I liked how you turned to renting out your extra bedrooms to help you achieve your goals and speed up the process. 

In that unit I have repainted, put in new carpets, and restored it to a livable situation.

@Jeremy Lee  What are you hoping to achieve by doing this?

For the buy and hold folks, I’m wondering what you are actually able to achieve in you areas.

The cash flow achieved by keeping the existing residents will be much lower than the cash flow achieve by renovating every unit and bring in new residents.

Even though the IRA pays this tax on income derived from the use of non-IRA funds, you can still achieve a higher cash-on-cash return for your IRA dollars as a use of leverage.A self directed IRA or 401k may also joint venture with another party, including the account owner in certain well structured arrangements.  

You should be able to assess the market enough using that.Although, every unit is different, so I'm not sure if it will tell you what you want to know about YOUR units in question. 

Equity is fine, but would probably need to be something like 1 to 2 percent per year, so that you didnt achieve a full 50 percent until year 30.

If the unit is entirely carpets than I do 50%. 4.)

All that said, I love self storage for how it fits into my life and achieves my investment objectives.