An Owner’s Perspective
By John Bykowski, Clay Street Storage

When I purchased my facility in Kissimmee, Florida about 2 ½ years ago in August of 2004, I was paying attention to the kiosk market and the idea of remotely managing my facility but knew I had to make several upgrades to the property first. We originally had a completely paper-based accounting and tenant recordkeeping system and the facility was lacking a tenant access gate. The property also had a number of deferred maintenance items and required upgrades that justified me being on-site for business hours every day addressing those items.

Because Hurricane Charlie had just hit Central Florida and with the active hurricane season that summer, we had a very active rental season and it was nice to be onsite. At the same time, I realized I had an average of about two on-site inquiries per day which included rentals and face-to-face payments. Soon it became obvious that once I had the facility up and running nearing steady state and that the maintenance and upgrade work was no longer there, the amount of drop-in traffic would not be adequate to justify a full-time staffed office, unless I added some sort of additional services such as retail, notary, etc., which this site was not conducive to due to location and layout.

Clay St. Storage’s INSOMNIAC Rental Station

The INSOMNIAC kiosk was an attractive solution because it allowed me to extend my service hours, not staff the office full-time, and at a cost that was less than that of hiring a staff person who would be terribly bored due to low workload. The installation of the kiosk allowed me to campaign for a local political office and attend my sister's wedding this last fall out of town without a negative impact on the business. In fact, for the month of November 2006, the kiosk performed more new rental transactions than I did, with our earliest transaction at 6:45 AM.

Our local Home Depot just installed a kiosk-based system for purchasing propane gas bottles. As customers become more comfortable with self-service kiosks, I expect a greater percentage of our rentals and payments will be performed through the kiosk. A nice benefit of being able to remotely manage my facility is that I’ve been able to convert the old manager's apartment to more storage units.