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I knew I wanted to do something bigger, and I waited because I was a little scared. So my biggest advice is just don't let fear hold you back. Just go for it, man. That's it. Welcome to the best ever show, the world's longest running daily commercial real estate podcast.
Our host interview commercial real estate experts every day to get you the best advice ever with none of the fluffy stuff. Hello, best ever listeners. Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I'm Ash Patel, and I'm with today's guest, Chris Long. Chris is joining us from Ottawa, Canada.
He's the CEO and founder of LongYards, a hybrid business model that takes old world storage and combines it with secure contractor storage yards as well as community support. Chris is a GP on 3 properties located in Ottawa, Florida, and North Carolina. Chris, thank you so much for joining us. And how are you today? I'm great.
Thanks, Ash. Appreciate it. Looking forward to it. Yeah. Listen.
I saw in a YouTube video with your business model, and I reached out to the team at the best ever podcast. And I'm like, you gotta get this guy on the podcast. So I think we all reached out to you. I'm excited you're here. And, Chris, before we get started, can you give the best ever listeners a little bit more about your background and what you're focused on now?
Yeah. Great. Love it. So, basically, I started as an entrepreneur young. At 12 years old, I was knocking on doors selling chocolate bars.
And even the winter selling chocolate bars at 12 years old. What is that? Like a chocolate bar. You know? Oh, chocolate bars.
Okay. Awesome. Yeah. So it just started off young, but I take my hat off in the winter to get the red ears to get some more sales. But it started off I was just always never afraid to knock on doors.
Right? So that was one part of me. The second part, it was just I was always a hard worker. I grew up on the farm with my grandfather at a young age up on the Quebec side, and I was just working away. And my grandfather, he ran Conrad Heating, and we used to do HVAC work.
So at a young age, I remember I was working in basements doing duct work and HVAC, and there was no heat in the house. It was cold. It was freezing, and my hands were bloody. I was like, why would anyone in their right mind want to do construction? Why would anybody wanna work?
At a young age, I hated it. But then you fire up the heat in the house, and it just feels great. So I learned that rewarding, hard work atmosphere at a young age. So when I got into the workforce right out of college, I actually I dropped out. I had a young daughter.
So I went right into work, lucky enough to get an apprenticeship. Gone to carpentry, and I was became a licensed carpenter. I started and named my grandfather in 2013. And then I used that basically to build my small residential portfolio. So I was doing renovation jobs.
I was getting into real estate, turning houses in duplexes. I only actually had 2 houses. I turned to duplexes. And that was kind of the little glimpse that said there's something bigger that I could do with, and there's a need in the marketplace, which I'm excited to talk about. Alright.
So that sounds a great story. You're on your way to building a residential portfolio, and you've got the skills needed to do the renovations. What came next? Well, after that, tenants, toilets, and headaches came next and roof repairs. And quickly, I was like, you know what?
In Canada, when you have a tenant not paying, it's a little different. And by the way, I'm calling it a Florida right now. So I am in the states. We are expanding. But from what I'm learning in Florida, the law is a little different over here than Canada.
If someone doesn't pay, it's it's a little bit different. So quickly, I realized this isn't working. I still love real estate, but I wanted something different. And that's when I figured out there's different places in the marketplace that I could be capitalizing. So I looked in the residential.
I was thinking about multifamily, and then I was looking in the commercial sector. So at that point, I was still kinda figuring it out. But luckily enough, I had a commercial property, and then I stumbled upon the great opportunity which I went all in in. What was your commercial property? There's 10 acres of heavy industrial land on a main road in Ottawa.
You bought this? Yeah. So my brother and I actually bought it. And what was your plan? Hold hold on.
Were you gonna ride 4 wheelers on it? What were you gonna do with 10 acres? Good question. So first, my brother and I, we wanted to do storage, traditional storage on the property. So that was the original vision.
So we bought it, and we were just kinda bumping heads with figuring out what to do and get a little brother relationship. I'm like, well, who's gonna pull the trigger first and what's happening? So that was the original vision. We bought it to build self storage on it, and, obviously, that changed. Okay.
So traditional self storage. Right. Alright. Now I know the answer to this, but tell the best ever listeners what this turned into. Okay.
Great. So before I get into that a little bit, I just wanna say how it's changed a little bit. Because when I first built my first location, it's been about 2 years now. We're expanding in the states. So as you know, interest rates have changed.
A few things have gone up, and the world is changing around us with all that right now. But what's unique about long air is with our business model and the cash flow, we're not too concerned about that. So that's really great to the market. And there's just a massive shortage of contractor space available. And that's how I discovered the need myself.
Right? So I was like, hey. I need this. I'm a contractor myself. I go home, and there was a bunch of equipment on my driveway.
My garage was full. My wife's Chris, my parents are coming. You gotta clean this stuff up. So I knew there was a need in the marketplace and needed a on an affordable space that wasn't a long term lease, and that was just adaptable for my business needs. So I did this.
I started building great business from the inside out for the needs of small business like myself as a contractor, and that's pretty much where the idea and how the vision started was from that need. So you took your 10 acres, and you divided it up using chain link fences. Right. So I had this property. I was like, k.
What am I gonna do with this? I knew I had the need. So it just to quickly cover it's changed a little bit in the last 2 years. So one of the things we want to expand more in Ottawa, but there's just a lack of industrial space. And things are costing more than you used to with the cost of development.
So people, if if you wanna move on this now, it's better to move on quickly because the cost of development's going up higher. There's just so many opportunities with territory. So what I did and what I did with my first property is exactly what you said. So I started off. I had this commercial property, and it was really expensive.
For me, it was hard to start myself. It was an old house in the property. You drive by, it looks condemned. It just looked really rough. There was trees everywhere.
I was like, I gotta get this thing started. So basically, I put everything into it. I started up very simply. I cut down the trees. I was out there with a chance on myself, cutting down trees, doing everything I could.
And I literally built this on a shoestring budget. I started up myself. So my brother helped me with the 1st row of fencing. I got the house up. We just painted it.
I couldn't afford to finish the inside, but I made it look good from the outside. And then I even had to get used gates for the front. So I drove to Gatineau, got some used gates, put them in the back of my truck, put ribbons, had the four ways on. And, basically, I put those gates up, spray painted them, made them look good, and had a key lock on the front. So that was basically how it started.
I just had a few yards. It was a shoestring budget. I was like, I'm going all in. Right? And sure enough, I cut the ribbon October 1, 2019, official launch of long yards.
Within 6 weeks, we were fully leased up. And that's how it started. 6 weeks, you leased up 10 acres. How large is each spot? So just to clarify that.
Each storage unit, I guess. Yeah. At the beginning, I couldn't afford to do the whole 10 acres. It was a little bit too ambitious for me. So I started in 3 phases.
The first third, that's when I cut the ribbon, and that's when we leased up. So then we started building up gradually. And it was tough because at the beginning, I could barely actually afford to put the gates in the front yard. So I leased up a yard, and I used it last month in the deposit to put the gate on. So I leased up organically.
And once I had the first third, then I got an investor behind me. And then I really started to put the machine down and started going because at the beginning, people are like, what are you doing? You're crazy. You're building contractor yards. No one's gonna back this.
I had to get it going, get the momentum, then the investor got behind me, and then we built out the rest. Chris, I've had the luxury of watching the video and seeing your website. But for our best ever listeners that maybe can't envision what we're talking about, can you paint a picture of what this facility looks like? Yeah. So, basically, it's 10 acres, and it is quite literally a long yard.
It's 200 feet by 2,000 feet. So you've got a road in the middle, and you have different yards on both sides. And you have your cameras, your power, and, basically, we provide these affordable spaces for small businesses. That's basically what it looks like. And is it chain link fence, or is there fabric covering each spot?
How high are the fences? Is there a barbed wire? It's 6 feet high. In different areas, we have different permit regulations for how high you can go with your fence. For our location in Canada, it's 6 feet, and then we add the barbed wire on top of it, and then you have the fabric.
So it's a completely enclosed space, which again didn't exist in the marketplace. For small business, it's either you have to have a small commercial lease, and you're not sure sometimes where you're gonna be in 2 to 5 years, or you need to go to an outside storage, cram your stuff in an awkward spot, hope there's a camera there. For us, it's like mini storage. The only difference is you have gates that are enclosed and a fully fenced in yard. You can put a camera there, put power there, and that's what it looks like.
Yeah. I love that you filled that need in the business because every one of my contractors' friends, their spouse, they can't park in the garage. Right? Their garage has just turned into their junkyard, but at least the garage is covered. So what do you do to keep the elements out of people's belongings?
Nothing. The beauty of it is just keep it simple. So if they want to add things to their yard, as long as they don't require permits, then that's fine. So you have so many different combinations of different clients using the space. Some of them are adding their own shelters.
Again, as long as it's required permits, it's fine. But when I needed it, you could bring in a pod. You could bring in your own container. You bring your own storage. You can bring in an office.
That's the thing. These things are made to be adaptable to your business needs. So if you need that covered space, that's fine. But we're not having a problem filling up with just every single person who just needs that extra space. It's catered to them, and it's affordable.
Interesting. I love that. So you can throw a pod in there, or if zoning allows it, a trailer or container. Yeah. Exactly.
And I've got so many more questions. So power. Every single person that rents from you has power available to them? No. Not everybody.
Because it's 10 acres. It is a long yard for us to bring power to the front all the way to the back. We can't do that. So we bring it out a little bit organically. We went to the locations we can, and that's it.
So to be honest, that are are close to a 100 yards, we only have 2 people that actually are using power. And along with the thing, to bring a generator, they bring a generator, and and that's it. What's your typical customer? What do they do? Are they all tradespeople?
Different areas we're discovering have different types of clients, and you're you're marketing to different strategies. So we have a hybrid and a combination of corporate clients. We have small businesses. We've have homeowners who are just hobbyists, and their wife want their junk off the lawn. So you got all sorts of people from all walks of life.
It's really unique because at the end of the day, you're, like, building a small business community. What do corporate clients store there? We have Ultramar. They store propane. We have large corporate clients that are basically storing commercial goods for local distribution.
We'll get back to the show with a first of sponsors I'm confident you'll find value in learning more about. When it comes to scaling your real estate business, is lack of capital holding you back? Raising private capital on demand can be a major challenge, but you can get the knowledge and tools you need to succeed when you attend Dana Cornell's 3 hour raise capital master class live. After starting out with no capital or relationships, Dana has raised over 2,000,000,000, that's with a b, $1,000,000,000 twice in the last 20 years, and he has made it his mission to share the best of what he's learned with business owners and real estate investors like you. You can learn more at danacornell.comforward/bestever.
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Visitpassiveinvesting.comforward/redflags to download that PDF now. That's passiveinvesting.comforward/redflags. Zoning. Do you have to be way out in the boonies to put one of these facilities up? No.
In Canada, most heavy industrial will work. What What I'm learning in the states is there's different terms and different codes for different areas. So, basically, outdoor storage or open air as some counties would say. That's a very important part. And even them with those zoning requirements, they have certain restrictions.
They want a certain height because it's a residential area. They wanna see cranes, whatnot. So, work with the zoning department is definitely really important, and that's one big step that we gotta work through. And cameras, if you don't have power everywhere, how can the lots in the back, how do they get covered by cameras? Oh, no.
We got cameras. So we run power over Internet cameras everywhere. Got it. Okay. Yeah.
And our clients get cameras. So we gotta remember, I built a for myself as a small business. I'm like, what do I need? Right? And then now all my clients, they get camera access.
So they can see everything going on. So I had a landscaper selling stone from almost yards. He could sit at home, watch his client or customer come in. He could text the gate from his phone, watch the gate open, watches him drive to the yard, watches the camera in the yard. That's not the right stone.
Pick up that stone. Send some knee transfer on his way. It's a beautiful thing. Who would have thought a landscaper could work remotely from home? I love that.
That's that's the thing. But the way we're doing things, it's so unique to the marketplace, and we're just working on so many different strategies. We introduce technology. We automate it. And, again, we're not worried about a few interest points with our cash flow.
I moved to the states. I'm immigrating here. I'm working in the states, and I didn't visit my property for a year. So once you do the heavy lifting and it's up and running, then the systems take over. Chris, in the US, I think we've got a little bit more crime than you have in Canada.
And even with the cameras, have you experienced theft? No. We're still new to the marketplace. We're going through our site plan approvals on a lot of our locations and due diligence. There was no one doing this in Canada.
When I started, I looked around. I'm like, I was the only crazy person that braved us in Canada. But in the states, we have seen some unique business models, and they do a block wall around the perimeter. But it really depends on how the real estate is gridlocked in. If you have good landscape buffers and everything.
But, yeah, you got higher population, more opportunity, more prime, more everything. But I figured all these security elements that we placed at our 1st location, placed at the second, and it's so active traditionally that people they feel it's a safe community. Right? It's people are looking over each other in a helpful way, not looking over each other like I wanna take something kind of way. I love it.
Competition. You're definitely a pioneer in this space, but I don't see a lot of barriers to entry for your competition. So have other people gotten on board with this idea and try to run with it? That's one thing. That's that's the reality in the marketplace.
So not that I'm aware of. Like I said, I saw it first in the states to make sure it wasn't completely crazy in Canada. So I knew it was happening, but no one's doing it like we're doing it. So just like I'm educating listeners and talking to you about it, you're like, what are you doing? We have to educate the marketplace too.
So it's really unique. The way we tell the story and the way we get clients in, we know people in Ottawa now because competition's coming. We'd started it in October 2019. Now people are starting it, but they're not leasing up. So it sounds easy, and it looks easy on the surface, but there's a lot of layers to it.
We had to reinvent the wheel 3 to 5 times as we're building now to perfect the wheel. So now we have our marketing systems dialed in. We have our build out dialed in. We have everything we need dialed in. So, yes, there's gonna be competition, but I think we're just ahead of the market on the how we roll it out, how we market, how we get our clients, and how we're growing.
Good. You have 1st mover advantage. So speaking of marketing, you're selling to franchisees. What does a franchisee get if they buy into long yards? So, basically, they get all of our systems to support them.
If you don't have the land let's say you wanna buy land because there's a lot of money to be made in the real estate. You can also lease land and have great cash flowing business. So that's the first thing. He's gotta identify whether you you love real estate and what these listeners most people do. We're gonna help you add tremendous value to the real estate.
We're gonna find a parcel with you, protect your territory, provide you everything you need to get the lending, the highest and best use, gonna walk you through on the lease up, oversee the construction, and then we're gonna help you scale up. We want ideally a franchisee to have 3 or 4 locations in one area, have one manager overseeing it, and a great business. So we're gonna help you with everything we've learned scaled up quickly. Where's the ideal location? Is it in an industrial area, a residential area?
Is it where a typical self storage facility would be? Well, actually, it's funny. Self storage, it's complimentary. People are going their store. They see us.
So, like, that's kinda neat. And some storage storage for the small stuff. Like, we're storage for the big stuff. That's a great way to summarize it. So we kinda wanna be around the action.
Now a lot of people are gonna see this. It's like, oh, I got this little parcel I'm looking at. It's outside of North Carolina. It's but no. We want to be somewhere close to the core.
Wanna be up good traffic. You wanna be in where something's happening, some growth. There's a very heavy data driven process because we have people come to us, and we're like, no. That location is just not gonna work. You could try it.
You could put a half million or a million, cross your fingers, but we're not confident, so we're saying no. So we work internally to make sure that the data supports location, and there's a lot of factors for that. Chris, do you charge by the square foot? How does pricing work for tenants? Yeah.
We do charge by the square foot. So we have our most common size yards and depending on the location. So it's hard to answer that because, obviously, the more you pay for the real estate, closer to town, then the more we could charge. Yeah. So if you were to take, typical warehousing price, and I know it varies all over the country, are you half of the price for indoor warehouse storage?
Unconditioned bottom of the barrel warehouse. Yeah. So I haven't priced it in there. We kind of go against RV parking because what's the RV charging in the area? And then we kinda use that as a formula to to reverse engineer what we could charge to what's in the marketplace.
And that's kind of a determining factor because we are different. We are different in the marketplace. However, we're full time, and our clients stay for a long time. So with RVs, you got people come to go and you have tons of clients. We don't have that many clients.
We have these industrial guys that stick around for a long time. What's the typical size of each yard? And what I mean each yard, each tenant space. And you can vary the sizes just by moving a chain link fence. Right?
Well, that's the thing. So what else is a little bit unique about our business? We wanna build things modular. So we build it in a way where it's fixed to the front, everything. You got your your gate with your code.
But if the yard can move around, we'll make it move around. So when you think about that, there's many layers to that. It's like quick for build out. That's what's unique about long hair. It's like the largest projects you've taken months with underwriting and due diligence.
We can hit the ground running and lease up quick. So we can provide cash flow quick. And our whole strategy right from the fencing, right to how we run power, right till we lease up, prelease up. It's quick. Everything about us quick.
What's the smallest space I can rent? Our smallest yard and actually, we stopped doing this because, again, our learning curve reinventing wheel was 30 by 50, but we don't make that size anymore. They're a little larger than that, which is our common size, but we also have larger yards for corporate clients. Our biggest yard rents for $22100 a month, and our smallest yard rents for $275 a month. So it's really all over the map.
So roughly 2 or 3000 square feet is only a couple $100 a month? Yeah. Man, I'm gonna start collecting old cars. I'm gonna throw them in your yard. So, Chris, you started this with a shoestring budget, and then I heard the word investor.
What happened? You took on an investor? Basically, it was hard to get going. Right? I got it started, and I was talking to people.
I'm like, no. You're crazy. I've never heard of this. Good luck. That's when I had to sell both my houses and started up by myself.
And even then, it was tight to make it work. But at that point, I had the investor behind me, and he just helped with the first property. So to give you an idea of the numbers of the first property, bought it for 470,000, got it going myself with some lifting. Investor put in around 500,000 in total, so I was in around 1.11.2, and it got appraised for 3,600,000. That was my very first location, and it's not even done being built out yet.
What's the revenue that comes in each year? Right now, around 360,000, and it's going up. We haven't even reached phase 4, phase 5. That's incredible. And our maintenance is a fraction of the cost of most businesses.
Right? Think of self storage. So I kinda say long years of self storage on steroids because we don't have the roofs. We don't have the doors. We have clients to stay for a long time.
They need their stuff. It's not grandma's junk. This is their industrial livelihood. So, yeah, it's great. And no HVAC systems.
I gotta put potholes, fix gates. There's no plumbing. Is it month to month tenants? I built it for a business that I mean, for what I needed as a small business. I didn't want something that was long term.
I didn't want something that was complicated or that restricted my business. I want something that was affordable and that could be adaptable. So I built it for guys like me, and we offer month to month. And we do want a couple months notice when you're leaving, but that's fine. And you know what?
We have a very low turnover. Our clients are happy. They're staying. They're referring their friends. So it's great.
The strategy that we have implanted, it it's great. Chris, that's an incredible story. What is your best real estate investing advice ever? I sat on that property for 2 years, and I was thinking about it for a long time. I knew I wanted to do something bigger, and I waited because I was a little scared.
So my biggest advice is just don't let fear hold you back. Just go for it, man. That's it. Yeah. That is great advice.
Chris, are you ready for the best ever lightning round? Let's do it. Alright, Chris. What's the best ever book you recently read? I get over the classic Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki.
And, Chris, what's the best ever way you like to give back? Well, actually, what's great about Longair is we built the community. So we're taking a leadership role. We're helping these small businesses. We provide back to the neighborhood and the community.
And I love giving back. I'm building a business plus giving back to the community. It's great. I'm loving it. Chris, how can the best ever listeners reach out to you?
Beautiful. So you can reach me at longears.com@longears.com. The website, longears.com or my email, clong@longears.com, or you could just call me 941-278-1995. Give me a shout. Yeah.
Chris, I gotta thank you again. My team reached out to you. Had no idea if you were gonna be able to come on this podcast. Thank you for being gracious, sharing what you're doing, and truly being a pioneer in this industry, man. Amazing conversation.
Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for your time. Best ever listeners. Thank you so much for joining us.
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