm and fuzzy feeling, if you will, that their unit is secure and that they're aware of what's going on with their unit at all times.
Same for our managers. They're able to look through the portal and see the status of the entire facility at any one time and see who's on the property, how long they've been on the property, and who's come and gone throughout the course of the day. From a manager's security standpoint, it gives them the ability to take a quick look at the property and see exactly what's going on.
Morrow: All of our facilities have been converted to Nokē Smart Entry. We've got just over 5,000 units that are smart units and have had zero break-ins from a tenant protection standpoint. We've had other claims, such as water, rodents, etc., but nothing resulting from burglary.
I've been in the industry a long time, long enough to remember when we were still running ads in the Yellow Pages. It took this industry a very long time to be convinced that they needed websites. Now, everybody has websites and no one has Yellow Page ads. I view Nokē Smart Entry as the equivalent of the website back in 2003 when I started in the industry. It's going to be something that we all have at our facilities. It's going to be something that our customers require of us and I encourage anybody to use Nokē at their facilities.
Morrow: The thermal motion sensor alerted the manager that there was a locked unit that had activity going on inside of it. We were able to discover that someone had decided they wanted to 'hang out' in the unit beyond what the intent of the self-storage unit was, and we were able to correct them and resolve that issue.
Morrow: It goes back to the customer experience for me and the ease of use for self-storage. Our customers are able to rent a unit online, come down to the facility, get access to the facility, and access their unit without talking to any of our employees. That's the experience that many customers have become used to, not only with self-storage but with hotels and many other businesses. It's been exciting that our facilities have been able to match that experience, just like we had intended.
Morrow: We do get a discount through our insurance provider because we have Nokē Smart Entry at our facilities. The insurance companies see that there is value in the security that the system provides. The thermal motion sensor could theoretically alert us to a fire, not that we've had to do that specifically, but I can see the use. The commercial liability companies see that value and have given us a discount because of it.
Same thing with our tenant protection program. We're getting a higher revenue share than we normally would because we have Nokē Smart Entry at our facilities. The tenant protection company has also recognized the additional security that Nokē provides which gives them a warm and fuzzy feeling that there are going to be fewer break-ins at the property.
Morrow: We started using Nokē in 2018. We did one facility that was 100% Nokē units, and over the last few years, we've been rolling it out at our other properties. I have five properties in El Paso, Texas and we did those projects in phases. In the first phase, we did half of the units in El Paso with Nokē Smart Entry, the other half was 'dumb'. That allowed us to calculate the value that Nokē provides to our customers and to our facilities.
We saw that Nokē units rented quickly. they were the preferred unit of customers coming into the facility and those customers were willing to pay more for those units versus the 'dumb' units. We quickly decided we wanted to make our 'dumb' units smart, and converted the rest of the properties.
At the five El Paso locations, we spent about $300k converting those units to Nokē Smart Entry, and based on the increased rents that we were charging and some other advantages, I calculated our ROI on that investment to be about $3M dollars and it continues to grow as we're continuing to push rates.
Morrow: The bottom line impact of Nokē was a $300k investment for a $3M return over 18 months. I would never build a new facility without Nokē Smart Entry and any facility that we take over management, we work very hard to convince the owner that it is time to upgrade their facility and install Nokē Smart Entry.