| Choosing the right buyer is one of the biggest challenges in the self-storage industry right now—even more difficult than pricing, says HFF's Aaron Swerdlin, who runs the firm's national self-storage group. He told our Houston reporter that a small number of people do most of the deals in this sector, but he's seeing more buyers now than ever in his 17-year self-storage career. He predicts that HFF will sell almost 40 properties this year and wouldn't be surprised if each goes to a different buyer. He brought a 14-property nationwide portfolio to market in May and received 24 offers, mostly all cash. This changed his attitude about ‘10 for the better—the number of offers and tight range made him realize people are in a “do a deal mentality” and aren't as concerned with getting a bargain as they were in '09. |
| In addition to recently closing a 539-unit, 50k SF property in Houston, he's been busy in our neck of the woods—just closing a 68k SF property in Jersey, a 42k SF one in Brooklyn, and has a "decently sized" NYC deal expected to close in September. We pulled up Marcus & Millichap's 1H10 self-storage report for more local insight, and it says that approximately 24.4k new households are expected in the NYC-Northern NJ metro this year, a 0.4% gain. Through '13, it's expected to average 0.4% annually. Nationwide, self-storage supply is estimated at 7.25 SF per person, but supply in NYC-Northern NJ is just 2.2 SF per person. No surprise, though: We can't throw our stuff in the East River, so we've got to put it somewhere. |
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