Existing home sales have been stuck at 30-year lows for two full years, and barely one in 35 American homes now changes hands annually. Storage demand should be broken. It isn’t, and the reasons why will shape what happens when housing finally thaws.

Key takeaways

• Existing-home sales totaled 4.06 million in both 2024 and 2025, the slowest two consecutive years since 1995, and only 11.2 percent of US households moved in 2024, a record low.
• Public Storage says move-ins tied to existing home sales are only about 15 percent of its activity, and millennials are now its largest customer cohort.
• The share of US households renting self storage rose from 11.1 percent in 2022 to 13.4 percent in 2024, and average length of stay has stretched to 18 to 20 months.
• No major forecaster expects housing turnover to normalize before 2028, and every major storage REIT built its 2026 guidance without assuming a housing recovery.

For as long as the self-storage industry has told its own story, the moving truck has been the main character. Households in transition, between a sold house and a bought one, between cities, between chapters, have long been treated as the sector’s most reliable source of new customers. By that logic, the last three years should have been a demand catastrophe.

The housing market has delivered its side of that bargain. Existing-home sales totaled 4.06 million in both 2024 and 2025, the two slowest consecutive years since 1995, and the June 2026 pace of 4.09 million shows 2026 tracking only marginally better. Redfin calculates that just 28 of every 1,000 US homes changed hands in the first nine months of 2025, the lowest turnover rate in at least three decades and down from 44 per 1,000 at the 2021 peak. Census data show only 11.2% of American households moved in 2024, the lowest mobility rate on record. With the 30-year mortgage averaging 6.66% in late July and roughly half of all outstanding mortgages still carrying rates below 4%, the arithmetic of moving remains punishing, and the great American homeowner has responded by staying put.

And yet the storage industry that housing supposedly feeds is not starving. The major REITs ended the second quarter of 2026 with occupancy in the low 90s, move-in rents positive year over year for the first time since 2021, and full-year guidance raised across the board. Demand, in the word every management team reached for this earnings season, is steady.

Steady demand against a frozen housing market is not a small curiosity. It is evidence that the industry’s customer base has quietly been rebuilt, and it raises the question this article takes up in its second half: if storage can do this without housing, what happens when housing comes back?

What the housing freeze cost self-storage pricing

None of this is to say the housing freeze was painless. It was, in fact, the proximate cause of the worst pricing downturn in the industry’s modern history.

The mechanism is straightforward. Moving customers are high-urgency, price-insensitive renters who show up in volume when homes trade. Industry data suggest more than a third of home buyers and sellers use self storage during a move, and Green Street research has noted a strong correlation between home-sale activity and move-in rent growth specifically: when transaction volume dries up, operators lose the marginal customer who lets them push street rates. Heitman, the institutional real estate manager, has estimated that housing headwinds cut new storage demand by roughly 10%.

The pricing consequences played out in plain view. National street rates peaked around $110 a month in mid-2022, according to SpareFoot data, and had fallen to roughly $85 by mid-2024. At the REIT level, move-in rents were falling as much as 9% year over year at Public Storage and 13% at CubeSmart during the worst of the 2024 trough, and portfolio occupancy slipped from peaks above 96% in 2021 to the low 90s. Yardi Matrix was still describing “a historically weak housing market” as the sector’s principal constraint in its 2026 reports, with national advertised rates at about $135 a month in June, down 1.5% from a year earlier.

The demand mix data tell the same story from the customer’s side. UBS survey work cited by Nareit late last year found that only 35% of storage users in the third quarter of 2025 cited temporary moving needs, below the 37% historical average. In StorageCafe’s most recent national survey, moving had slipped to the second most common reason for renting a unit, cited by 31% of customers, behind simply running out of space at home at 35%. A use case that once defined the industry now describes less than a third of it.

Public Storage has put the sharpest number on the shift. Asked directly about housing exposure on the company’s first-quarter 2025 call, Tom Boyle, then the company’s chief financial and investment officer and now its chief executive, said move-ins driven by existing home sales were “about 15% of our activity. So the other 85% is driven by a whole host of other demand drivers.”

That 85% is where the industry’s last three years were saved.

Who is renting self storage instead of movers: millennials, apartment renters and businesses

Start with the demographic engine. “Millennials are our largest cohort of customers today,” Boyle told analysts on the second-quarter call in July. “They’re using storage with a higher propensity than prior generations at the same age, and Gen Z is following suit.” The claim is borne out in the Self Storage Association’s survey data, which show millennial usage climbing from under 16% in 2023 to nearly 20% in 2025, with Gen Z usage rising as well. These are customers renting storage not because they bought a house but because they didn’t: priced out of ownership, living in apartments, and treating a $150-a-month unit as the cheapest square footage they can add to their lives. The structural backdrop helps explain why. The average new US apartment measures about 908 square feet after a decade-long shrinking trend that has only recently begun to reverse, and studios and one-bedrooms make up more than half of new units delivered. “Renters and buyers are sacrificing size for a location and using self-storage as really an extension of their home,” Drew Dolan, principal of storage developer DXD Capital, told Bisnow this spring.

The same logic applies to homeowners who would have traded up in a normal market. Locked into a 3% mortgage and unable to justify moving, the growing family converts the spare bedroom to a nursery, the garage to a home office, and sends the overflow to storage. Adam Siegel of Crexi described storage as “the pressure valve for life events that used to trigger home purchases,” which is as good a one-line summary of the current demand regime as the industry has produced. Spenser Glimcher, who covers the sector for Green Street, has made a similar point: long-term apartment renters who cannot afford homes still hit the life events that generate storage demand, and they are now carrying the sector’s fundamentals.

Aggregate penetration numbers confirm that these gains are net new demand rather than reshuffling. SSA data cited in the PwC and Urban Land Institute Emerging Trends report show the share of US households renting storage jumped from 11.1% in 2022 to 13.4% in 2024, the largest increase between any two survey periods on record, a striking outcome for what were, by street-rate math, two bad years.

Business customers are a second pillar. Estimates of the commercial share of the tenant base range from about 15% of Public Storage’s portfolio to a quarter or more of industry demand by some measures, and most observers agree the segment is growing faster than the consumer side. E-commerce sellers using units as micro-warehouses, contractors staging equipment, and small businesses priced out of industrial space have become fixtures of the rent roll, attractive tenants who stay long and default rarely.

Then there is the long tail that the industry’s “4 Ds” framework, death, divorce, downsizing and dislocation, never fully captured. Home renovation, running at roughly $509 billion a year nationally, generates temporary storage demand from households improving the houses they cannot afford to leave. Vehicle, RV and boat storage has grown fast enough that Yardi Matrix’s count of dedicated RV and boat facilities more than doubled between 2023 and 2025, from about 800 properties to roughly 2,000. Disaster dislocation remains a recurring, if grim, driver: the January 2025 Los Angeles fires produced a wave of demand, though for the REITs the lasting operational story was emergency pricing restrictions, which Public Storage expected to cost it roughly a full point of same-store revenue in 2025, a drag that later tracked better than feared.

CubeSmart chief executive Chris Marr summed up the portfolio effect on his July call, crediting “the value of having such a wide range of need-based demand for our product.” It was a sentence that would have sounded like spin in 2022. After three years of a housing market at standstill and occupancy still in the low 90s, it reads more like a description of the data.

Longer lengths of stay: how the housing freeze cut storage move-outs

There is a second, less appreciated way the housing freeze has supported the sector: the customers storage already had stopped leaving.

Across the second quarter, move-out activity fell faster than move-in activity at all three major REITs, continuing a pattern that has held for most of two years. Public Storage reported move-outs down 8% year over year. Extra Space said its average length of stay is running about a month and a half longer than a year ago, with customers in place longer than 12 months at roughly 64% of its tenant base as of the spring. Industry-wide, the average stay has stretched to somewhere between 18 and 20 months, against nine to 14 months before the pandemic, and PwC and ULI report that about 60% of users now expect to keep their unit for more than a year, a record.

The economics of that stickiness are powerful. Long-tenured customers are the base on which operators apply existing-customer rate increases, and as Green Street’s research has observed, the need-based customer who stores because of a space shortage or a home office absorbs those increases far more readily than a transient mover would. The locked-in homeowner who cannot justify selling a house is, in miniature, the storage tenant who cannot quite face emptying a unit. Both are artifacts of the same frozen market, and the second has been quietly funding the industry through the drought caused by the first.

When will the housing market recover? Forecasts for 2026 through 2028

Which brings the story to the recovery question, and the first honest answer is that the recovery keeps getting smaller and later.

The National Association of Realtors’ forecasting event in late 2025 called for home sales to jump 14% in 2026; by June, chief economist Lawrence Yun had cut that to 4%, with the improvement loaded into the back half of the year. Fannie Mae’s July forecast has existing sales grinding from about 4.1 million this year to 4.4 million in 2027, still roughly 17% below the 2016 to 2022 norm of well over 5 million. The Mortgage Bankers Association expects the 30-year rate to sit in a 6% to 6.5% band through 2027 and considers a return below 6% unlikely. And the Federal Reserve is no longer a reliable source of help: the July 2026 meeting held rates steady with three dissenters arguing for a hike, not a cut. On current forecasts, no one has housing turnover returning to its historical 4%-plus of homes per year before 2028 at the earliest.

Notably, the storage industry has stopped waiting. Every major REIT built its 2026 guidance without assuming housing improvement. “I don’t think we need the housing market to come back to experience a recovery,” Extra Space chief executive Joe Margolis said last fall, a view he repeated in July: demand is steady, and improving results are coming from shrinking supply and pricing power rather than new customers.

What a housing recovery would be worth to self-storage operators

That guidance posture is exactly what makes the housing question interesting for investors and operators, because it means any recovery is uncounted upside. David Cramer, chief executive of National Storage Affiliates before its absorption into Public Storage this year, made the case bluntly on his final full-year earnings call in February: “We have the most to gain from a recovery in the level of housing turnover.”

The honest analysis is two-sided. A thaw would unlock the frozen movers, and frozen movers cut both ways: the same transaction that generates a high-urgency move-in also liberates a locked-in tenant who has been paying rate increases for three years. Churn would rise, lengths of stay would shorten, and some of the stickiness that carried the sector through the downturn would unwind. No operator has publicly quantified that offset, and it is real.

Three things suggest the net effect is still solidly positive. First, transition demand is gross new volume: a household that uses storage during a move often needs it on both ends of the transaction, and this demand arrives on top of, not instead of, the existing base. Second, the customers who filled the gap are not move-linked. The millennial renter in 900 square feet, the e-commerce seller, the renovating homeowner have no reason to vacate because home sales recover; the demand regime built during the freeze looks additive, not substitutive. One institutional estimate, from feasibility consultancy MMCG, puts the potential occupancy release from housing normalization at 200 to 400 basis points, though it stands alone in putting a number on it.

Third, and most important, a demand recovery would land on a starved supply pipeline. Deliveries have fallen from 65 million square feet in 2024 to a projected 51 to 54 million this year, with Yardi Matrix forecasting roughly 45 million in 2027 and under 39 million in 2028, holding annual supply growth near 1.7% of stock. Green Street estimates market rents would need to rise on the order of 50% for new construction to pencil at today’s costs, which are up some 65% since 2019. Construction starts cannot respond quickly to a demand surprise. The last time this configuration appeared, in the years after the financial crisis, storage demand recovered into a pipeline that credit markets had shut down, and REIT occupancy climbed from the low 80s to the mid 90s between 2010 and 2015 while new deliveries were absorbed in half the usual time. One caveat belongs on the record: Yardi raised its supply forecasts modestly this spring on rising construction starts, the first pipeline increase since 2023, so the supply floor may be in.

The synthesis for operators and investors is this. Self storage entered the housing freeze dependent on the moving customer and is exiting it with a broader, stickier, more demographically driven base that no longer requires housing turnover to grow. The 2026 recovery in fundamentals is a supply story with a free housing option attached. If the thaw arrives on schedule in 2027 or 2028, it will deliver a classic cyclical demand wave into the thinnest development pipeline in over a decade, and the operators who spent the downturn rebuilding pricing power will be the ones collecting on it. If it doesn’t, the last three years suggest the industry now knows how to live without it.

The moving truck will come back eventually. When it does, it will find the units already surprisingly full.