Why Self-Storage Is Important To Your Tenants

Take, for instance, a newly divorced man who's obviously going through a difficult transition. He might need a place to temporarily keep his belongings while he's sorting out where he's going to live.

Or how about a daughter who's moving her elderly father into a nursing home? Is the daughter just supposed to chuck everything his father owns? She might need to store her father's possessions temporarily -- perhaps even some treasured photos or antique furniture -- as Dad settles into his new digs.

Then there's the family moving from San Francisco to San Diego. To properly "stage" their San Francisco home, which is about to go on the market, they need to temporarily store some of their furnishings.

And let's not forget the many small businesses that turn to self-storage as an inexpensive alternative to warehousing their inventory.

So, for millions of Americans, self-storage isn't a matter of dealing with clutter. It's a matter of dealing with life. And by no means is the self-storage unit always, as Mansfield suggested, a "gated enclave for excess stuff."

Temporary "Problem"

In many cases, self-storage is a solution to a temporary "problem," not a symptom of some sort of permanent clutter "plague."

And we certainly know that while a small minority of self-storage tenants might be hoarders, storage units are not harbors for hoarders. If anything, hoarded belongings tend to remain in hoarders' homes, as renting a storage unit would represent a sense of organization that most hoarders aren't capable of grasping.

Another misconception about self-storage facilities is that they're "havens" for thieves, as one TV station in Houston put it in 2013.

Self-storage facilities, just like any other type of business, are susceptible to break-ins, but storage facilities predominantly are safe and secure places. According to the 2013 Self-Storage Almanac, just 8.9 percent of facilities surveyed had reported break-ins or thefts in 2012. If you applied that number across the board in 2015, that would mean less than 10 percent of the more than 52,000 self-storage facilities in the U.S. are victims of break-ins or thefts.

As Ginny Sutton, executive director of the Texas Self Storage Association, said in 2013: "Considering the number of facilities out there, the number of news stories about break-ins are relatively few and far between. Storage facility operators just cannot guarantee that no one will ever find a way to burglarize units, no matter how secure things are. That is why tenant insurance exists."

The Real Reason People Use Self-Storage

As the self-storage industry grows, we must continue to contend with comments about storage units being "gated enclaves" for stuff or harbors for hoarders or "havens" for thieves. The best evidence that the industry has on its side in combatting such skewed views of self-storage is the truth: Millions of Americans rent storage units to help them ease the stresses of life and business.

Contributed by: Chuck Gordon, co-founder and CEO of Austin, Texas-based SpareFoot, which helps self-storage facilities gain more tenants.

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