27 Nov 2020
Originally published on PropertyWheel.
South Africa’s largest self storage property fund, Stor-Age, has continued to outperform the sector, delivering a strong performance for the six months ended in September 2020.
Despite the disruption of the pandemic in South Africa and the UK, the company delivered a robust operating performance allowing it to declare an interim dividend of 52 cents for the period, further demonstrating the resilience of its operating model.
“The challenges over the last six months required swift business decisions with effective execution. Our high-quality property fund portfolio across two markets, specialist sector skills and experience, together with our unrelenting focus on servicing our customers, enabled Stor-Age to quickly recover from the initial setback of the lockdowns and deliver a very strong operational performance” commented CEO, Gavin Lucas.
Intense operational focus and discipline at a property level, supported by the company’s specialised digital marketing platform, enabled Stor-Age to continue extracting both occupancy and revenue growth locally and in the UK.
In the wake of the initial phases of lockdown in both markets, enquiries returned to pre-Covid-19 levels by the end of May. For the full period, South Africa and UK enquiries were 14% and 19% ahead respectively of the prior year’s period on a like-for-like-basis. The strong demand underpinned the impressive growth in occupancy of 26 100sqm, taking the closing group occupancy position to 86%.
Despite the subdued economic environments in both markets prior to the imposition of the lockdowns, like-for-like rental income grew by a healthy 6.1% and 2.8% in South Africa and the UK respectively, while at a group level rental income and net property operating income increased by 21.3% and 13.3% respectively.
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