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Business Daily

Self-storage and the Gen Z boom

Business Daily

BBC

Business

4.4816 Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ever needed to put your stuff in a storage unit?

Recent research predicts the global self-storage market will be worth around $70bn by 2031 and the UK’s self-storage industry made more than £1bn last year for the first time ever.

But what’s behind this rapid growth? What are people putting into these units? And what does it have to do with Gen Z and internet shoppers?

We also hear from critics on what the growing industry says about housing around the world.

Presented and produced by Sam Gruet

(Image: A young woman loads storage boxes into a unit. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Here we are in one of the units.

0:04.7

Yep.

0:05.5

This is three walls in a door.

0:08.6

Welcome to Canada's booming self-storage industry

0:12.4

and today's Business Daily on the BBC World Service.

0:15.8

A slightly off-beat question.

0:18.0

What's the strangest thing that you've seen someone try to store on one of your

0:22.1

facilities? It's the strangest thing. Let me come back to that. You can ask me again later.

0:28.7

I'll think about what it is. My name is Sam Gruet and today we're lifting the shutters and going

0:33.5

inside a global multi-billion dollar industry that spawned podcasts.

0:38.4

We get around about 15,000 listens a month, which I had no idea there was that many

0:43.3

people interested in self-storage, which is incredible.

0:45.5

And attracted entrepreneurs and investors around the world.

0:48.7

From Japan in the northeast to Indonesia and the south of Asia and west to West Asia, otherwise known as the Middle East.

0:58.0

But what's behind the global boom in self-storage? That's coming up on Business Daily.

1:07.9

It's a Saturday morning in Canada's biggest city, Toronto, and like several thousand people around the world,

1:14.2

I'm packing up some stuff, ready to move it into self-storage.

1:19.8

Storage has become big business around the world, but it's not always so easy to get hold of the numbers.

1:26.1

Recent research predicts the global self-storage market will be worth around 60%. always so easy to get hold of the numbers. After 400 metres.

1:33.0

Recent research predicts the global self-storage market will be worth around $70 billion by 2013.

1:34.4

In the UK, revenue was over a billion pounds last year for the first time ever, according

1:39.2

to a recent report by Property Agency, Cushman and Wakefield, and the Self Storage Association, UK.

...

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