Customer Story · Self-Storage
Three times the deals reviewed, with the same team.
A first pass on a single property used to take Boardwalk Storage about four hours. With Primer it takes thirty minutes, which is why the team now models around a hundred deals a month instead of thirty.
- Industry
- Self-Storage
- HQ
- Atlanta, GA
- Scale
- Top 50 operator
Doug Steverson
COO & Partner, Boardwalk Storage
Atlanta, GA
At a glance
30min
First pass on a property
Down from about four hours
~100/mo
Deals modeled each month
Up from about thirty, same team
10–15/wk
Inbound deal flow they handle
OMs reviewed against the buy box
Most deals never made it past the inbox.
In self-storage acquisitions, brokers send ten to fifteen offering memoranda a week. Before Primer, a first pass on one property took Doug and his team about four hours. With those numbers, a real look at every OM was impossible.
They ran a sniff test, did back-of-the-napkin math against asking price and revenue, and triaged the rest out.
The problem with triage is that some of the marginal deals — the ones at steep multiples that don’t pencil at first glance — are exactly the ones that close, when read right. Boardwalk’s working capacity was roughly thirty deals a month at one hundred percent utilization, and most of the marginal ones were getting passed over before anyone took a deep look.
“Our model is different from most, so we’ve been a challenging client. Your whole team stays on top of it, always looking for what went wrong so we can do better. You’ve built a solid team of robot fighters over there.”
The first ask: don’t change how you underwrite.
Most vendors ask customers to conform to their tool. The PropRise team did the opposite. They sat down with Boardwalk’s acquisition model — the one Doug’s team has built up and refined over years — and configured Primer to populate it the way Boardwalk wants to see a deal.
In practice: a broker sends an OM. Doug or his Director of Acquisitions does a fast fit-check against the buy box — price-to-revenue, asset size, geography. If it passes, the documents go to Primer. Primer returns the populated Boardwalk model with rent rolls, unit mix, T-12 financials, and rate data mapped to the right cells, with sources cited. The Director spends about thirty minutes reviewing and adjusting assumptions. The team decides: pursue, or pass.
The sequence
From OM to decision in under an hour.
-
01
OM lands
Fast fit-check.
Five-minute yes or no on whether to go deeper. Price-to-revenue, asset size, geography against the buy box.
-
02
Primer runs
Populated Boardwalk model.
Rent rolls, unit mix, T-12 financials, and rate data mapped to the right cells. Every cell cited to source.
-
03
Team decides
Thirty minutes of review.
Pursue or pass. LOI drafts from the same model — no re-templating.
The deal that crystallized the shift.
The deal that crystallized the shift for Doug is one his team currently has under contract: a multi-property self-storage portfolio, a true acquisition play. Each property needed individual underwriting, and the initial version of every model went through Primer.
In the old workflow, portfolios would mean days, if not weeks, of an analyst’s time before the team could even make a go-or-pass decision on the portfolio. With Primer, the populated models came back property by property, the team spent about thirty minutes reviewing each one, and they moved forward in days rather than weeks.
Every subsequent proforma version — through diligence, through IC, through LOI revisions — has been built on those originals.
Same team. Different funnel.
The team went from modeling roughly thirty deals a month to around a hundred, with the same people. Boardwalk is now looking at deals they would have triaged out before — the marginal ones at steep-looking multiples, the portfolios that previously weren’t worth days of analyst time to evaluate.
When the team’s analyst moved on in the summer of 2025, Primer made it possible to consolidate underwriting into the Director of Acquisitions seat with senior judgment up front, and Primer doing the data prep underneath. The senior role now owns deal evaluation end-to-end.
The advocacy followed. In February 2026, Doug sent an introduction to a peer CEO at another self-storage platform, describing Primer in his own words as something that “takes the headache out of populating your proforma yourselves and saves a ton of time.” That peer is now a Primer customer too.
“We put an LOI on a deal we would have triaged out. That closed.”
Run your model on the next OM that lands.
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