Research Reports

Houston is famous for space, not just NASA’s center for human spaceflight, but also the way it has tended to expand to accommodate a growing population. The same might be said for the self-storage industry in the city, which has 68.4 million square feet of space, and its self-storage footage per person ratio of more than 9.5 is one of the highest in the country, according to Yardi Matrix in July 2019. But the data also reveals that street rates on a range of self-storage unit sizes in Space City have dropped significantly on a year-over-year basis.

The self-storage industry has become one of real estate’s hotspots, mostly thanks to the growing job market and heightened demand that keeps investors busy. Whether people are buying more, or, on the contrary, are downsizing their home, they need storage facilities to keep things in order. According to the National Self-Storage Report conducted by Yardi Matrix in August 2019, the development activity intensified in about 40% of the top markets, compared to the previous month, with the number of self-storage projects under construction or in the planning stages being equivalent to 9.5% of the total current inventory. Drawn from Yardi Matrix’s national database of more than 27,000 stores, here are the top 5 hottest markets for new self-storage construction: