How to Gauge Market Demand for a New Self Storage Facility

Self Storage Investing
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If I’m thinking about building a self storage facility. What’s the best way to understand the supply and demand in my market? I know I can just look up local storage facilities on Google, but I need a better way to make sense of this.

Is the market saturated with too much competition from too many storage facilities or is there an under-supply of self storage facilities in my area? I don’t want to build this thing and then the tenants don’t come.

How is market saturation measured? Meaning, at what point is there too much or not enough storage available in a market, and where can I get the data to know with confidence what the situation is?

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I know of two websites that can help you see the current inventory of storage facilities throughout the country.

They don’t always account for everything (sometimes there are lesser known facilities that don’t show up in their database), but you’ll see about 90% of what’s out there.

One of them is RadiusPlus, and the other is StorTrack, and they both do a similar thing.

Last I heard, the national average is about 7-8 square feet of storage space per person. So, if you see that the supply of self-storage around your location is less than this, there’s probably enough demand to support a new facility or expanding an existing one. If the supply is higher than this, it could still work, but it may take longer to fill up.

These websites will let you pick a location and then draw a radius around it (3 miles, 5 miles, 7 miles, 10 miles… it varies, depending on how rural your location is and how dense the population is). For rural locations, you’ll want to use a larger radius, like 7-10 miles, for urban areas, you’ll want to use a smaller one, like 3-5 miles.

Whatever radius you pick, it will show you how many sq ft of self storage there is per capita around your chosen location.

You can create an account and start searching for areas. It will show you what other facilities are nearby, how much square footage they have, what kind of storage they have, and more. I think RadiusPlus will give you a small number of free searches before you have to start paying for it. I don’t recall how StorTrack works because I’m currently paying monthly for that one.

They’re both awesome tools that deliver very important information for making these decisions.

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@seanjean Id call the facilities in the are and see if they units available. If they full I’d ask how long their wait list is. This should help determine demand.

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I recently made a video showing how StorTrack works, if you’re curious how it can help with this process.

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@retipsterseth does that website work for RV storage yards too? Can you find the supply and demand for that type of long-term parking?

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@retipsterseth or anyone else.

If you find land in these areas that are low in supply for storage, how would one best find buyers who are interested in building self storage?

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@Landvestor you’d probably be best off getting a feasibility study, then getting it entitled for self storage (if it actually makes sense) and then selling it as a package to a self storage investor at a huge markup from the original land price.

For me, this process took about $50k of cash and several months, but it’s definitely a much more valuable package if you can get there, and especially if you can prove that there’s demand with an independent feasibility study.

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Thanks for the response!

After the feasibility study and entitlement.. how do you find the actual self storage buyers?

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@Landvestor I would start with the nearest ‘competitors’ in the immediate vicinity. They already know the market and probably want to control the pricing in it. If anyone wants the first shot at it, it’s probably them. After that, you can expand to the surrounding areas and continue cold calling until you find someone.

Otherwise, there are a lot of self storage communities and associations in each state where self storage owners and managers get together. Once you get to know a few of them, they all seem to know each other, or they’re at least aware of who their competitors are.