The Self-Storage Supply Graveyard: 395 Dead Projects, 29M Sq Ft Inactive

THE SELF STORAGE REPORT — EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Episode: The Self-Storage Supply Graveyard: 395 Dead Projects, 29M Sq Ft Inactive Guest: Noah Starr — Chief Executive Officer, TractIQ Host: Chris Berg — Business Development Director, Abernathey Development Recorded: August 6, 2026 (premiered August 11, 2026) Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yno6x1xou5w Key topics: Public Storage closing the National Storage Affiliates acquisition and Noah's claim that it is the largest self-storage acquisition of all time; Extra Space Q2 2026 — same-store revenue up over 2%, same-store NOI up 3.5%, Core FFO up 5%, expenses lowered, guidance raised; why Extra Space's earnings did not show up in its stock price and the buyback at $129–$130; Public Storage's Los Angeles exposure and the rate cap that expired July 1; Public Storage move-in rents turning positive, up 4% in June alone, occupancy up year over year, move-outs down 8%; the roughly 14,000 unrentable units Public Storage found inside the NSA portfolio and why NSA never unlocked them; NSA as a hodgepodge of operators under one umbrella rather than a unified platform; the $1.2 billion Public Storage Canada acquisition and Public 4.0 under new leadership; Noah Springer saying assets are overpriced at 4.5%–5.5% cap rates and Noah Starr's argument that this describes only primary Class A on-market deals; TractIQ's $500 million of listings data and cap rates outside primary Class A; the record $50 million-plus single-asset sale in Washington, a $55 million asset in Los Angeles and a three-handle deal in Phoenix; debt being easy to raise while equity for small and mid-sized deals is not; Storage Star's roughly 60-facility acquisition and brokers reporting their best year since 2021; the cancellation graveyard — 395 canceled storage development projects, 48 in Texas at more than 4 million square feet, 32 in California at 2.5 million square feet; the inactive pipeline — roughly 29 million square feet nationally with no update in 18 months, and about 8.7 million square feet canceled or inactive in Texas; TractIQ's manual quarterly review of every project using satellite imagery, city contact and developer contact; the Andover CEO's point at SSA New York that entitled projects can return to the board quickly; the TractIQ REIT dashboard, occupancies ticking up and achieved rates staying flat against street rates down 30% from peak; NSA achieved rates roughly 40% below Public Storage and why Q3 reporting will be messy; national 10x10 non-climate same-store pricing turning positive with July the largest year-over-year gain since 2023; whether Public Storage bought NSA at the bottom of the street and web rate trough; SSA Las Vegas and the TractIQ happy hour co-hosted with Arco Murray. Note: Speaker labels and timestamps are from the source recording transcript — attribution is as recorded, not reconstructed. Light cleanup of transcription errors only; wording preserved. Timestamps removed, and single-word backchannel interjections that split a speaker's sentence ("Mm.", "Yeah.", "Wow.") were dropped so sentences read continuously. Spelled-out figures converted to numerals. All substantive speech retained. Chris's on-air factual statements are preserved exactly as spoken and have not been corrected. ————————————————————————————— Chris Berg: Welcome to our Q2 2026 Review. Man, I'm gonna rhyme it again. What is happening right now? Very excited for our guest today. He's got an incredible breakdown of what took place here in Q2 2026. Welcome to the Self Storage Report. I'm Chris Berg, head of business development for Abernathey Development. Want to invite you to go check out a great new website that we have launched. It's called selfstoragereport.com. Again, selfstoragereport.com. I think CNBC meets Wall Street Journal type of content that's gonna be here. And this, I just released this report here around Millrose. If you're not familiar with Millrose, they are the landholding company for Lennar. This is a fascinating, fascinating, fascinating article. When you think about how if you want to be like Wayne Gretzky and know where the puck is going, definitely go read this article about where housing is going, thus, obviously, demand for self-storage. All right, let's jump into the conversation here. Want to welcome our great guest, Noah Starr, CEO of TractIQ. Noah, it's always great to have you. I think I ask you this question a lot when we do these reviews, but it works, I'm gonna do it again. So, not necessarily the most important thing to you, but for the people that are watching, what do you think is the most important thing they should take away? Noah Starr: It's great to be here, Chris. I love hanging out, talking storage. Love what you're doing with the media company and all of it. I think, you know, I'll use this conversation to come up with a snappy one-liner as well, but I think this earnings season was really interesting for a lot of different reasons that we can talk about. Of course, I think the biggest headline of all is NSA is now officially part of Public Storage, and the largest self-storage acquisition of all time. And I was chatting with, you know, folks, and it was a very smooth transaction. So a lot of credit to both of those teams to flip a switch and one day 1,000 stores just transfer hands like nothing happened. So a lot of credit to them. That's definitely gonna take the cake for the biggest headline. But you know, I think as we look into the data, I think there's some optimism in these numbers, especially with what we're seeing at Extra Space, but a lot to dive into for this earnings season. Chris Berg: So you talked about, you know, having a conversation with people. I was having a conversation with a C-suite exec at Extra Space as well about the earnings. And I was like, hey, do you have a statement right there? He's like, yeah, we crushed it. I was like, okay. And then I got a more formal statement. But to be fair to him, they did crush it. I mean, the numbers were fantastic. They actually lowered their expenses. The intriguing piece to add to that was, you know, we crushed earnings, but it's not really showing up in our stock price. I don't know if you remember, but it was around $129, $130. They were doing a big stock buyback, and it's, I think maybe today, last I checked was $141-ish. So just your thoughts on they crushed it and why is it not showing up in the stock price? Noah Starr: Yeah, I mean the stock price, you know, what is Mr. Market pricing the stock today? I think we can have a conversation around what drives stock prices, which I don't think I'm set up to talk about today. I will say their stock is up, you know, almost 10% in the last six months. So, you know, I'm sure they're a little happy with that. But yeah, to your point, you know, more importantly: Same-store revenue up over 2%, same-store NOI up 3.5%. They raised their guidance and their Core FFO is up 5% as well. So those are pretty good numbers, especially when you compare against Public Storage and CubeSmart, which we can do. So yes, I definitely think it's fair for Extra Space to say that they crushed it in this earnings season. And as we dive into the numbers, you know, why didn't Public do as well? Why didn't CubeSmart do as well? I think those are interesting as well. Chris Berg: So let's jump into Public. I'm gonna give you the premise that a big reason Public's numbers maybe lagged is because they've got a huge part of their portfolio in LA. They had the rate cap in LA that's now finally lifted on July 1st. I think the data I saw is that, I mean, it had a decrease of like 40% on their NOI within the LA market, or it had a big impact. So going forward, do you think now lifting this rate cap in LA is gonna have a big impact in Q3 and Q4 for Public Storage? Noah Starr: Yeah, to your point, I think they might have the largest portfolio in LA and I think that, you know, that definitely impacted performance. Extra Space wouldn't even share their LA portfolio on the call when they were asked directly because, you know, I'm sure they had the same kind of situation. But I'd say some optimism for Public Storage that I was looking at was that move-in rents turned positive for the quarter. Move-in rents in June alone were up 4%. Their occupancy was still up year over year. Their churn — like move-outs — were down 8% year over year. They did raise their guidance, and then looking at the, call it, leading indicators for Public Storage, there's I think still a lot of optimism, even though their earnings seem to have been dragged down by, you know, their LA performance. And of course, really interestingly, they acquired NSA. So we're gonna say goodbye to NSA in terms of tracking them every single quarter the last number of years. But you know, a crazy stat that I was surprised to hear was how Public Storage said that they found 14,000 units that they could bring back online that were unrentable in the NSA portfolio. So I think they're gonna unlock a lot of value in the portfolio. They obviously are investing heavily in CapEx and new signage and all the things to bring it up to Public Storage standards. But, you know, I think they have had a lot of moving parts to deal with this acquisition over the last, you know, six months or more. And you know, so looking at the leading indicators, I think there's still a lot of optimism. Chris Berg: So not that you have the answer to this, but what's your best guesstimation? Like how does NSA and then Public miss 14,000 units, even through DD? Like how does that happen? Noah Starr: I can only speculate. I asked the same question, 'cause I was really surprised to hear that. But if you think about NSA — and a lot of credit to their team, they obviously had a fantastic exit and they had a lot of great operators — but NSA was a hodgepodge of different operators all under the same umbrella. It wasn't like one unified storage platform. So I have to think that some operators run things differently. You know, when you're about to sell your portfolio, you know, maybe the idea of "I need to maximize revenue" doesn't come into play versus let's close the transaction, let's make sure the stores are set up for a proper transition. And then Public Storage can, you know, they probably saw this in the underwriting. They probably realized, wait, we could probably just by streamlining, just by consolidating all 1,000-plus locations under our own umbrella, we're gonna be able to find inefficiencies like that. Chris Berg: You know what I love is we haven't even talked about the $1.2 billion deal in Canada either. Like it's just, there's so much going on. So quickly, your thesis on what took place in PS Canada. Noah Starr: Yeah, so you know, Canada's a really interesting market. The rates seem to be really elevated. The supply is much lower than in the US. It's much harder to develop. There's obviously different provinces, and you know, Canada has a lot of other unique aspects about it versus the US. I think Public Storage, as they look for growth, you know, they're not limited to just the United States. They're looking everywhere. And I have to think that by, you know — and I think there was some ownership nuances where they were already a part of this portfolio in some way, or something that I could study a little closer. But you know, they're looking for yield, they're looking for growth. They have new leadership that just came in. They announced Public 4.0 and immediately, you know, say what you will about, you know, being the CEO of a public company. But the new CEO is coming swinging, right? Taking down NSA, taking down the Canada portfolio. There's been a lot of leadership changes, there's been a lot of new priorities at Public Storage, and they're taking action. And I think it'll be interesting to see in the coming years, you know, as we look back on the NSA acquisition, as we look back on this Canada acquisition, as we look back at Public 4.0. I'm optimistic that I think the market and the industry will view these as pretty good moves, but it's still too early to tell. Chris Berg: Couple of things that jumped out to me that I want you to discuss or get your feedback on. So Noah Starr was talking on the Extra Space call and he says, hey look, we just — we did some acquisitions, but most of them are sort of JV things. We didn't go out and really do a lot of purchase acquisitions because he feels like the assets are just overpriced right now. What's your response? Noah Starr: Yeah, so I heard that and you know, I would say in the history of self-storage — and I think the REITs are part of this — we don't have very good data on deals on the market, right? So, and if you actually think about Extra Space, I think that Noah was talking about rates are — you know, between 4.5 and 5.5, or sorry, cap rates are between 4.5% and 5.5%. That is not a market cap rate for the whole industry. He's probably referring to primary Class A facilities, on-market deals that they see. Not all of the deals in the market that are actually, you know, available for purchase, not secondary markets, not Class B, not Class C, not all those kinds of facilities. So I've seen cap rates much higher than what they were quoted in the earnings call. And that's because we have $500 million of listings where we can actually now see and evaluate, okay, how do listings and on-market deals compare in primary versus secondary versus tertiary, Class A, B, C, you know, how do demographics impact the cap rates, and lease-up versus value-add, all that kind of stuff. So to me, this is, you know, they probably have their own internal data where they've manually collected what are cap rates. And I think it was a high-level response, but I think we're gonna be able to do a lot better on contextualizing pricing in the market, you know, in the next coming quarters. Chris Berg: I think that's accurate, to be fair to him. I mean, last week or a couple weeks ago we had Mikey Taylor on, you know, the biggest sale in the history of Washington, $50 million-plus for a single asset. Which again, I follow the 18.6-year real estate cycle. He talks about things get frothy at the end. There's another asset we're looking at in LA being priced at $55 million. I mean, those are some frothy numbers for a single asset. Noah Starr: Yeah, I mean Class A facilities, I think it's probably true that cap rates are in the high 4s to mid 5s, but it also depends. Everyone has a different definition of even what a cap rate is. And so I think if you— Chris Berg: Yeah. And I'm not — sorry, I'm not so concerned about cap rates because you're right, that can get — but I mean just the fact that you've got a single asset, biggest sale ever in the — you know, $55 million in LA, like just the numbers are up there. My point is, which I want to get your feedback on, is you know, the deal in Washington was an all-cash deal. There's just a lot of capital that people are trying to deploy into self-storage. My thesis is because it's a little bit safer if things are going where a lot of people think, maybe not in the right direction for the market longer term, the next few years, that they're like, hey, I can go put this money somewhere that I think is gonna have a really strong cash flow and do what they do for how they, you know, manipulate the numbers, if you will. But I guess that's all I'm getting at is, do you feel like things are pretty frothy out there or no? Noah Starr: So the feedback that I'm hearing in the market is — and this would be from brokers and investors and lenders — for raising debt, it's not that challenging. And the problem in the market isn't raising debt. It seems like the conversations are around, you can raise debt, it's actually pretty competitive the rates that you can get. The challenge is, in a lot of these small to mid-sized deals, raising equity has been a challenge. But on the flip side, these larger groups that already have their equity, they're very active. So, you know, Storage Star had a huge acquisition of around 60 facilities, you know, maybe a month or two ago. Obviously, Public Storage has been very active, and a lot of the larger groups are still continuing to acquire. And the broker feedback — I've heard from some brokers that this is the best year they've had since 2021 in terms of transaction volume. So it's really interesting, but I also think it depends on the type of broker, the type of product that you're selling. If you're looking to sell to the highly institutional, larger-scale portfolios, those groups are very, very active. But, you know, the smaller deals, the mid-sized deals, raising equity now, to me, I think is still a major challenge. Chris Berg: Yeah. By the way, too, there was another asset in Phoenix that had a three handle on it. And that the portfolio — that the capital guys, the private equity guys, just had to sell because the other parts of their portfolio were not performing well, wasn't in storage, but they're like, hey, we gotta show our investors a win here. So it's just intriguing to see when and why people are selling. The other thing that jumped out to me from the Extra Space conversation was Joe Margolis saying, hey, we really see a reduction in supply, and that's why we feel like it's been a big part of our NOI numbers going up. Let's say you're— Noah Starr: I think that that was really interesting. And I think — so I wrote a piece. I'll just share my screen just because I think this is a perfect example. I wrote this piece, how no one invited me to these earnings calls, but of course I listened and I'll still comment because data, and I think it's fun and all the good vibes. And there's — that's like, I'll get to that question, but there's a lot of questions that are asked in these earnings calls that I don't think actually get answers, right? So I think, is supply coming down? Yeah, it seems like supply is coming down. Okay. Where? How much? All the kinds of things. And I imagine Extra Space has that data, and the forum of the call — which I wrote about, being a standard conference call that you can't share screens — there's not a forum to like dive into the data, and the leadership doesn't probably want to do that because it's, you know, challenging and brings up some risks. But in my case, I just came out with a piece two days ago about the cancellation graveyard and the inactive pipeline graveyard, and I actually looked at all of the projects that we have deemed canceled or inactive in TractIQ to actually show the data around that question. And what I thought was interesting, living in Texas, is that we're tracking 395 storage development projects that were canceled. 48 of them are in Texas, so more than 4 million square feet. 32 were in California, 2.5 million square feet, and so on. Kind of also looked at how big are these projects in terms of canceled, and you can see lots of small projects were canceled, lots of big projects were canceled. And then really interestingly, we looked at the projects that haven't had an update in 18 months. And our team manually reviews every single storage development project every quarter, looking at satellite imagery, reaching out to the city, reaching out to the developer. And so if we don't see any updates whatsoever for 18 months, we'll call it inactive. You can see here there are lots of inactive projects. And you know, we're looking at about 29 million square feet across the country that are inactive across the board. That's a huge number. I wish we had the data 5, 10, 20 years ago — like, in the context of self-storage, is this the most amount of inactive or canceled development sites ever? I'd probably say it is, because there's never been more development. There's never been — the industry's never been this large. There's never been this amount of capital chasing the space, but I can't prove that. But trying to address that question not with "it seems like supply is coming down," but more so of, wow, Texas has had around 8.7 million of canceled and inactive development sites that we're tracking. That to me is a very direct signal that supply is coming down. But of course we'd also need to look at deliveries by year and things like that. Chris Berg: Yeah, such a great point. When I was at the New York SSA, the CEO from Andover said, hey, look, everyone's talking about supply's going down. Yes, that's true, because you're talking about here, these things that have gone inactive. He's like, look, assuming that the entitlements and the city's willing to work with people, those things can get put back on the board, you know, pretty quickly. So he says, I think there's a lot of hidden supply that may not be showing up in the numbers, but could definitely get put back on the chessboard in a pretty quick fashion. So we'll see how that plays out. But anything else you want to add on that, sir? Noah Starr: On the supply front, no. I think, you know, there's a lot of interesting data. We've looked at occupancy versus supply, we've looked at achieved rates versus supply, and obviously supply is a huge factor in letting these markets recover, because they were so — you know, record numbers of supply came in in '23, '24, and even in some '25. Chris Berg: Anything from any of the earnings calls, earnings numbers that kind of spooked you or had, like, caused concern for you? Noah Starr: Hmm. So what I'll show here is we will actually probably release this in the next week or two as our REIT report. What I have here is our full REIT dashboard, actually updated with all the quarterly data. So looking at occupancies across all of the REITs, and you can kind of see how, you know, Extra Space, CubeSmart, and Public Storage have all ticked up from last quarter. You know, looking at all the achieved rates, things like that. I think what's really interesting is if you actually look at the achieved rates in Q2 versus Q1, they're pretty flat. If you're just zooming in, even though churn was lower for both Public Storage and Extra Space, the achieved rates are kind of steady. You can look at a lot of different things there. Number one, obviously street rates are down 30% or so from their peaks a number of years ago. So the fact that they've been able to keep achieved rates flat this entire time is a testament to those revenue management strategies. But also, just — it is flat. When you have flat revenue, that obviously, you know, on a per square foot basis, are they gonna be able to continue growing? Is it going to decline? You know, what kind of lag should we consider as it relates to street versus achieved rates? So all that stuff is really interesting. Chris Berg: I think what's fascinating — I don't know how much you watch stocks, but you look at that graph, and never has it really gone down. I mean, it's kind of going down a little bit now, but point being is it looks like it's almost setting up like, hey, once this housing thing opens up, like boom, I think you're gonna see rates go up quite precipitously, if you will. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Anything else you want to show from — I mean, this is such a great report that you guys put out. Anything else that you think we should look at? Noah Starr: Yeah, I'll say next quarter is probably gonna be really messy, because Public Storage is going to figure out how to report the NSA stores and like lump them in. And you can see NSA, their achieved rates are like 40% lower than Public Storage's. So you know, I'd be curious how they report, but you can probably expect the achieved rates for Public Storage are gonna drop significantly as they start to blend in that portfolio. So that's just some nuance in the data that is going to be messy. I think for signs of optimism, we're looking at, you know, average move-out, move-in rates. You can kind of see, you know, across Extra Space, you can see across Public. There's one other chart I want to show in terms of optimism. So I pulled this data here, and this is actually basically the national 10x10 non-climate same-store pricing since 2023. And you can kind of see it, I think, with optimism — each bar represents the year-over-year change in that price. So you can see, of course, since 2023, every single month, besides a handful, were drastically negative. But now the gravity of year-over-year changes has started to become positive, and we actually have the highest, you know, positive months. And I pulled this, you know, a couple of days before July ended. But, you know, July's year-over-year pricing looks to have been the largest gain since, you know, since 2023 at the least. Chris Berg: Yeah. You know what's fascinating — again, I look at that from an investment perspective and I think, here's Noah Springer saying that assets are overpriced, but I think Public probably looks at this and says, man, we just bought NSA at the perfect time, right? Like rates are gonna start to go. You said there's this huge margin they can work with based on what NSA was doing. And so I mean, Public obviously thinks they probably got — maybe not a great deal, but at least a good deal. Do you agree? Noah Starr: Yeah, I've said this before. I wanna try to find — it's probably a combination of the occupancy and the achieved rates. But if you can buy pricing, or buy facilities that cash flow based on today's current income, and underwrite based on today's rates, where rates are 30% to 40% below peak pricing depending on the market — that's pretty compelling. Because you know, real estate has these three to five year cycles, and we absolutely just went through one in self-storage, and it was really painful. And, you know, I remember years ago, people, you know, didn't understand anything about achieved rates, because for the first time street rates were falling in self-storage. So you know, had to have that communication and had to break through that data, and now everyone kinda understands what that's like. But maybe we'll start to see street rates and web rates increase. So if your bet is on the long-term viability of self-storage globally, and you're the largest REIT in the country or the world for self-storage, and you can buy an NSA at a fair market in-place cap rate today, and potentially optimize 14,000 units, potentially you're at the bottom of the street and web rate trough across the country and the world — that could set up to be a very accretive acquisition for them. Chris Berg: That's so well said. And oftentimes people forget, you know, they've got such a different capital stack, right? Like they're never gonna sell versus a PE firm that's trying to flip it around in five to seven years. So Noah Starr, CEO of TractIQ, always great stuff. Wanna give you the last word. Anything else you wanna add or share we haven't talked about? Noah Starr: Yeah, we are going to be at SSA in Vegas next month. So we're gonna do something really cool at our booth. We're also going to co-host a happy hour with Arco Murray on that Tuesday, which is going to be awesome. And we're gonna, I think, release something really cool at that event, as always. So definitely encourage folks to stay tuned to that. Chris Berg: Dude, you guys are like always having a good time, helping people have a good time. It's fantastic. So thank you for the time. Wanna share this as well. I want to remind you, go check out selfstoragereport.com. Again, selfstoragereport.com. Definitely check out this article. It is fascinating to see how Millrose earnings is going to impact household forecasts, as well as obviously self-storage demand. Noah, always great to have you and just good to get your insights. You do such great work over at TractIQ. If you want to find out more, go to tractiq.com. Again, that's tractiq.com. Looks like Noah froze. I don't know what's going on there, but Mr. Starr is frozen. We're going to wrap it up now. Be sure to join us again. We've got a great show in store for you next week. Of course, subscribe to the channel so you can be the first to get this great content that we put out every single week here on the Self Storage Report. I'm Chris Berg. We'll see you back here very, very soon. — END OF TRANSCRIPT —