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 (the Ozarks, where he'd spent every summer), then scan for facilities with no website or two-star reviews — distressed mom-and-pop owners who've stopped managing. He pulled owners off the county site, skip-traced them, and started dialing. On the third or fourth call an office manager simply handed him the owner's number. That conversation became his first facility, closed at the end of 2021. Five months later the same seller sold him the second — for $750,000, which meant writing a personal check for roughly $75,000 at 25 years old.

Today it's seven locations, about 750 units at ~95% occupancy, two rent raises this year, entirely self-managed with his cousin and business partner Nick, and 100% owned with no outside capital. He went part-time nursing in 2022, then PRN (one to two shifts a month), and finally quit — without telling his parents for three or four months. He's now back in St. Louis with his wife, figuring out what the next chapter looks like.

Along the way the guys get into the lending math on multi-family, why he stress-tests every deal after watching a 4% note reset to 7.5%, the FIRE movement and “work optional” as a goal instead of retirement, and — refreshingly — why he was still partying hard through the whole build.