08 Sep 2025
This week the Radius+ team was attending SSA’s Las Vegas show celebrating it’s 50th year anniversary.
The energy at the show was optimistic despite the challenges in the market.
My first major takeaway was that people are bullish on the next 4 years. Conversations with top operators and acquisition groups were around how Certificate of Occupancy and lease up deals are trading again. This was not the case even a year ago when rental rates were continuing to plummet and investors were not willing to risk buying assets before they were fully stabilized. This sentiment was furthered by hearing about how many large equity investors were getting involved in storage and looking to deploy funds over the next year.
The second thing that stood out to me from the conversations we’ve had is the push for innovation around revenue management. With ECRI’s being such a critical piece of Self Storage operations over the past 2 years. Many top 50 operators that I spoke with have all spent time and resources revamping their revenue management departments and invested in understanding who rents at their facilities to gauge when/how aggressively to leverage any type of rent increases. Conversely there are operators who have found massive success in their facilities performance through keeping steady with their rates instead of using price as a lever to increase occupancy and revenue. However these operators feel like the exception to the rule, and have a more targeted and slower growth strategy as only certain types of markets and deals may fit their investment criteria, while national operators with a larger store count have adopted the aggressive pricing strategy the REITs rolled out around 2023.
While it is great to feel the optimism at this show and can see funds poised to be deployed as a sign of confidence that the industry is recovering- rental rates still remain low in most markets in the US and deals that make sense are still a challenge, let’s see how the rest of 2025 unfolds.
