It always starts with the smell. You know it. You know it before you even open the door. It's the heady mixture of perspiration and poor hygiene. Tiny hints of pine from a tree-shaped air freshener signal a losing battle to bring freshness to the air. We are talking about New York City cabs, of course, or just about any big city taxis, that many of us have survived.

The cracked vinyl seats. The crowded passenger area thanks to a bullet-proof partition that stops the air conditioning from providing relief from sweltering New York summers. Your guide on the adventures was the gruff, hardened cabbie who begrudgingly acknowledges your destination. You can feel his disdain as if you have broken an unspoken rule by choosing to go wherever it is you are going.

Let's not forget the wonderful process of hailing a cab in the first place. I would often consider hiking up my pants to show off my shapely legs but alas, I forgot to shave my legs again…

Now let's go back and analyze this circa 2015 business model. To legally operate a taxi in New York, you need a medallion. A decade ago, the cost of a medallion for a single cab was about $1M. They were an investment in a cabbie's future and retirement. Today you can buy one for less than 200K.

So, what happened? There aren't fewer New Yorkers. But we all know the answer…Uber and Lyft happened. Why endure the experience of riding in a cab when there's an easier, much more pleasant option?

Now some of you hard-core New Yorkers (whom I love by the way) are saying, "Fawhget about it. Ya' dig? What does some guy from Califawhnia know about New Yawhk?" But the proof is in the results. An inferior experience was mostly replaced by a superior experience that better aligned with what consumers wanted.

So why am I talking about this to the multifamily crowd? This is the story of Rentable Items in mostly all of your communities (albeit without the smell and rudeness). It's not that your residents can't secure the parking spot, garage, storage unit, etc. that they desire – it's because the process for doing so isn't convenient for them.

Sales 101 teaches us to make it easy for the customer to say "yes." Do we do that? Better yet, if you think about your properties, do you even have an accurate inventory of those items in each of your communities? How can you sell something when you're unsure of what's on your shelves?

You have these valuable assets just sitting, and sometimes you even have to spend money to fix them just so they can stay dormant! We all know about the storage units and garages that are broken into and used as unauthorized mini-houses, or end up as under-the-table transactions where the revenue never makes its way into the ledger.