Self-Storage Shows No Sign Of Slowing Down

One of the biggest deals for the entire self-storage industry closed this quarter when Harrison Street Real Estate sold a 1.1M SF 13-property portfolio to Sovran Self Storage. The $186.4M purchase comprises four properties in California, six in New England and three in Texas.

The transaction is one data point in a trend of massive and steady investment sales in the self-storage sector. NGKF managing director Aaron Swerdlin, who repped Harrison Street in the deal, tells Bisnow he hasn’t seen so much interest in a deal in probably five years—and that includes another big deal he did in December worth about a quarter of a billion dollars.

For the Harrison Street portfolio, at the end of the process there were five or six potential buyers, all with cash in hand. That kind of rampant interest is creating a market for new investors. Over the last 10 years, Aaron says, those investors have gotten smarter and more educated. 

Unlike in other sectors, Aaron isn’t detecting any softness in the market. He points out that for 20 years, self-storage has been the top-performing asset in the REIT world. Year-over-year, slower growth can’t really be perceived as softness just because you have 6% growth rather than 9% or 12%.   

In some sectors, rent growth has been more than double four years in a row. That can only go on for so long before you price yourself out of the market. But Aaron isn’t yet feeling that self-storage is overheated; it's just taking a much-needed breather.