Jeff Greenberger, a nationally recognized self-storage attorney and founder of Late2Lien, joins Matt Engfer to explain why lien enforcement isn’t dangerous—but getting it wrong absolutely is.

With more than 30 years of experience serving the self-storage industry, Jeff walks through the real legal risks operators face when notices, timelines, disclosures, or documentation aren’t handled precisely. From evolving state statutes and California’s increasingly complex disclosure requirements to tenant tactics pulled straight from Reddit, this episode exposes how small operational missteps can quickly turn into lawsuits.

Jeff also shares why “compliance is king,” how technology can remove human error from the lien process, and how Late2Lien was built to take responsibility off managers’ plates while protecting owners from liability. The conversation blends legal insight, real-world examples, and practical guidance that every operator—large or small—can apply immediately.

Key Takeaways:

(0:00) Intro
(1:47) Jeff's story
(4:56) Shaping the legal landscape of self-storage
(7:52) Current legal issues Jeff’s clients are facing
(11:12) Making sure clients are limiting risk and exposure to litigation
(12:24) CA & PA Bills impacting rates and lien statutes
(19:46) Reddit threads creating risk for self-storage owners: Credit Cards
(22:31) Reddit threads about change of address scams
(26:14) How does Late2Lien work?
(33:28) Late2Lien helps avoid the sale
(34:54) How Cubby and Late2Lien work together  

Resources Mentioned:

Late2Lien | Website
https://www.late2lien.com

Jeff Greenberger | Self Storage Law
https://www.selfstoragelegal.com/

Cubby | Website
https://www.cubbystorage.com

Thank you for listening to “Students of Storage.” Be sure to leave us a 5-star review and subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.

#SelfStorage #SelfStorageLaw #StudentsOfStorage

Contributors - Matt Engfer, Jeff Greenberger

Transcript

Hey everybody, Matt Engfer here, co-founder and CEO of Cubby. Today on our Students of Storage podcast, we are joined by the one and only Jeff Greenberger, the as I call him, the patron saint of law in self-storage. We dive into his backstory, some great stories from coming up in the industry, how he's impacted, how the industry is legislated, and then we dive into the topics that everyone is talking about in self storage right now related to the changes in law from some of the statutes that are changing in California to some big changes coming up in Pennsylvania in 2026 and some of the gotchas that operators should be watching out for from tricks that delinquent tenants are learning on Reddit like credit card dispute tactics and address change tactics and more. I thought it was a great conversation, timely conversation, and a fun one, too. Jeff's always good for a few jokes and he did not disappoint. Hope you enjoy. Thanks so much for joining, Jeff.

Thank you so much for being here today. Really appreciate you hopping on. Oh, Matt, it's always a pleasure. You're such a great guy to talk to. I'm so happy to be here.

It is always a pleasure indeed. Tell the people who you are and I would love to — I actually don't know all of the details. Let's dive into your background, your history, and how you got to where you are in self-storage being one of the patron saints of our legal community.

The first time someone called me an OG, I laughed. So I'm Jeff Greenberger. I'm a lawyer in Cincinnati, Ohio. About 30 years ago, I was at a different law firm that subsequently broke up. We had a tax attorney in that office who went to high school with the daughter of the person who first built self storage in our area. His name was Rudy Hermes. He subsequently passed away, but great guy.

And she walked up to him at a party one night and said, "Mr. Hermes, when can I have some of your business?"

And he looked at her and said, "When you can outdrink me." She said, "I'm Sicilian. I can outdrink anybody." And he's a crusty old German.

And he disagreed. And apparently they went shot for shot for a while. And now both of them have passed away, but neither one of them actually remembered the outcome of the contest. But a couple days later, she walked into my office and said, "You do real estate law, right, and apartments?" I said, "Yeah." She said, "Now you do self-storage?" And I'm like, "Those things I see along the highway with the garage door." She's like, "Yep." I said, "I don't know anything about them."

She's like, "Well, we've got a new client and they're a big owner and you now do it." And I was like, "Okay." And I learned, and Mr. Hermes at the time was on the national board of the SSA and — no offense to my colleagues in the industry — he said to me, "You're a more interesting speaker than the people we have. They're kind of dry. Why don't you come do some shows?" I didn't know any better. So I'm like, "Sure."

And the next thing you know, 30 years later, I'm a patron saint.

The SSA has made a little caricature of me. They have these — I forget what they're called exactly, but I've become a cartoon character in their world. And most recently I was in one of their ads, and they had little circles of people who were attending shows and it said like "connects and informs" and I was the one that said "protects," and I made a comment to Andy that I'd become the new condom of self-storage and within an hour my face was on a Trojan label as a meme. So yeah, that's me in self storage. I am awesome. Awesome. We took it there. We took it there right away. I love it. Immediately. Okay. Perfect.

Perfect.

Well, that is a humorous and humble telling of the story along the way from that kind of first bite at the apple with self-storage.

You've not only seen but helped shape basically the way that legal is handled in self storage — like a lot of the lien laws and everything in between. You've had a hand in being on the cutting edge of — since like, I don't know how many years, 10 years, 20 years.

Yeah.

I was not a favored son at the SSA for a while. I was mostly an ISS participant, but everyone sort of decided I was okay after a while. Jim Grant credits me with making online lien sales legal. He says I'm the driving force behind that. I think it was their idea and I just did some legal maneuvering to help make it work.

But then we pushed that through in a lot of states, and so I do get some credit for that. And I'm really lucky because — we'll talk about it sort of at the end — but we've got this company called Late2Lien, and from that we're able to assimilate a lot of data that helps the SSA in their legislative efforts. They don't know what a newspaper ad actually costs in a state, but I do, and I can give them data from big city to small town and lead times and all that, and it's very compelling when they go to the legislature to say we'd like to reduce or get rid of newspaper advertising, and here's data from a vendor who — we spend $20-something thousand a month placing newspaper ads.

Yeah.

So we know a lot of places. We have a lot of newspapers and a lot of names that I think are fake names for newspapers. We actually have one called the Quincy Herald Wig. I had to look it up to be convinced that it was real.

It's up on the East Coast, of course, but so we're able to help with that data and that helps inform positions of the SSA. And then sometimes they're just nice enough to ask me what do I see my clients getting bothered by, and they take that and make it a legislative effort, which is spectacular. So I guess in a weird way, I do have some influence in all that.

And that's great. And then whenever possible, I will write or participate in testimony before House and Senate committees in various states, because of my position of being able to say I can tell you with certainty, newspaper ads are too expensive in your state and they're not getting anywhere and they're getting harder to place. So I seem to be a go-to resource for that and I'm so pleased to do it.

Awesome. Awesome. And then we'll talk — I definitely want to dive into the technology piece with Late2Lien that you have. But before we get there, what is the general day-to-day time spent for you in your legal profession look like? What are you working on? How many clients are you working with at any given time? Take me inside that world.

So we sort of, years ago, got away from doing things that local attorneys could do. We don't do any more formations of partnerships or entity formation or contracts to purchase or contracts to sell. There are perfectly capable attorneys in almost — at least in every state — that can do those things.

Sometimes they want a little bit of background on what's special about self-storage. I've got one right now where a buyer wants to view every unit and I'm trying to talk them off the ledge on behalf of the seller that we're not cutting 300 locks to let them see people's porn before they close, because it just creates too many problems.

But some people just don't understand — when they buy apartments, they tour every apartment; when they buy an office building, they canvas every floor; but in self storage, it just doesn't work that way. What we do help here with is operational stuff. And it's mostly because we can't find competent attorneys in other states that can do it. So what we do is we end up working with them or partnering with them. So if we're doing a rental agreement in a state where I'm not licensed, then the deal is we'll write it.

You will have your local attorney review it. We'll talk with your local attorney after that, make sure we have their blessing before it goes into play.

And that way, if there is a need to file a claim to enforce the lease or defend the lease or a bankruptcy relief from stay or something, they have local counsel who's already seen it, understands it, approves it, and so forth. But paying local counsel to write a self-storage agreement when they have no experience with it — it's not only paying them to reinvent the wheel, but they're often way far off because they take an apartment rental agreement and sort of scratch out "apartment" and write "self storage."

And it's not the same business by any stretch of the imagination. Not the least of which is we're typically month-to-month contracts. But we also tend not to hold people to things as much as, say, an apartment owner. I mean, if you sign a 12-month lease with an apartment owner — I represent a lot of student housing — if the student moves out, we're almost certainly not going to re-rent the apartment until next school year, right?

We suffer a lot of damages, and it's one of maybe 200 apartments. When you lose one 200th of your revenue, or three or four 200ths of your revenue, it's a big deal. When you're talking self storage and you might have 5-600 units and a 10x10 moves out, it's not really supposed to move the needle too much, and it generally doesn't.

So we're not in nearly as many collection matters and so forth in self storage, mostly because the collections are small and no one wants to handle them. But day-to-day, we're out there — really my mantra, other than "compliance is king," is "I'd rather you hear it from me than from a plaintiff's attorney someday."

So what we're really out there doing is looking at how people are operating and trying to make sure they understand their exposure and their risks and try to keep them on the straight and narrow.

And oftentimes that involves reworking their lease or rewriting it completely. Some people still to this day have a lease that's on a note card, and that's just not going to cut it. And then we tend to follow up with them every couple years, maybe five, and just update. But generally once we set them on their way, they do fly on their own.

And the only other thing we really are involved with, germane to you all, is a lot of people are asking us for recommendations of management software. And I assume we're going to talk about this California thing at some point today.

Dealing with how to make their software work with these legislative changes that are maybe a little nutty. Yeah, let's dive into it. You see everything that is kind of the topic of the moment, and all these laws are changing in different states at any given time. What's hot on your to-do list right now?

So we're recording this right around Christmas of 2025, for those watching it a year from now. The real hot topic is California has put through two bills — one at the beginning of 2025 and one that will go into effect January 1, 2026.

And unfortunately the second one is pretty onerous as far as making disclosures about rates of rent and when rent can increase. Whether or not they've received promotional rates, how fast they can raise those promotional rates. But the real gotcha one is you have to put a line in there that tells the tenant what the maximum rate is that they could pay within the first 12 months of rental.

And we're all having trouble wrapping our arms around that because we're month-to-month rentals, so conditions change, market conditions change. We also can end up being bound by price gouging laws that might prevent us from raising rates, especially in California.

Those restrictions are still in effect in LA County from the fires from — what, a year and a half, two years ago — and they're still protecting and prohibiting rate increases. When those get lifted, as a self-storage owner, you're probably going to need to bump rates because you've been locked for two years or more.

We had that with COVID — when everyone came out of COVID and we could finally raise rates again, we had to, because we couldn't for years in some states. So if you remember, if you've ever been as bored as I am in a hotel room, on the back of a door in the closet, there's this little sign that says the maximum we can charge you for a hotel room, and they put obscene numbers there. Right.

Yeah.

I've been in a Holiday Inn where they could charge $3,000 a night. And I was like, I wouldn't pay $3,000 for the whole Holiday Inn, right? But they have to do it. And California is sort of making us like innkeepers where we have to tell people what the maximum rate is and take our best guess and hope we're right. And that's insane.

And most of the CRMs really aren't up to that task yet. It's not a simple programming issue to help owners calculate those rates and come up with a formula of what the maximum rate could be 12 months from now. I mean, when you think about how much has changed in the last 12 months, just think about it.

I mean, everything from a change in presidency to the wars and who we're angry with now and who we're friends with now and so forth. I mean, how do you calculate rates for a year out?

I mean, you can budget for it, but you can't calculate it. And so I'm on the phone probably 15-20 times a day now with California operators trying to help them work this stuff out. There's also some other sort of what I'd call conspicuous disclosure requirements. So this has to be in a different type size and a different font and set off by a box or characters. And a lot of the management software isn't really capable of creating a box. It just wasn't ever programmed to do that.

No one ever foresaw that as an issue. So we're up against the gun to get it all done by January 1, and then wait and see how the bottom feeder lawyers interpret it and come after people for the box not being bold enough or whatever comes next. So we deal with that, and my job is really mostly to keep track of statutory changes, help with them, and then keep track of them and make sure owners are aware of them when they happen.

So for example, Pennsylvania has one going into effect January 24th — of all dates — of 2026. It's not a nice round eight. And that will make some changes to various parts of their statute. And mostly it deals with lien sales and so forth, but we work really hard to try to make sure people are aware of it.

And look, there are also state associations and they do good jobs of distributing that information, but generally only to their members. I keep a — what's it called now — X account, and all I put on there now is basically my statutory update notices. So people, if at least they follow me at Self Storage Law on Twitter/X, they're not going to see restaurant reviews from me.

And I'm not going to pan the airline I flew, but you will see any updates to your laws posted so that even if you're not a client or a customer of our office or of Late2Lien or a member of your state association, at least you have a way of knowing about it, just to get the word out.

The California thing is super topical — where we have conversations with our customers. I know we've talked about it with you guys, like the way that you display fees. What basically the changes are impacting — the lease itself, the web presence. So all the website companies out there are racing to make sure that their functionality can accommodate this, whether it's on Cubby or any of the other software platforms out there.

And then, and then yeah, just the way that people are trained and talk about this stuff — it causes some changes operationally there. So it's pretty wild, and there's a lot of activity happening throughout the industry, I think, to kind of get ready for that. Pennsylvania has some more. What else is on your mind as the patron saint of self-storage law these days?

This is going to become a meme at some point. I'm going to be in a Pope Leo hat before you know it.

It's better than some of the other ones you were throwing out there. So, yeah. Right. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Official drunkard of the industry. That's a bad — yeah. So I go on the road about 25 times a year now.

Mhm.

To do both national and state association shows. I'm a huge believer that with this position comes a responsibility to go out and talk to the states and meet with the people and help them.

I'm a real big believer in law needs to be approachable. And while I may not be in a state where I'm licensed giving them legal advice, we can certainly talk about big picture topics and help them avoid it. And there's a couple — and we were talking before — I mean, my biggest concern right now are sites like Reddit, and there are these subreddits that talk about how to stick it to your landlord.

And two of the big ones right now are — when there was that big Target data breach and the credit card industry started putting chips in cards, they also started changing the rules to say that once a card has a chip in it, if it's not touched to or dipped into a chip reader, the merchant — this has nothing to do with storage, we just happen to be part of that tent — loses the dispute automatically, any fraud claim.

And right now we don't have chip readers in storage, and I believe you guys are working on, along with one or two other CRM that I've talked to, sort of like an Apple Pay type solution that will help alleviate this. But if you read the subreddit, it basically says, "Go online, use your mother, father, sister, brother, friend's card, charge it, it'll go through, go get what you want out of your unit, leave the rest that you don't want.

They'll throw it out for you, and then have your mother, father, sister, brother, friend dispute the charge, and they automatically win. We automatically lose. So now we've lost our sale date, lost the money, and we have to dispose of garbage." And maybe even resell it. And so that's a really bad subreddit for us, but solutions are slow in coming to that one. We have to come up with better ways to process credit cards.

They have an extremely high dispute rate, and I got banned from Utah twice now. That's one state I don't have to go to.

I got banned, and then rebanned. I tell the story that one of the stories I tell is that credit cards in self storage that are very late — 45 days or more — have one of the highest dispute rates of any transaction the processors follow, right, and Chase Bank, who we do a lot of work with, said we're third after porn and escort purchases to be disputed. Now again, these are late payments, not all payments. So you can do anything you want with statistics, but that's what Chase has done with our statistic. And I said in Utah, I'm hoping next year we're able to beat out those escorts and get to number two, and got in trouble and got banned. And then said it again, got rebanned. So yeah, I'm persona non grata in Utah.

I try to even avoid the Salt Lake airport now because I think they're out for me. So yeah.

Which is tough being a Delta kid, but yeah, great airport. Great airport in Salt Lake. Yeah, it is a nice new airport and not welcome. The other one is just — and it's been this way for a long time — is change of address. And the subreddits on that basically say if you're sold, go marching in and act surprised and then feign an excuse of how you changed your address.

And now what was a very basic — you were late, you were right to be sold, you were sold — now there's a fact pattern, right? Now there's a case. I told you, and we wouldn't have enough time on this podcast to go over all the different ways I've heard people say they've changed their address.

Everything from "I scratched it on a check and you cashed the check," which is written, signed and dated and everything, to "I had the cutest Hello Kitty change of address labels, and how could you not notice them?" They said, "Meow, I moved." Right. We had a lady put a change of address in with the post office, right?

And she put it to the White House, and she did, I think, two years in federal prison. It's a felony to do that.

Yeah.

Right.

So the Reddit says just tell them you emailed it or mailed it or put it in the drop slot or whatever. And now we've got a fact pattern that challenges the legitimacy of the sale.

And we didn't have that five minutes before. So we really talk a lot on the road about screwing down tightly how you accept change of address. I tend to use as an analogy the banks, right? If you called your banker and said "change my address," do you think they would?

No.

No.

If you threw it in the night deposit slot, analogous to a drop slot, do you think they'd accept it? No. If you emailed them, would they accept it? No. They want you to go on the app or the website and change it yourself.

Yeah.

Or come into the bank with ID, right?

And I kind of beat that drum of we have sort of the same fiduciary duty, and we shouldn't accept change of address except in a way that we really know we're dealing with our occupant. And I always like to remind people, don't forget the DNA of our industry is self-service storage, right? There's a lot we're trying to make more and more self-service.

And with Cubby and with a lot of these other CRM, changing your address is easy to do online. They can't blame our manager for fat-fingering it or making a mistake. And you all — I believe you track all the ISP stuff to prove that, yeah, somebody logged in, and when they logged in, and that information is retained like a keystroke on our computers to protect us later. You logged in. If you fat-fingered 112 to 221, that's on you, not us.

And we really do want people, and we encourage the CRM to just keep pushing change of payment, change of address, all those sorts of things back to the tenant. Make it as easy as possible that my 80-something-year-old mother can do it.

Even though she's afraid of it, she'll do it. Right. I mean, she always — she doesn't have an Amazon account because she's afraid of it, but she orders airline tickets on delta.com all the time. Like, wait, right. Right. Yeah.

How's that?

Well, you got to be able to — you make a good point. Just like for operators out there thinking about this, like they should have a process for doing this, and it should be airtight. And they should have a point of view on that, and their technology should be able to support it. You have made a career of serving operators with your legal services, but you've also made a career of serving them with technology as well.

Tell us about Late2Lien. Just give us the primer on what it is that the service offers, and then we'll dive into a little bit more. Late2Lien has been around for about 15 years now, and the genesis of it was we had a lot of clients coming to us with rental agreements saying can you look at our notices and tell us if they're right or not. And the problem with answering that question is the notice could say the right things, but they could fill it in the wrong way.

One of the really great tricks that I use, like a party trick, in self storage, if there is such a thing, is when a statute says "x number of days after something," you have to add a day to that, right? If it's 10 days after something, that's 11 days. It's not 10. So you can get your dating wrong, you can mail it wrong, you can have failed to keep up with statutory changes. I still talk to operators in states where we don't have to use certified mail that are still using it.

And I'd beg them to stop because it's not calculated to get to people, right? We'd rather use ordinary first class certificate of mailing or something like that, because it's going to get in their mailbox. They don't have to go down to the post office and sign for it when they're working.

Or hopefully working. Maybe not, because they're not paying their bill. So we were basically saying we can't answer that question because we don't know what you're going to do with it next, and we don't know if in six months your notice is going to be out of date and you're going to forget to notice that, even if we add you to our mailing list.

Yeah, it requires changes. So what we did is we basically implemented — I think the right term for it is software as a service.

Yeah.

It ties into many of the CRM including Cubby, and we build out these API integrations with them, and we ping your management software, and we look for people who are late. And you sort of define what "late" means as an operator, and then once we find that person who's late, we basically take control of the noticing process and the advertising or posting.

So what the statute says has to be done, we do. So you're not leaving it in the hands of a manager, who, by the way, it's their least favorite thing of all to do, and they tend to postpone it and put it off and don't want the friction with the tenants.

Or a DM who's got 20 facilities and is sitting in for a manager who's on sick leave and also supposed to be reviewing lien sales. We take all that responsibility over, and now we've actually built out direct integration with StorageTreasures. We can automatically upload your sale into StorageTreasures.

That's the only one of the online lien sale companies we have now. Others are coming soon, but that's a really big exciting thing, because we didn't really know this — we didn't realize what a time suck it was to upload sales manually. Yeah, we do now. And doing it for the StorageTreasures customers has been a real boon, and people really love it and they appreciate us more, and it didn't increase our price.

So everyone's sort of happy that we handle sort of — it's not really cradle to grave, but it's default to basically up to the moment of sale. We handle it and we take responsibility for it, and we actually indemnify people. So if something is wrong — this is incredible that you guys do this — I think it's a major value add that you guys bring to the market.

We don't have to pay very many claims because we're very careful. But if there's a claim made against one of our notices or one of our — I guess not one of our ad postings — that something is legally wrong with it, not your data, but our work, we'll pay it. I mean, that's just how we are. The people we work with on this side say it's a miracle we got this insurance. I maybe shouldn't bring that to the attention of the church. It's not exactly a common policy that insurance companies — right?

You know, they can understand property casualty, they can understand errors and omissions, but indemnification of owners, that's a big deal. And we're really lucky to have good partners on the insurance side who were able to help us grow it and help us keep our cyber liability in place and all that sort of stuff, because it gets tougher and tougher every year to insure stuff.

And I'm sure you all find that as well on your side. But yeah, indemnification's a tough one because not many businesses are willing to do it. Most businesses actually put it back on the operator, and we don't. We'll stand up and we'll accept liability if liability is deserved.

And so we do all that, and we do it for a fixed price, and there's no sort of gotchas or hidden charges in it.

There's different pricing models, but all in all, you understand what you're going to spend before you sign up with us. And that's it. And we just do it. And we're very hands-on. We like to call ourselves a partner of the facility, because you inherit a customer service team who really is not only trying to look out for you but educate you and explain to you why things happen the way they do. And then it — everyone — it takes a little time to accept the process.

We have a lot of managers who think we're AI and we're replacing their — you know, we're going to take their job next month — and it takes about two or three months. We have a customer who's a very large operator who is beta testing us right now, and I think 20-30 of their facilities, something like that. And the first month all the managers were really weary or leery. And then they had their meeting on us like a week ago, and to a manager they said this belongs at every facility now.

Yeah.

They learned to like us because they realize we're on their side. We're a teammate. We're there to help, not harm, and we're not there to throw them under the bus, and we're not there to take their jobs.

Yeah.

Once you have it in place for a little while, you could see that it's eliminating issues before they happen. Makes a lot of sense. We really — I'm sorry, I didn't mean to step on you.

We really like to talk about ourselves as sort of the extra chair in the room, right? We're the black hat, and the manager can wear the white hat, right?

They're the good guy now, or good lady. We get blamed, right? "I didn't send you that lien notice, Mrs. Jones. We have this awful computer service that does it."

Right.

"Fine. We'll take that blame."

Yeah.

And then they can work with the tenant and resolve the situation.

Cool. Cool. And you have a crazy high resolution rate, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Very few of the units that we process go to sale. It obviously varies a little bit by socioeconomic strata and location, but really, of all the ones we take in, we find that only about 4% ever even touch the doorstep of sale. And even some of those get cured after sale. So it's — we're really effective at what we do.

Some of it is people just wait and wouldn't care whether we were involved or not, but having the — I think the word I've heard used about Late2Lien before is "ruthless," right? And we don't mean to be, but when you get a notice and you have a time clock ticking, it forces you to pay attention. And if the manager delays sending or postpones and all those sorts of things that Late2Lien really doesn't allow, they get used to it and they don't — you know, the Powerball is $1.5 billion today.

Don't think I didn't notice it, right? But you know, if I have an opportunity to spend my money on storage rent or Powerball tickets, and I have a dream of winning 1.5 billion, you know, maybe I will. But if my sale is next week, I'm going to pay more attention to it.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. Okay, cool. And I know our teams have worked very well together. I think we share a bunch of customers at this point, and we're continuing to make our integration with Late2Lien better. Like I know it's working on two-way integration where within Cubby, you'll have full visibility into all the activity that's taking place in Late2Lien, and vice versa.

So we've really appreciated working with you all. It's always a pleasure to see you on the road and, you know, teaching the people up at these trade show events and SSA events. Thank you so much for joining us, for being a good partner to Cubby and the industry, and really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you.

Thank you. You're wonderful partners to deal with as well — so accommodating and so open and helpful, and we're really very pleased. If you actually look at the percentages of your customers that are on lien, it's a really nice high percentage. Great, great relationship. So we appreciate you right back, and thanks for having me today. I appreciate it.

Absolutely. See you on the road.

Yep.