Last year, I relocated from Austin to San Francisco for work. That’s a pretty long haul—more than 1,700 miles. This year, I made that long haul again to settle back in Austin and join the SpareFoot team. During 2012 and 2013, my whole life practically has been stuffed into moving boxes. With two halfway-across-the-country moves under my belt, I’m done with packing and unpacking for a while (well, almost done).
[ by Elizabeth Jespersen ]
Last month, SpareFoot released the first edition of the Storage Trends Quarterly report. The cool thing about self-storage industry performance – yes, there’s really something cool about this – is how it lines up with larger economic trends. After all, moving and education are among the biggest reasons people invest in self-storage— two important indicators of the economy’s overall well-being. So, what do all of our numbers and diagrams about storage really mean from a big-picture perspective?
Ever wondered what really motivates storage customers, or how well your city/state performs compared to the rest of the industry? Can you guess what percentage of storage renters are women?
The $22 billion self-storage industry is a hidden giant among us. You probably drive past at least one storage facility on your daily commute, with or without realizing it. They’re everywhere, but you don’t notice because self-storage is boring— a boring goldmine, that is. It’s one of the fastest-growing sectors of commercial real estate, with the amount of storage space in the U.S. doubling to 2 billion square feet in a mere five years from 2000-2005.
Some exciting SpareFoot developments have unfolded lately. We’ve partnered with two other leading self-storage directory sites: SelfStorageDeals.com and SelfStorageFinders.com. Now our advertising network is the largest in the self-storage industry— larger than all of our competitors’ combined (according to Compete.com, March 2011). This is an exciting milestone for a local Austin start-up to reach in a $22.6 billion industry. Self storage is actually larger than both the U.S. recorded music and movie industries in terms of gross sales. Boom.
In a recent flex of our self-storage marketing muscle, SpareFoot helped power one of our partners’ revamped websites. The new EasyStorageSearch.com utilizes The SpareFoot Network to make its users’ search for self-storage a whole lot easier. Our network includes a database that lists thousands of self-storage facilities nationwide, and technology that makes it easy to search, compare and reserve units. This platform is proven to convert more self-storage search traffic than any other in the industry, which means it reliably delivers just the information and resources customers are looking for.
