How Prestige Storage built a top 50 U.S. portfolio and turned it into a reliable outperformer for the decade to come

Columbus, OH

The Pain of Growing Up

Cory Bonda was hired as a real estate analyst before he even graduated from Ohio State University in 2016. His mornings were filled with underwriting properties. His afternoons consisted of moonlighting for a small local storage operator - cleaning out units and hiring site managers. It wasn’t long before he realized he had stumbled upon a special opportunity to transform those few drive up storage facilities into something much more audacious. Less than four years after entering the workforce, he founded Prestige Storage Management to pursue his ambition. 

Today, Prestige is a top 50 owner in the United States with over 75 employees operating 60+ properties across 7 states. They’ve professionalized their operations, stabilized their portfolio, and continue to grow through acquisitions. But it wasn’t easy clear they’d build something so impressive.

Controller Tyler Annon still remembers the moment he felt the doubt it would all work. It was 2021, and Prestige Storage had just acquired their 15th property. What should have been a celebration felt more like a looming crisis. "By the time I joined in 2021, we had 12 properties," Tyler recalls, "but as we grew from 15 to 30 to 45 to 60 properties, we were drowning," Tyler explained. "Suddenly we had to train 50 property managers on five different software systems, making sure the platforms were constantly updated with correct information. It became unbearable."

Diagnosing the problems

For decades, the self-storage industry has been overlooked by professional technology providers. Storage operators had to turn to each other to solve their own problems. A litany of homegrown tools sprang up to set prices, integrate websites, route phone calls, collect payments, and more. These tools proved valuable but as the industry matured and portfolios grew larger and more complex, cracks began to emerge. Much of the technology hasn’t kept up with advances in web based software, mobile adoption, and AI. As COVID created a self-storage boom and industry consolidation accelerated, growing operators struggled to maintain a secure, performant, well-integrated platform that delivered exceptional renter experiences.

Surpassing $50 billion in annual revenue in 2022, the industry had entered a new era, one with greater expectations of the technology required to run a professional storage operation. This resulted in vendor consolidation and unreliable customer service across wide swaths of mission critical systems. Operators had long known much of what they needed to realize their dream operation. The problem was that they didn’t have access to a vendor ecosystem that could reliably recruit the talent required to build a durable technology partner, one capable of consistent innovation. If the industry is to continue to fully realize its potential and grow to 70, 80, or 100bn in revenue, a new tech vanguard is a prerequisite.

Prestige’s growth had landed Cory and Tyler in this web. Their outdated technology that had grown difficult and expensive to integrate and administer, becoming a drag on their ability to grow. “Historically, we were always a day, a week, a month looking in arrears. It goes back to seamless integration.” complained Cory. "When you have 60+ properties across as many markets as we do, it's impossible to do a full rate survey every single day, those kinds of things, and be competitive. You need your tech to be real-time." 

Enter the Platform Builders

Five hundred miles away in a Flatiron Manhattan office, Declan Starrett was wrestling with this problem. He had honed his instincts for product building at Bridgewater Associates and real-estate software platform VTS. Now a Product Manager at Cubby, he had joined a team obsessed with delivering a self-storage platform built to generate real, quantifiable business outcomes for the industry.

"Almost everyone had a website cobbling together inventory and prices," Declan recalls. "But we kept thinking: what is lost when your e-commerce experience isn’t deeply connected to your pricing decisions or your management software?"

The answer, sussed out in partnership with more than twenty industry advisors and clients, turned out to be obvious: revenue.

Declan worked closely with David Starr, an MIT and Stanford-educated machine learning engineer who’d previously used technology to predict commodities prices at Goldman Sachs and built construction cost estimation tools at technology giant Procore. Together, they architected what would become something totally unique in the self-storage industry. With the help of many of the industry’s most thoughtful operators, they designed a revenue management system that recommended rates and rate changes directly inside Cubby’s management software and published them in real time, on a series of e-commerce web components, anywhere on the web.

The Leap of Faith

By late 2022, Prestige had reached their breaking point. The software sprawl wasn't just inefficient—it was actively holding back their growth.

"Switching property management software after utilizing the same system for 7 to 10 years is daunting," Cory admits. "Whether you're the biggest operations guru or a one-off operator, it keeps you up at night."

The decision to move to Cubby represented more than a software switch. It was a bet on a fundamentally different approach to self-storage technology.

"We had a couple of goals," Cory explains. "First, make it as seamless as possible to manage multiple properties. Second, enable our property management team to run everything from one computer screen. We wanted to work more on the business than for the business."

Tyler was initially skeptical. After years of managing multiple systems, the promise of a unified platform seemed too good to be true. "Could one system really replace five? Could we maintain all the functionality we needed while gaining the integration we desperately wanted?"

The Cubby team understood these concerns. They had built their platform specifically for operators experiencing Prestige's pain points. "We didn't want operators to choose between functionality and integration," David explains. "We wanted to give them both."

The Implementation: Where Theory Meets Reality

The transition began in November 2024. For Prestige's 50 property managers spread across multiple states, this meant learning an entirely new way of operating.

"I would say the process went as good as it could have," Cory recalls. "We had an unbelievable experience with Cubby customer success from top to bottom. Whether it's me sending a question directly to my account rep and getting an answer immediately, or a property manager who's never met anyone from Cubby asking a question and getting it resolved within minutes."

That partnership was critical to preparing Prestige’s organization for the change. In collaboration with Cubby’s client success team, they designed a gamified roll-out strategy involving bonuses and internal celebration of Cubby milestones. They prepared a core team managing their first wave of 12 facilities and ensured all were not only trained but excited for the change. The resulting enthusiasm within that core group of users spread like wildfire across the entire organization. It created a level of FOMO among the group that would manage in the second phase, which would see the rest of the portfolio go live in a single day just two months later. In the end, Prestige had aced the transition hand in hand with Cubby’s client success team.

In the weeks leading up to the transition, for a number of reasons, Prestige elected not to transfer credit card tokens from their old payment processor to Cubby. They were nervous about this decision - the entire tenant base would have to re-enter payment information once Cubby was live. If it went poorly, they would risk a spike in move outs and accounts receivable. The simplicity of Cubby’s payment links and tenant portal, however, allowed 600 renters to securely sign up for auto-pay in a single click, without remembering passwords or calling Prestige’s call center team. "We're able to automatically say, 'Hey, you paid last month with this credit card. Do you want to be on autopay?' And we enable it immediately," Tyler explains. "We were setting records for autopay penetration and accounts receivable within two months."

Ultimately, Cory and Tyler felt great about the new foundation they’d created for the business, especially when it came to the data they now had easily accessible in a clean, standardized data warehouse provided by Cubby. "Cubby’s native analytics and the data warehouse allow us to see live data," Cory explains. "Now we can track all the information - how many rentals come from different marketing campaigns and channels through to the website, from pay-per-click, from organic in real-time for example. It’s all right there for us."

A step-change for e-commerce in storage

Once live on Cubby, Prestige was able to focus on achieving the outcomes they’d hoped to capture from the new platform. Item #1 on that list was generating more online rentals. Prestige's old system required customers to navigate multiple screens and enter onerous amounts of information. Cubby's e-commerce platform, built from the ground up for storage rentals, streamlined the entire process.

"With Cubby, we have a very seamless rental process," Tyler explains. "We want everything to be as simple as possible for the consumer. Find the unit quickly, enter information seamlessly, complete the payment."

The results were immediate and dramatic. "Since we switched to Cubby Storefront, we've seen our online move-ins jump by close to 200%," Tyler reports. While the results seem shocking, Prestige credits it to a few factors. Not only is Prestige’s online storefront converting a higher percentage of visitors into renters, but it unlocked unexpected benefits. For the first time ever, they had full creative control over their website, enabling them to maximize the marketing talent they had access to internally and through contractors. More importantly, they started to see leads they’d never had access to before. “All of a sudden, we noticed how some renters were abandoning the checkout process or giving up if their credit card had expired. We’ve never had access to that data before,” remarked Cory. Prestige was finally in a position to take full advantage of their web presence.

Swarming leads online and over the phone

As the Prestige team started calling back those abandoned cart leads, they were thrilled to see so many of them converting, but it was difficult to understand what was happening in their organization once their teams moved customer conversations to the phone. They wanted to professionalize their ability to handle phone calls, so clearly important to converting leads and serving customers. They chose to implement Cubby Calls, a deeply integrated call center management toolkit that unlocked their ability to understand how quickly they were acting on abandoned cart leads and how many inbound leads they were successfully fielding. Today, Prestige’s leads dashboard is a hive of activity - from calls, to comments on each lead, to tasks and follow up reminders, the revenue-hungry culture of Prestige is clearly on display in their Cubby dashboard.

“We now know that if we call an abandoned cart lead within 5 minutes, we have a greater than 70% chance of closing them,” remarked Cory. “I’m talking about almost two million dollars in revenue from those leads alone in less than a year of being live on the platform. I look back and think, wow, how irresponsible is it to run storage without these capabilities.”

Cubby Call allows you to manage all call logs, recordings, and team performance.

Call management became dramatically more efficient with Cubby Call, which integrated customer information directly into the phone system. "It shows who the customer is, do they have a unit already, are they past due," Cory explains. "That allows us to respond quicker."

The system even provided call ratings and coaching tools integrated into the same platform. "Our district managers can quickly launch into the Cubby Call rating and see how our team is doing within seconds."

The Compound Effects

Six months after implementation, the benefits of platform unification were compounding across Prestige's operations. But perhaps the most significant change was in how Prestige's team spent their time. "We're now able to work more on the business than for the business," Cory reflects.

The Numbers That Tell the Story

The transformation wasn't just operational—it was measurable:

• 200% increase in online move-ins within months of implementing Cubby Storefront

• $1.8mm in revenue collected from abandoned cart recoveries

• 80% autopay penetration within two months of go-live

The Platform Promise Delivered

Today, Prestige Storage operates 63 properties with a unified platform and data strategy. Their property managers and call center agents work from single screens instead of juggling multiple systems. Their executives see real-time performance instead of waiting for reports. Their customers enjoy seamless experiences from initial rental through ongoing payments.

"Cubby's fantastic," Cory concludes. "I'm excited for all the changes they've been implementing they continue to add. They're pushing to be the industry leader."

Tyler agrees: "Overall, I think they're pushing to be the industry leader in the self-storage market. And having a partner thinking that way helps us stay ahead too.”

The Ongoing Journey

Prestige's transformation is only a year in. The unified platform provides a foundation for continuous improvement that wasn't possible beforehand. "I'm excited for all the changes we’ve been implementing," Cory notes. "When you have a truly integrated platform, new enhancements benefit everything immediately."

Next up? Prestige plans to continue growing, looking ahead to more units managed per employee. They’re transforming regional portfolios to operate more efficiently in a hub-and-spoke model. And they’re preparing to take full advantage of the next wave of technology available to them. 

For Prestige, it’s an exciting time to be scaling in storage. The platform promise, so elusive for so long in self-storage, has finally been delivered. And for operators ready to embrace it, the possibilities are just beginning.

Prestige Storage operates 63 self-storage facilities across multiple markets from their headquarters in Columbus, Ohio.