MARCH 2019 POLL: Do you offer truck rentals at your facility?

Jana_Community

Beep, beep! Offering truck rentals to tenants can be a great add-on service and moneymaker for self storage owners. So owners and managers, let's hear it - do you offer moving truck rentals at your facility? Why or why not? Fire off in the comments with your experience on truck rentals and self storage.

Orkocean

Quick suggestion.. You may want to include options for other truck dealers such as budget and penske. 

LSAirport

Actually we meet all three options at different locations. 

JamesStorage

We offer our own truck, although that seems to be the minority

StowIT

We off U-Haul Trucks and trailers

MegumiM

We tried teaming up with U-Haul years ago but we stopped for several reasons but mostly financial. I think it's a great secondary source of income if you are able to rent them regularly and have the space.

brownrooster

Our other facilities in town do. Mine does not.  They have discussed adding it to mine.  I hope they do not.  My company does not offer any $$ incentive for the truck rentals so to me it would be an advantage to them, disadvantage to me as it would distract me from "job 1" with no compensation.

MrFugate

I've worked properties that rent U-Hauls before there are times when it can be a P.I.T.A. but it will bring customers & money to the property. If I had a place to park trucks after hours I would do it at the location I'm at now.

LinderISS

I've worked at facilities that either offer rentals or do not offer.  I believe the amount of time it takes to maintain, rent and return the vehicles is not worth the money even on the simple transactions.   And IF there are any issues, i.e. damage, non-return, people living in them it takes so much administrative time.  

Orkocean

U-haul isn't that bad. As long as there are no issues with the u-haul site a normal encounter with a customer from walking in to pulling out in a truck can be about 5 minutes. If they have 20 million questions then of course it can take longer but the same can be said for a storage customer. Phone call inquiries if we're not busy and take the time to go over everything can be about the same time. If we're busy we simply tell them they need to call u-haul directly. We don't have much room on our property and tight aisles so we limit what can/can't be brought to our location. If we're overloaded with trucks on site we let u-haul know and they send them elsewhere. 

MattSM

We own our own trucks but require a valid DL and PoI. Does anyone know of a 3rd party company that offers say a collision waiver when a tenant or user doesn't have valid PoI?

brett

Get in with ALL of your local movers, and ask to handle their U-Haul scheduling. Often times, this is easier than dealing with U-Haul corp directly. Saves time, makes you more money. 

teamcapitola

We were a Uhaul dealer for around 3 years, but we terminated the contract 2 years ago.

For the most part it wasn't bad; just the normal issues when dealing with a large separate company etc. We were limited to only 2 trucks due to the property but we seemed to receive a disproportional amount of calls/reservations because of our rating/reviews.

The local dealers nearby were very poorly rated (back then and most were gas stations). Since we took customer service very seriously, and provided actual service & answers, we became the only dealer with a high rating....causing a tremendous amount of traffic leaving little time for our core business. 

The biggest issue we had was with our location and inability to take/stock lots or trucks (we are in an upscale shopping center). We had a lot of angry Uhaul customers because Uhaul would direct one way drop offs to us (even though we made it clear we couldn't take them)tell people that their reserved truck would be at our address even though it wasn't.

i43storage

teamcapitola said:

We were a Uhaul dealer ...

... Uhaul would direct one way drop offs to us (even though we made it clear we couldn't take them)tell people that their reserved truck would be at our address even though it wasn't.

Ouch!