Storbord · Research
Original analysis on self-storage.
Fewer people changed address in 2023 than in 1948, on 2.3x the population. That demand did not disappear. It got deferred, and it is sitting there.
I rolled Public Storage, Extra Space, and CubeSmart into one weighted composite, the way Nareit builds sector indexes: 379M square feet, 5,248 facilities, 21 quarters. Q2 2026 reads +0.1% weighted NOI growth, the first annual occupancy gain of the down-cycle, and a market map where the winners are the metros that never built. PSA's print sits 5.2 points below my +3% cycle trigger.
Nobody publishes 'homes sold per capita,' so I built it: Redfin metro sales ÷ Census population, 2023–2025, top 100 whole-MSA markets. Florida owns the leaderboard. Then I ran it against three years of 10x10 street rates in 26 markets. The highest-turnover markets saw rents fall the most. Turnover tells you where demand comes from, not where rents go. Supply chases the same signal.
Harvard's 2026 State of the Nation's Housing describes a housing market frozen at a three-decade low. Moving is the biggest single driver of storage demand. The report, translated into storage terms: 14 charts and the full PDF.