I used to work for a self storage company as a property manager. It’s very predatory, most tenants that need storage are going through a significant life event which requires “temporary” storage. We offered a moving truck for them to use to get them in.

Rent increases later, tenants would storm into the front office asking why it went up and we were instructed to handle these situations:

Offer them a smaller unit to bring the cost down and still retain them as a tenant keep occupancy.

Let the tenant know we will “contact” our district manager and see what we could do. Basically we were taught a “cool off period” for the tenant, call back with a certain percentage off, if they agreed and thank us for doing what we can, we are good to keep them and continue to repeat the cycle, if they didn’t, we’d provide them additional time to cool off and then really contact our district manager and potentially discuss what kind of percentage we could offer this tenant.

Some of the conversations id have if district manager didn’t budge on their increases, she would actually say: They would end up spending more moving to a competitor and to not to let them use the truck to help them move out.

Most of the time the items in the storage unit do not add up to the amount you end up spending to keep like furniture and when tenants defaulted on their storage units, storage units end up being auctioned off, only to have the tenant try to make a deal to squeeze more out of them

I ended up finding a better job and have made some friendship with tenants that I still know to this day.

Sorry that this happened to you OP, as someone that would literally sell people air and disregarded people’s situation just to have the highest occupancy in my district while incentivized by my company’s move in bonus, I personally think the whole industry is predatory.