My fee on a 19-property roll-up is tied to portfolio occupancy

I don't know the storage side at all, but the occupancy clause is them asking you to take equity risk on a fee contract. Your costs don't fall 8% when their occupancy falls. If anything you get more cleanouts.

I've been the vendor on a portfolio like this, smaller, eleven sites in one state. Three things I'd change before I signed anything.

One, the scope words you listed are all doing too much work. "Small make-ready" is undefined and it will grow. On mine it started as sweeping a unit and replacing a latch and within five months it included painting corridor walls and hauling abandoned mattresses to a transfer station at my cost. Write a dollar threshold and a time threshold into the scope. Anything over 45 minutes or $75 in materials is a work order at the rate card, no exceptions, no verbal approvals.

Two, lien cleanouts should never be in a flat fee. They're unpredictable, they scale with delinquency, and disposal fees vary by county. Price them per unit by size band. That single change moved me from break-even to a real margin.

Three, on the occupancy clause, my counter would be a floor on total annual dollars rather than arguing about the trigger. Say the annual fee will not fall below a stated number regardless of occupancy or dispositions. You need that anyway, because if they sell four sites out of the portfolio your per-NRSF fee drops and none of your fixed cost does. Dispositions are more likely to hurt you than occupancy, and nobody puts a disposition clause in these.

On the number, $0.34 is low for that geographic spread. Mine was tighter and I needed the equivalent of about $0.41 with cleanouts carved out to hold a margin I'd get out of bed for. Your 220 mile spread is the whole difference.

Your cost range of $410k to $440k has a spread of 7% and you called it rough. That's the problem, because the deal lives or dies inside that spread. Build it bottom up with real numbers. Three crews of two at fully loaded labor cost, not wage. Four trucks with fuel at your actual mileage across nineteen sites, and go get the mileage from a routing tool rather than estimating. Insurance quoted, not guessed.

Then add the thing you left out entirely, which is the supervisor's time on their reporting requirements. Platforms at this size want work order data in their system, monthly summaries, photo documentation on every completed ticket. That's ten to fifteen hours a week of somebody who isn't turning a wrench.

@harrow the disposition point is the one I'd never have thought of and it seems obviously worse than the occupancy thing. They're an aggregator. Selling stabilized assets is the plan.

Small thing from managing my own units. Gate and access hardware failures cluster. You'll get four quiet months and then a controller board dies at three sites in a heat wave. If the flat fee covers parts as well as labor on access control, find out what generation of gate system is at each of the nineteen. Older controllers get expensive fast and the parts aren't always available.

Ask who the contracting entity is. On a roll-up, each facility often sits in its own SPE, and the master services agreement may be signed by a management company with no assets. If eleven sites get added under a different entity, or a site gets sold and the buyer doesn't assume your agreement, you want to know now what your termination and notice rights look like. Also check whether they've asked for indemnity language broad enough to cover claims arising from their own gate design. I've read a few of those. A lawyer in the state where the entities sit should look at it before you sign, and it's worth the fee on a $483k contract.

Door and latch repair on older single story metal buildings is a different business from doing it on newer climate controlled multistory. Roll-up doors on 1980s sites bind, the tracks are out of square, and the honest fix is a door replacement the owner won't pay for, so you're back every quarter. Walk all nineteen before you price anything. If more than a third are pre-1995 metal, $0.34 isn't in the conversation.

Worth understanding what your fee looks like on their side. At roughly $0.34 per NRSF you're a line item they'll compare against a national vendor's bid and against bringing it in house at scale. Aggregators pitch operational efficiency to their investors, and one of the ways they show it is consolidating vendors and then squeezing the consolidated contract at renewal. So price the renewal, not just year one. A one year term with an option is worse for you than three years with a defined escalator, even if the year one number is a little lower.