How Space4You cut move-in admin by 80% and takes 30% of bookings at the weekend

80% less admin per move-in | Move-ins in minutes | 30% of bookings at the weekend

“The biggest difference Stora has made for us is that our business keeps running even when there’s nobody in the office.”

— Finn-Kristof Kausch, Founder and Managing Director

Who are Space4You?

Space4You operates and manages self storage facilities in Germany and Switzerland. Founder and Managing Director Finn-Kristof Kausch launched the business in 2023 and built it around automation from the first day, having already run a conventional facility since 2016.

The company now runs three arms: the storage sites it owns, Space4You Management, which runs facilities for other property owners under third-party management, and Space4You Connect, which builds digital tools for the self storage industry.

The Challenge

Finn came into self storage from hospitality. While studying he worked in England several times, saw the industry there, and in 2016 took over a commercial unit in northern Germany to open his first facility.

That first site taught him what the model costs to run. Everything went through a person.

“At our first sites a move-in could easily take an hour. The customer had to come by, we had to do the handover, we had a consultation, the customer had to sign the contract.”

— Finn-Kristof Kausch, Founder and Managing Director

Every enquiry, contract and move-in was a manual job, and the work grew with every customer. An operator running that way can only be open when someone is behind the desk, and can only grow by hiring.

So when Finn started Space4You in 2023, he set out to avoid that model rather than fix it. He needed a system that could:

• Let customers book, sign and move in without meeting anyone
• Keep the operation lean enough for a small team to run several sites
• Complete bookings outside office hours, instead of holding them until Monday
• Be chosen before the doors opened, rather than bolted on afterwards

The Solution

Finn began looking for a platform around 2022 and came across Stora at a trade show, where he met co-founder Gavin Shields.

“The good thing about Stora is that it isn’t purely management software. It thinks very much from the customer’s side. Contracts, bookings, availability and payment processing all hang together, and that makes it very easy for the customer.”

Stora went live several months before the facility opened, so enquiries were already collecting in the CRM before there was anything to rent. Setting the pre-opening website live early meant the first move-ins were waiting on day one.

Today a customer arrives from a Google or AI search onto a website Stora provides, picks a unit size and a move-in date, and adds insurance, 24-hour access or a post and parcel service before completing the booking online. The digital contract and ID verification happen straight afterwards. Access to the building, through Stora’s integration with smart access provider Sensorberg, is only released once payment, identification and signature are all done, at any hour.

The team is still there for anyone who wants them.

“We want to give our customers the choice. If a customer wants to book in a fully automated way, without any advice from us, they can do that, including outside our opening hours. But if a customer does want advice or has questions, we’re still there to support them.”

On pricing, Space4You runs Stora’s dynamic pricing so rates move with occupancy without anyone watching them, which matters when a third of bookings arrive while the office is shut. The price increase tool handles existing customers.

Finn’s mornings start on the reporting dashboard: current occupancy, revenue, outstanding payments, and an activity feed of what happened overnight.

The Results

Admin time per move-in is down by around 80%. The handover, the consultation and the contract signing are all gone, and the whole sequence runs digitally. A move-in that took a good hour now takes a few minutes.

Around 30% of bookings now happen at the weekend.

“These days around 30% of our bookings happen at the weekend, at exactly the moment when our competition isn’t there, or our own office isn’t staffed.”

Renting online 24 hours a day, 365 days a year means a customer who decides they need storage at ten on a Sunday evening can book, sign, pay and move in without waiting for Monday.

The organisation stays lean. Fewer staff are needed per site, and the team looks after several locations at once rather than one each.

The last manual job was the telephone. Calls that arrived when nobody could answer were the one part of the journey that stayed human by default. Using Stora’s public API, Space4You Connect built an AI call assistant that answers 24 hours a day, reads live data from Stora, and writes the caller back into Stora as a lead with a summary for staff to follow up.

The same API carries the rest of what they have built: an in-house post and parcel app that identifies a customer’s delivery and emails them when it arrives, and a price scanner that checks competitor pricing automatically and flags when rates should move.

Looking Ahead

Space4You now runs facilities for other owners as well as its own, which only works if the process is the same everywhere.

“Stora simply gives us the foundation to run several sites in parallel with a very lean organisation.”

That standardisation is what the management business is built on, and it is how Finn intends to keep growing across Germany and Switzerland without the admin growing with it.

“If a self storage operator asked me today whether I’d recommend Stora, I’d say yes, clearly. Particularly if they want to make their business digital, automated and scalable.”

Get a free Stora demo today to see how our platform can support and grow your self storage business.