Millennials Drive Self-Storage Market

LOS ANGELES—The millennial demographic is helping to fuel growth in the self-storage industry, according to Fred Cordova, EVP at Kennedy Wilson. Cordova recently represented the buyer in the acquisition of a three-property self-storage portfolio in Los Angeles and Riverside, which GlobeSt.com reported in a previous story, and is an expert in the self-storage sector.

“The global forces affecting the self-storage market are the downscaling of households and how people live,” Cordova tells GlobeSt.com. “The millennials aren’t buying houses, and ownership has dropped down from 65% to 66% to 61%, so you have a huge demand for apartment units. These new apartments are quite small, but people still have their stuff and they need to put it somewhere. Self-storage space is half the cost of living space, so it makes sense to put the items you don’t use that often in storage.”