There's nothing small about the mini-storage business. You'll see available units everywhere you go in the New Orleans area these days.
Local real estate expert, Wade Ragas says their visibility is by design. "Storage units go where they can find the highest traffic volumes available to them. So, they look for streets that are appropriate to give them lots of people to see them." And, he says they're a heck of an investment.
"They're among the highest rate of return, investments, that many of these owners have, because the rents are not that different from what apartments rent for, but the operating costs are very low."
In that regard, he says they're somewhat similar to parking lots....for our stuff.
And, he says the demand for storage is growing
"We Americans are a bit of pack rats, in the sense of accumulating a lot of stuff. If you open up peoples' garages, you don't very often see cars in there. You often see racks of things."
And, when the racks get full, we go rent more racks. We want to keep those items, but we don't want to further overwhelm our houses.
"Also, we're in an era of a lot of estates being settled from elderly persons who have passed on, but who had belongings that they stored. And then, gradually, the family will work its way through that," says Ragas.
He says the metro area went through years of oversupply, possibly due to storage needs, post-Katrina. So we didn't build much for quite a while, in terms of mini-storage.
But now, Ragas says several markets are driving increased demand.
"And they're not over-built at this point."