Stephen May is a realtor and a self-storage owner-operator, and a college friend of the guys from Missouri State. He graduated in May 2019 with a bachelor's in nursing, took a job at Saint Luke's on the Country Club Plaza, and moved to Kansas City having visited exactly once — he'd already bought a house there before he arrived.

That house was a house hack: 3% down, conventional, owner-occupied, with buddies paying $400 a room to cover the mortgage. Eight months later he talked a lender past the 12-month owner-occupant rule and bought a second at 5% down. The roommates moved out, the first became a rental, and he was hooked at 23.

The pivot that matters is what came next. Studying self-storage through Bigger Pockets and AJ Osborne, he built a sourcing method anyone can copy: Google “self storage near me” in a market he already knew (t ...