Gabfocus Spotlight: How has the self storage industry changed in the last 15 years?

The world of self storage has changed a lot in the last decade or two, and modern competition is fierce. The new landscape may seem more challenging than ever to navigate for a new operator, but that doesn't mean it's a bad time to get started.

In this Spotlight, John C. Lindsey gives a snapshot view of how the self storage industry has changed and explains why self storage is a great business to get into.

Question: "How has the self storage industry changed in the last 15 years?"

Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:

In this Gabfocus Session: New to the Industry: A beginner’s guide to self storage, we spoke with Adam Armstrong and Lindsey Self Storage's John Lindsey about the self storage landscape and what new operators should know to be successful as they get started.

Check out the full Session to dive deeper! 

Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what John had to say:

"I remember the early 2000s, back then, there was no question of saturation or competition. It basically was like you would find a good corner, and you'd build a facility, and it would be relatively successful in a couple of years.

And they weren't diving into the level of detail that we have these days just because we didn't need to at that time, there wasn't this oversaturation. People weren't squeezing every last penny and point of internal rate of return and metric to get out of it. It was more just a good business to get into. People did it and did very well for themselves.

And after '08, the shift that we saw was really a tightening of the lending industry, which affects everyone and everything we do these days. But out of that, we saw this growing wave we've been riding for the past decade that storage has just continued the hike and now is in this J curve.

But it's great as storage has been validated as an institutional Class A quality asset, which is phenomenal. We did great through '08. We did great through COVID. So there's been this huge quantum shift over the past decade, as far as, I think, how storage is recognized on a global and international scale, which really just catapults us into this next level of investment vehicles.

So I think we couldn't be better positioned in the spotlight right now, as far as the real estate class is concerned."