Stuf was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal's coverage of the self-storage market. Here's the stat that stopped me: more than 12% of American households — roughly 1 in 8 — are renting a storage unit right now. And that number has only been climbing, up from 9% in 2005.
Meanwhile, Q1 2025 self-storage sales hit $855M, up 37% year-over-year. The market that investors have written off as "already happened" is still very much happening.
That's the backdrop. The WSJ piece could only go so deep, so here's what we'd add if we could.
Self-storage is having a moment, and it's not a blip. Demand in dense urban markets is structural, not cyclical. People in cities accumulate more than their apartments can hold. Businesses downsize office footprints and need somewhere for the overflow. Life events — such as moves, new babies, aging parents — create storage needs that don't track with the economy.
At the same time, the traditional development pipeline for new urban storage facilities has slowed considerably. Zoning, permitting, and the cost of ground-up construction in high-land-value markets have made new conventional supply increasingly rare. The result: demand rising, traditional supply unable to keep up.
Here's the reframe that matters for building owners: the storage supply problem in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles isn't primarily a construction problem. It's a recognition problem.
The space already exists. It's in the basements of residential buildings. It's on the windowless floors of commercial properties. It's in the ground-floor retail voids that never got a second look. It's in parking levels that sit half-empty on weekday mornings.
For a building owner, space that was generating zero income can start generating a consistent monthly revenue stream — with none of the headaches of traditional retail or office leasing. No complex tenant negotiations. No vacancy risk tied to a single tenant's business performance. No operational burden on ownership.
We've spent over five years growing a hyperlocal storage network inside existing buildings across New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington, DC, Atlanta, and Boston. Every location started the same way: a building owner with underutilized space and a question about whether it could become something.
It almost always can. Storage works in spaces other uses can't absorb — no natural light required, minimal HVAC, flexible footprints. As few as 3,000 square feet can generate meaningful monthly revenue. We handle the buildout, the technology, and the operations. Ownership collects a check every single month.
The conversation is simple. If you have space that isn't earning, we want to talk.
Developers and investors tell me all the time they wish they'd invested in self-storage years ago. They watched Public Storage, Extra Space, and CubeSmart scale into giants and assumed the opportunity had passed them by.
It hasn't. Working with Stuf means they don't miss out.
Here's why it works for building owners specifically: storage is naturally sticky. Nobody wants to deal with moving their stuff, so customers stay — and staying means growing, recurring revenue for ownership. Minimal operational lift. Accretive cash flow. And appreciation on an asset that's now more productive than it was before.
Unlike the industry norm of surprise rate hikes, we put control in the customer's hands with a price lock membership. That's not just good for renters — it's good for retention, and retention is what makes this revenue stream genuinely reliable.
The boat didn't leave. It just looks different than it used to. And this time, building owners are the ones on it.
Email us at realestate@stufstorage.com if you want to talk about what's inside your portfolio.