Self-Storage REIT Raises $810M In IPO
California-based SmartStop Self Storage raised $810M through its initial public offering and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.
The new REIT has sold 27 million shares at its offering price of $30 each, Bloomberg reported. That share price values the company at more than $1.5B.
The price was in the lower half of the range it was previously marketing — between $28 and $35 per share.
The company began trading under the ticker SMA on Wednesday, and as of 2 p.m. ET, its stock price had risen to $32.72.
The company incurred a net loss of $18.4M on its $237M in revenue for 2024, according to a securities filing. The company owns or manages 208 properties totaling 16.7M SF across 21 U.S. states and Canadian provinces, according to March investor materials.
It said in its Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it is the 10th-largest self-storage company in the U.S.
Self-storage vacancy in the U.S. last year was just over 8%, normalizing to prepandemic levels, according to a November CBRE report, but up from historic lows during the pandemic that reached nearly zero availability.
The market for new REITs going public was frozen just a few years ago when interest rates began skyrocketing and the capital markets clamped down. There were no REIT IPOs in all of 2022.
But real estate has been slowly dipping its toes back in over the last year. Cold storage REIT Lineage raised $4.4B when it went public last summer. Dallas-based FrontView, which acquires and manages prominent retail locations, raised $250.8M through its IPO in October.
Healthcare-focused REIT Sila Realty Trust also went public last summer but chose a direct listing on the stock exchange rather than launching an IPO.
