am bullish on self-storage because of something I noticed at a Class-A facility in Southern California. I saw a 20-something moving out of a shared apartment and a young couple running a side business from their unit. Neither looked like the “classic” self-storage customer, yet they are becoming the backbone of the next demand wave.

That’s when my long-term thesis of self-storage really clicked for me. We’ve spent the last two years talking about supply, and rightly so. The industry built aggressively after the pandemic demand surge. Yardi Matrix estimates roughly 50 million-plus square feet delivered nationally at the peak of this cycle, which slowed rent growth and tested underwriting assumptions. But what matters is who emerges stronger.

Data and real life are telling us: Demand isn’t disappearing—it’s evolving. Gen Z is becoming a dominant user group of self-storage. Surveys from SpareFoot and MSM show Gen-Z renters are adopting storage earlier in life than millennials—often in their early 20s—driven by mobility, smaller living spaces, side hustles, and delayed homeownership. Once a customer uses storage once, lifetime value tends to be significant. Storage isn’t transactional; it’s habitual.

This matters because Gen Z is entering its prime “life transition” years. Moves, job changes, relationships forming and dissolving, business formation—these are the moments that drive storage demand, and they compound. When you acquire a customer at 23 instead of 35, the runway is long.

Now layer that over the housing reality. Homes are getting smaller. Apartments are denser. ADUs are reshaping markets like California, where land scarcity compresses space. The result is simple: People still own the same amount of stuff but lack the room. Storage becomes the external closet, garage, and business backroom.

Yes, rent growth has been uneven. Yes, new supply has tested operators. But national occupancy has remained resilient, hovering around the low 90-percent range, and new construction pipelines are tapering as we look into the future.

This is where experience matters. The 18.6-year real estate cycle teaches us that the best opportunities are rarely obvious. Late-cycle discomfort is where durable platforms are built. For disciplined developers, especially in supply-constrained, infill California markets, self-storage remains one of the most compelling long-term asset classes in commercial real estate—not because of last quarter’s rents but because of the people quietly lining up at the door. And this line makes my long-term thesis bullish on self-storage.