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This article takes the view of the consumer, "Why do so many people pay to store items they almost never use?". But in actuality, the interesting part of this i

This article takes the view of the consumer, "Why do so many people pay to store items they almost never use?". But in actuality, the interesting part of this is why is there so much supply of self-storage businesses? The answer is: cash flow. Self-storage businesses are the almost perfect solution for someone with a good size (but not enormous) bucket of money that they want to put to work generating cashflow: 1. Cheap build out (cheap land, cheap facilities) 2. Almost entirely hands-off (no employees, automated entry) 3. Low liability (low risk of customers suing you) 4. Low overhead (just pay for taxes, electricity, minimal maintenance) 5. Reliable monthly cash flow The abundant supply of these businesses, I suspect, tends to generate demand: it's easier to pay $80/month to store your junk than spend the time and emotional labor of picking through what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of. That ends up being captive long-term revenue.

browningstreet 17d ago
I disagree with the last point -- it's a pain to gather a bunch of things up, put them in vehicles (or rent a truck), find a storage facility that isn't full, rent the unit, haul your things over to the unit.. all the while ignoring that you're putting off whatever culling and disposal ceremony you should actually be engaging in. My local town gives you two free visits to the garbage transfer station per year. Choosing storage over that seems harder.
- neutronicus 17d ago
  You're hauling the stuff regardless. Dealing with renting a storage unit vs deciding to throw away your Pokemon cards feels like kind of a wash.
  - diskzero 17d ago
    Are you infinitely wealthy? Storage units are a slow leak on finances, just like uncanceled subscriptions and mobile phone plan features.
    - neutronicus 17d ago
      No, I'm not, and I've also never rented a storage unit. It seems hard to imagine the sums involved becoming comparable to other amounts of money lit on fire to avoid fights with family though (i.e. home renovation, travel).
      - diskzero 17d ago
        Interesting comparison and one I didn't consider. Thanks for the insight!
    - vel0city 17d ago
      Rebuying decorations every year is also a leak on finances. Rebuying a bunch of camping gear (more than I can comfortably store in my home) is also a leak on finances. It's far cheaper to use a storage unit for a lot of this stuff I do routinely use than buying and selling a house just to get more storage space at home. I'm not blind to the fact not everyone just stores junk they never use. I'm certain there's a percentage of stuff in mine that is probably better off sold or trashed. But until we stop changing decorations for the different seasons, stop a number of hobbies with bulky stuff, or move to a giant mansion I just don't have the space and could use a few more square feet of pure storage space.
      - wildzzz 17d ago
        The answer is pretty simple: reduce your possessions to the space you can fill for free.
        vel0city 17d ago
        So, own nothing. Every square footage of every home costs $$$ to keep in your possession. I pay a mortgage. I pay insurance. I pay taxes. I pay maintenance costs. There were acquisition costs in the purchase of it, and there will be acquisition costs wherever I go next. Not one square inch of my home is "free". Suddenly that simple answer isn't so simple when actually confronted with reality, unless you're willing to be homeless and just carry your possessions in your hands.
- OutOfHere 17d ago
  Why assume that disposal is warranted? Sometimes, people actually reuse what they store. Also, it's better to donate than to dispose.
  - browningstreet 17d ago
    Sure.. donation is easy, doesn't require a storage unit. When I've had storage units and spent time there, and saw open doors and what people had in theirs, I stand by my take. The whole point of the article posted above was that it's a bit weird how numerous and prevalent self-storage has gotten in the US.
    - OutOfHere 17d ago
      Donation isn't that easy if one has to find someone who actually desires each item. It requires a lot of online posts, communication, and overall effort, but this ensures that each item finds a new home that's right for it.
      - browningstreet 13d ago
        Every Goodwill donation center takes everything you bring there. They even come out to your car and carry it in for you.
  - pixl97 17d ago
    >Also, it's better to donate than to dispose Aka, trash by proxy. Best to look up what people actually need. There is a lot of this junk we collect that just gets junked by the donation groups turning into a cost center.
    - OutOfHere 17d ago
      Donating to donation groups isn't a great donation. It's better to catalog and post each item, communicate with people who want it, and thereby find it a new home that's right for it. Granted, this is not possible for all items, especially never for clothing.
- nemomarx 17d ago
  I'm glad you have free visits to the dump for it. I've never lived anywhere where I wouldn't have to also pay to get my trash hauled away, so it's a big pain with old mattresses or furniture honestly.
- ninalanyon 17d ago
  > My local town gives you two free visits to the garbage transfer station per year. Where I live in Norway the recycling station is open three days a week and I can take stuff there free as often as I like up to 2 000 kg of stuff per year. It has never occurred to me that there would be a limit on the number of visits. Or have I misunderstood?
  - throw5678 17d ago
    US here. where I am: Recycling is free, hazardous waste is open a few days a month (also free), appliances are free, and rubbish is measured by weight (they weigh your vehicle on the way in and out). They pay you to take metal.
    - ElevenLathe 17d ago
      Without any fee beyond the required annual solid waste bill, my municipality will let me set out up to 20 (!) bags of trash per week with up to 50 lb (!) in them every week. I can throw out two tons of trash per month without having to haul anything anywhere or pay any extra fees. Clearly this is madness, but it does make it a lot easier to throw shit out than put it in a storage unit.
      - jaggederest 17d ago
        Trust me, given how many people just accumulate trash because it's expensive, that's an absolutely sane and excellent policy. As a society, we want people to use trash disposal, because the alternative is expensive, painful, and disgusting.
        cucumber3732842 17d ago
        You can literally tell which municipalities in my state have been hoodwinked by the Karens into adopting "pay as you throw". They're the ones where there's trash everywhere. It's like these people can't think two steps ahead (I'd go so far as to say that's the defining feature of regulatory policy in this state). You just gave people a financial incentive to litter and dump.
- rpdillon 17d ago
  Allowing people to put off the disposal ceremony is the primary value of the service!
  - deleted 17d ago
    [deleted]
- massysett 17d ago
  It is difficult for people to throw things away. Many things invoke "but this is a perfectly good..." I had a LaserJet monochrome printer. I knew I would never use it because I now have a color model, and if the color one broke I would replace it immediately. "But this is a perfectly good printer." It sat for a few years on a shelf before I finally tossed it. Resale nets too little to be worthwhile. Other things represent work. This is old files in the office. My workplace was full of file cabinets with drawers of papers. It was decades of accumulated knowledge. No one would ever read them or use them. But throwing them away seemed disrespectful of all the work that went into those papers. For these things, I think of my daughter's math homework. It is extremely valuable and lots of work went into it, and there is zero reason to retain it the instant it comes home. Other things represent memories. They embody a long friend or lost relative, or a vacation, or an occasion, or a feeling they caused when worn, used, etc. Discarding it seems to disrespect the memory. I try to keep these things to a minimum - keep representative samples, and digitize to the extent possible. This is why discarding things is hard. I don't want storage space and have none, but I completely understand why people would rather shove apparently useless things into a storage locker. It's easier to pay to store it than to discard it. I go a step farther and say that it's worth it for folks to pay to store these things. It's worth $80/month or whatever it costs to have that stuff sitting in a storage box, even if they know they will never ever use or even look at them.
  - nkingsy 17d ago
    facebook marketplace for $10 or $20 is magic. People don't like free as much as they like paying $10 or $20 for a $50 item
    - FireBeyond 17d ago
      A nominal fee convinces people they're getting a bargain. "Free" feels like you're driving to someone's house to pick up their trash.
      - freedomben 16d ago
        sadly, it is often true though. I learned early on that "free" usually meant "trash I don't want to deal with disposing of". There are of course people who don't do that (like myself) but that "price" is unfortunately a real signal to pay attention to
- michaelt 17d ago
  My theory is self storage is actually in competition with getting a bigger house. If your family is seriously considering moving to a bigger house, and that move is going to cost you $20,000 that makes renting a storage unit for $1000/year sound like a great deal.
  - jjav 16d ago
    > My theory is self storage is actually in competition with getting a bigger house. Obviously true. If one had a house with space for posessions, there would be no need for storage. As houses become ever smaller (for a given $/sqft) external self-storage becomes the only affordable way to gain some space. My parents were poor but back ~70 years ago it was still achievable for a lower income family to buy a house with some space. As an engineer in Silicon Valley, the largest house I can afford is barely twice the square footage of my childhood bedroom. In such a tiny house we fit 3 people, all with hobbies and equipment, child has toys, etc. A house with enough space would be another million at the very least. So that's impossible. So compared to that, a couple hundred a month for self-storage is a bargain. I hate it, would rather have the equity in a larger property but it is impossible to afford. So yes, that's why storage facilities have such a boom. Housing by $/sqft is impossibly expensive.
bluGill 17d ago
You are missing one other issue: it seems easier than it really is. There are only so many people who would use self storage. You see a full self storage place in town and thing you can get a share if you just build one. What you don't understand is demand is not elastic: if you build a second site in town you go from 100 units with 90 used (a good usage rate), do 200 units in town but still only 90 used.
- cucumber3732842 17d ago
  Eventually price crashes far enough below retail that commercial users start filling out a lot of the space because the cost per square foot is lower than their own space. Like you shove your winter PPE, your emergency stash of spare parts for process equipment, etc, etc, in some self storage lockers and get the same job done using less square footage with extensive compliance burden (or get more job done using same square footage).
  - dghlsakjg 17d ago
    I live near some storage facilities, and a significant number of them are rented by businesses. Go to one of theses facilities at 7 am, and you will almost always see a few contractors packing the truck with whatever they need for the day.
dlcarrier 17d ago
Demand is outpacing supply, so new supply is serving that unmet demand, not creating it.
- gffrd 17d ago
  That assumes the market is saturated, and there's nothing you could do to convince a non-customer to become a customer.
- jaggederest 17d ago
  This is Jevon's paradox - as you make the supply better and more efficient to use, people will demand more of it.
jboggan 17d ago
You are missing the biggest benefit of a self storage business - the appreciation of the underlying real estate. When you dig into the financials of the major self storage businesses you'll see they are essentially REITs that have better cashflow. They can pick an up-and-coming area, do a minimal build-out with low annual overhead, and then down the road when the facility would be needing overhauls and maintenance the underlying property has typically appreciated so much that it dwarfs all other associated revenue streams and makes sense to sell and raze the existing structure. Great business model if you have a long enough timeline. This is also why some startups trying to revolutionize the self storage model had extreme headwinds - if you are renting the underlying properties and trying to make the storage business profitable you are at an extreme disadvantage to the larger players who can subsidize operating costs with portfolio appreciation.
- jaggederest 17d ago
  This same concept is also true of McDonalds historically - they own the land, lease it to franchisees, and realize the appreciation themselves. McDonalds are fairly economically valuable, so the capital gains by the time they're cleared and resold as development often dwarfs the value of the franchise fees.
  - packetslave 17d ago
    As someone once put it: "McDonald's is a real estate company with a hamburger hobby"
    - dexterdog 17d ago
      Reminds me of the similar one about Harvard with a hedge fund and a little school.
      - monocasa 17d ago
        Or quite a few religious organizations. The whole reason why the Catholic Church doesn't allow priests to be married anymore was because it used to be that the individual churches were mostly the property of the priest, and would be passed down generationally (with some restrictions). The church phased in the ban on marriage so that over time, the churches would all in up in the estate of a priest with no heirs, where they'd become the property more formally of the Catholic Church proper. Today the Catholic Church is the single largest landowner in the world, with about 170 million acres. More recent religious organizations have taken note of that, with LDS owning about 2.4M acres.
sehugg 17d ago
$80/month that becomes $120/month and then $200/month within a year or two, and they mail you a postcard to tell you about it. I guess that's another nice perk of the business.
- cogogo 17d ago
  The other perk is they charge “mandatory” insurance fees. It is easy to opt out if you prove you have insurance but at least the facility I am using makes it seem like it is hard.
  - zrobotics 17d ago
    They will also "accidentally" re-add the insurance fees. I had a storage unit for about a year while sorting through my brother's estate, and without fail every 3 months the insurance fee would get added back on. I was so glad when I was able to cancel that lease, it was maddening to have to keep calling about the same issue.
    - SoftTalker 17d ago
      My son's college did the same thing. Every term, the billing for tuition and fees would include (a very expensive) fee for heath insurance. I would have to declare again that he was covered on my plan as a dependent and he didn't need the school's plan. I'm convinced they do this because the kids using student loans aren't paying attention.
- traviswingo 17d ago
  This literally just happened to me for a storage unit we got to store a bunch of baby stuff while deciding if we’re going to have another kid. Started at $87/month for a 5x10 unit. Plenty of space, and I added a six-foot-tall shelving unit ($50 from Home Depot) to keep it organized and access stuff when needed. We’ve had it for maybe 18 months now, and I just realized it’s $204/month for the last 6 months. It’s at the top of my list to eliminate this storage unit within the next few months. We also had a 12 month personal limit on how long we’d keep it, but life happens.
danesparza 17d ago
There are more self-storage facilities than there are Starbucks, Subways and McDonalds -- combined. Read that again. Wendover productions has a great video on the phenomena of self-storage and the economics around this: https://youtu.be/uEVv8SOJ6Is https://youtu.be/uEVv8SOJ6Is
qingcharles 17d ago
I know someone in the biz, so two other ways people are making money: 1) Buying land and getting it rezoned for storage and then selling it on -- it's getting harder to get permits to build storage as people get sick of them, so there is a whole economy in knowing how and where to build them and only dealing with the paperwork. 2) Storage unit construction is a huge business now. Sell the shovels in the gold rush etc.
0x1ch 17d ago
You're on the nose. My parent passed shortly after I went to University. It was tough and much easier to put all of her belongings in storage for four years, then it was dealing with it then and there while renting and in between jobs.
JKCalhoun 17d ago
Love to see some numbers on what starting up a self-storage runs.
Merad 17d ago
I used to work at a company that was the industry leader in business management software for storage facility owners. I don't remember exact numbers but a lot of facilities are mom & pop type operations where people basically invested in the business as a retirement plan. It's a surprisingly stable and profitable industry. Economy good? People buy too much crap and want to store it. Economy bad? People have to move and downsize their housing and need to store stuff. Large incentive for tenants to avoid delinquency because they risk their stuff being auctioned off.
BobbyTables2 17d ago
Suspect it’s far more than $80/month - I was paying that much for a small unit about 30 years ago! (In a LCOL area too!)
- ctkhn 17d ago
  I paid around that for a 5x10 unit in a medium sized midwestern city for a year during covid when I worked fully remote and moved back to my parents' house for a year.
gazook89 17d ago
I thought the article was predominantly about supply side. There are more quotes from providers than consumers. The article mentions every point you’ve made. You’ve summarized the article bang on.
cineticdaffodil 17d ago
[dead]
msarrel 16d ago
This is exactly what I came here to comment. Thank you.

browningstreet 17d ago

I disagree with the last point -- it's a pain to gather a bunch of things up, put them in vehicles (or rent a truck), find a storage facility that isn't full, rent the unit, haul your things over to the unit.. all the while ignoring that you're putting off whatever culling and disposal ceremony you should actually be engaging in. My local town gives you two free visits to the garbage transfer station per year. Choosing storage over that seems harder.

neutronicus 17d ago
You're hauling the stuff regardless. Dealing with renting a storage unit vs deciding to throw away your Pokemon cards feels like kind of a wash.
- diskzero 17d ago
  Are you infinitely wealthy? Storage units are a slow leak on finances, just like uncanceled subscriptions and mobile phone plan features.
  - neutronicus 17d ago
    No, I'm not, and I've also never rented a storage unit. It seems hard to imagine the sums involved becoming comparable to other amounts of money lit on fire to avoid fights with family though (i.e. home renovation, travel).
    - diskzero 17d ago
      Interesting comparison and one I didn't consider. Thanks for the insight!
  - vel0city 17d ago
    Rebuying decorations every year is also a leak on finances. Rebuying a bunch of camping gear (more than I can comfortably store in my home) is also a leak on finances. It's far cheaper to use a storage unit for a lot of this stuff I do routinely use than buying and selling a house just to get more storage space at home. I'm not blind to the fact not everyone just stores junk they never use. I'm certain there's a percentage of stuff in mine that is probably better off sold or trashed. But until we stop changing decorations for the different seasons, stop a number of hobbies with bulky stuff, or move to a giant mansion I just don't have the space and could use a few more square feet of pure storage space.
    - wildzzz 17d ago
      The answer is pretty simple: reduce your possessions to the space you can fill for free.
      - vel0city 17d ago
        So, own nothing. Every square footage of every home costs $$$ to keep in your possession. I pay a mortgage. I pay insurance. I pay taxes. I pay maintenance costs. There were acquisition costs in the purchase of it, and there will be acquisition costs wherever I go next. Not one square inch of my home is "free". Suddenly that simple answer isn't so simple when actually confronted with reality, unless you're willing to be homeless and just carry your possessions in your hands.
OutOfHere 17d ago
Why assume that disposal is warranted? Sometimes, people actually reuse what they store. Also, it's better to donate than to dispose.
- browningstreet 17d ago
  Sure.. donation is easy, doesn't require a storage unit. When I've had storage units and spent time there, and saw open doors and what people had in theirs, I stand by my take. The whole point of the article posted above was that it's a bit weird how numerous and prevalent self-storage has gotten in the US.
  - OutOfHere 17d ago
    Donation isn't that easy if one has to find someone who actually desires each item. It requires a lot of online posts, communication, and overall effort, but this ensures that each item finds a new home that's right for it.
    - browningstreet 13d ago
      Every Goodwill donation center takes everything you bring there. They even come out to your car and carry it in for you.
- pixl97 17d ago
  >Also, it's better to donate than to dispose Aka, trash by proxy. Best to look up what people actually need. There is a lot of this junk we collect that just gets junked by the donation groups turning into a cost center.
  - OutOfHere 17d ago
    Donating to donation groups isn't a great donation. It's better to catalog and post each item, communicate with people who want it, and thereby find it a new home that's right for it. Granted, this is not possible for all items, especially never for clothing.
nemomarx 17d ago
I'm glad you have free visits to the dump for it. I've never lived anywhere where I wouldn't have to also pay to get my trash hauled away, so it's a big pain with old mattresses or furniture honestly.
ninalanyon 17d ago
> My local town gives you two free visits to the garbage transfer station per year. Where I live in Norway the recycling station is open three days a week and I can take stuff there free as often as I like up to 2 000 kg of stuff per year. It has never occurred to me that there would be a limit on the number of visits. Or have I misunderstood?
- throw5678 17d ago
  US here. where I am: Recycling is free, hazardous waste is open a few days a month (also free), appliances are free, and rubbish is measured by weight (they weigh your vehicle on the way in and out). They pay you to take metal.
  - ElevenLathe 17d ago
    Without any fee beyond the required annual solid waste bill, my municipality will let me set out up to 20 (!) bags of trash per week with up to 50 lb (!) in them every week. I can throw out two tons of trash per month without having to haul anything anywhere or pay any extra fees. Clearly this is madness, but it does make it a lot easier to throw shit out than put it in a storage unit.
    - jaggederest 17d ago
      Trust me, given how many people just accumulate trash because it's expensive, that's an absolutely sane and excellent policy. As a society, we want people to use trash disposal, because the alternative is expensive, painful, and disgusting.
      - cucumber3732842 17d ago
        You can literally tell which municipalities in my state have been hoodwinked by the Karens into adopting "pay as you throw". They're the ones where there's trash everywhere. It's like these people can't think two steps ahead (I'd go so far as to say that's the defining feature of regulatory policy in this state). You just gave people a financial incentive to litter and dump.
rpdillon 17d ago
Allowing people to put off the disposal ceremony is the primary value of the service!
- deleted 17d ago
  [deleted]
massysett 17d ago
It is difficult for people to throw things away. Many things invoke "but this is a perfectly good..." I had a LaserJet monochrome printer. I knew I would never use it because I now have a color model, and if the color one broke I would replace it immediately. "But this is a perfectly good printer." It sat for a few years on a shelf before I finally tossed it. Resale nets too little to be worthwhile. Other things represent work. This is old files in the office. My workplace was full of file cabinets with drawers of papers. It was decades of accumulated knowledge. No one would ever read them or use them. But throwing them away seemed disrespectful of all the work that went into those papers. For these things, I think of my daughter's math homework. It is extremely valuable and lots of work went into it, and there is zero reason to retain it the instant it comes home. Other things represent memories. They embody a long friend or lost relative, or a vacation, or an occasion, or a feeling they caused when worn, used, etc. Discarding it seems to disrespect the memory. I try to keep these things to a minimum - keep representative samples, and digitize to the extent possible. This is why discarding things is hard. I don't want storage space and have none, but I completely understand why people would rather shove apparently useless things into a storage locker. It's easier to pay to store it than to discard it. I go a step farther and say that it's worth it for folks to pay to store these things. It's worth $80/month or whatever it costs to have that stuff sitting in a storage box, even if they know they will never ever use or even look at them.
- nkingsy 17d ago
  facebook marketplace for $10 or $20 is magic. People don't like free as much as they like paying $10 or $20 for a $50 item
  - FireBeyond 17d ago
    A nominal fee convinces people they're getting a bargain. "Free" feels like you're driving to someone's house to pick up their trash.
    - freedomben 16d ago
      sadly, it is often true though. I learned early on that "free" usually meant "trash I don't want to deal with disposing of". There are of course people who don't do that (like myself) but that "price" is unfortunately a real signal to pay attention to
michaelt 17d ago
My theory is self storage is actually in competition with getting a bigger house. If your family is seriously considering moving to a bigger house, and that move is going to cost you $20,000 that makes renting a storage unit for $1000/year sound like a great deal.
- jjav 16d ago
  > My theory is self storage is actually in competition with getting a bigger house. Obviously true. If one had a house with space for posessions, there would be no need for storage. As houses become ever smaller (for a given $/sqft) external self-storage becomes the only affordable way to gain some space. My parents were poor but back ~70 years ago it was still achievable for a lower income family to buy a house with some space. As an engineer in Silicon Valley, the largest house I can afford is barely twice the square footage of my childhood bedroom. In such a tiny house we fit 3 people, all with hobbies and equipment, child has toys, etc. A house with enough space would be another million at the very least. So that's impossible. So compared to that, a couple hundred a month for self-storage is a bargain. I hate it, would rather have the equity in a larger property but it is impossible to afford. So yes, that's why storage facilities have such a boom. Housing by $/sqft is impossibly expensive.

bluGill 17d ago

You are missing one other issue: it seems easier than it really is. There are only so many people who would use self storage. You see a full self storage place in town and thing you can get a share if you just build one. What you don't understand is demand is not elastic: if you build a second site in town you go from 100 units with 90 used (a good usage rate), do 200 units in town but still only 90 used.

cucumber3732842 17d ago
Eventually price crashes far enough below retail that commercial users start filling out a lot of the space because the cost per square foot is lower than their own space. Like you shove your winter PPE, your emergency stash of spare parts for process equipment, etc, etc, in some self storage lockers and get the same job done using less square footage with extensive compliance burden (or get more job done using same square footage).
- dghlsakjg 17d ago
  I live near some storage facilities, and a significant number of them are rented by businesses. Go to one of theses facilities at 7 am, and you will almost always see a few contractors packing the truck with whatever they need for the day.

dlcarrier 17d ago

Demand is outpacing supply, so new supply is serving that unmet demand, not creating it.

gffrd 17d ago
That assumes the market is saturated, and there's nothing you could do to convince a non-customer to become a customer.
jaggederest 17d ago
This is Jevon's paradox - as you make the supply better and more efficient to use, people will demand more of it.

jboggan 17d ago

You are missing the biggest benefit of a self storage business - the appreciation of the underlying real estate. When you dig into the financials of the major self storage businesses you'll see they are essentially REITs that have better cashflow. They can pick an up-and-coming area, do a minimal build-out with low annual overhead, and then down the road when the facility would be needing overhauls and maintenance the underlying property has typically appreciated so much that it dwarfs all other associated revenue streams and makes sense to sell and raze the existing structure. Great business model if you have a long enough timeline. This is also why some startups trying to revolutionize the self storage model had extreme headwinds - if you are renting the underlying properties and trying to make the storage business profitable you are at an extreme disadvantage to the larger players who can subsidize operating costs with portfolio appreciation.

jaggederest 17d ago
This same concept is also true of McDonalds historically - they own the land, lease it to franchisees, and realize the appreciation themselves. McDonalds are fairly economically valuable, so the capital gains by the time they're cleared and resold as development often dwarfs the value of the franchise fees.
- packetslave 17d ago
  As someone once put it: "McDonald's is a real estate company with a hamburger hobby"
  - dexterdog 17d ago
    Reminds me of the similar one about Harvard with a hedge fund and a little school.
    - monocasa 17d ago
      Or quite a few religious organizations. The whole reason why the Catholic Church doesn't allow priests to be married anymore was because it used to be that the individual churches were mostly the property of the priest, and would be passed down generationally (with some restrictions). The church phased in the ban on marriage so that over time, the churches would all in up in the estate of a priest with no heirs, where they'd become the property more formally of the Catholic Church proper. Today the Catholic Church is the single largest landowner in the world, with about 170 million acres. More recent religious organizations have taken note of that, with LDS owning about 2.4M acres.

sehugg 17d ago

$80/month that becomes $120/month and then $200/month within a year or two, and they mail you a postcard to tell you about it. I guess that's another nice perk of the business.

cogogo 17d ago
The other perk is they charge “mandatory” insurance fees. It is easy to opt out if you prove you have insurance but at least the facility I am using makes it seem like it is hard.
- zrobotics 17d ago
  They will also "accidentally" re-add the insurance fees. I had a storage unit for about a year while sorting through my brother's estate, and without fail every 3 months the insurance fee would get added back on. I was so glad when I was able to cancel that lease, it was maddening to have to keep calling about the same issue.
  - SoftTalker 17d ago
    My son's college did the same thing. Every term, the billing for tuition and fees would include (a very expensive) fee for heath insurance. I would have to declare again that he was covered on my plan as a dependent and he didn't need the school's plan. I'm convinced they do this because the kids using student loans aren't paying attention.
traviswingo 17d ago
This literally just happened to me for a storage unit we got to store a bunch of baby stuff while deciding if we’re going to have another kid. Started at $87/month for a 5x10 unit. Plenty of space, and I added a six-foot-tall shelving unit ($50 from Home Depot) to keep it organized and access stuff when needed. We’ve had it for maybe 18 months now, and I just realized it’s $204/month for the last 6 months. It’s at the top of my list to eliminate this storage unit within the next few months. We also had a 12 month personal limit on how long we’d keep it, but life happens.

danesparza 17d ago

There are more self-storage facilities than there are Starbucks, Subways and McDonalds -- combined. Read that again. Wendover productions has a great video on the phenomena of self-storage and the economics around this: https://youtu.be/uEVv8SOJ6Is https://youtu.be/uEVv8SOJ6Is

qingcharles 17d ago

I know someone in the biz, so two other ways people are making money: 1) Buying land and getting it rezoned for storage and then selling it on -- it's getting harder to get permits to build storage as people get sick of them, so there is a whole economy in knowing how and where to build them and only dealing with the paperwork. 2) Storage unit construction is a huge business now. Sell the shovels in the gold rush etc.

0x1ch 17d ago

You're on the nose. My parent passed shortly after I went to University. It was tough and much easier to put all of her belongings in storage for four years, then it was dealing with it then and there while renting and in between jobs.

JKCalhoun 17d ago

Love to see some numbers on what starting up a self-storage runs.

Merad 17d ago

I used to work at a company that was the industry leader in business management software for storage facility owners. I don't remember exact numbers but a lot of facilities are mom & pop type operations where people basically invested in the business as a retirement plan. It's a surprisingly stable and profitable industry. Economy good? People buy too much crap and want to store it. Economy bad? People have to move and downsize their housing and need to store stuff. Large incentive for tenants to avoid delinquency because they risk their stuff being auctioned off.

BobbyTables2 17d ago

Suspect it’s far more than $80/month - I was paying that much for a small unit about 30 years ago! (In a LCOL area too!)

ctkhn 17d ago
I paid around that for a 5x10 unit in a medium sized midwestern city for a year during covid when I worked fully remote and moved back to my parents' house for a year.

gazook89 17d ago

I thought the article was predominantly about supply side. There are more quotes from providers than consumers. The article mentions every point you’ve made. You’ve summarized the article bang on.

cineticdaffodil 17d ago

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msarrel 16d ago

This is exactly what I came here to comment. Thank you.