US Pending Home Sales Lowest Level EVER for month of February

THE SELF STORAGE REPORT — EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Episode: US Pending Home Sales Lowest Level EVER for month of February Host: Chris Berg — Abernathey Development Recorded: March 18, 2026 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmZE4IpcfeI Key topics: US pending home sales at the lowest level in history for the month of February; SSA conference week in San Antonio and the Riverwalk; the Public Storage / National Storage Affiliates $10.5 billion merger announced Monday; Public Storage's $77 billion enterprise value; James Dearter of Radius Plus on demand softness versus supply; Nick Gurley's pending home sales data; the 30-year mortgage rate jumping to 6.86%, the highest since November; homeowners locked into 3% rates; Austin realtors saying nobody is moving; Meta layoffs and job-security fear; Iran, oil, commodities and inflation; central banks buying gold instead of Treasuries; a walkthrough of storagedemandscore.com covering household supply, market rates and the demand score; Steve Con of Guardian Storage in Pittsburgh and the 3x demand rule for margin of safety. Note: Speaker attribution reconstructed from raw captions. Light cleanup of transcription errors only; wording preserved. Timestamps and YouTube chapter markers removed. Turns marked [attribution inferred] could not be attributed with certainty. ————————————————————————————— Chris Berg: Hey everybody, just got to San Antonio. This is the Riverwalk. Beautiful, beautiful day. Excited to be here for the SSA. Look at that. I'm rhyming and it's only Tuesday. Holy cow. Beautiful day. SSA only Tuesday. Let's go. Chris Berg: This is obviously going to be a great video. Want to jump in real quick here because some interesting data coming out. As we know, a lot of people have to talk about supply here in self storage, which by the way, this week is going to be such a great week with the deal that just happened with Public Storage, National Storage Affiliates. Um, and then we're going to NSA and we're going to have just a huge conversation what's going on in the industry. A big part of that obviously is going to be what's going on with demand. So, I want to touch on that real quick because there's some interesting data coming out as of late. Chris Berg: So, let me pull this up for you real quick. For the month of February, the worst February ever for US pending home sales. Pending home sales hit the lowest level in US history. Chris Berg: Why is this so important? Well, thank you to James Dearter over there at Radius Plus. He put out a great post uh just earlier today on LinkedIn talking about, hey, one of the big drivers for self storage, especially demand of course, is people moving. And when you've got people, in fact, I was just at a great barbecue place tonight for dinner talking to some realtors uh in Austin. They say, "Look, nobody's moving right now because everyone's stuck in their 3% rates. It's shifting a little bit, but not enough to really make an impact as far as self-storage demand." Chris Berg: So, you can see the piece here from James saying a lot of people again talking about supply, but the challenge is we've got such demand softness in the market because of what I just showed you from Nick Gurley. There's just no demand. There's nobody's moving. And now when you've got all this uncertainty with what's happening with Iran, you can see all the people that are laying people off when it comes to Meta. Imagine going on down the line with companies right now. People nervous about losing their jobs. You put that on top of it. No one's going to want to go obviously get themselves into a a long-term mortgage with the possibility of losing their job to whatever is happening right now in the economy, AI, the war, inflation, with commodities, oil. Chris Berg: And then on top of that, this just came out just a few minutes ago, I believe. Um, 30-year mortgage rate now jumps to 6.86%, highest level since November. Look, when you start messing with oil and the petrodollar, like there is a definite possibility that you could see the 10-year and the 30-year continue to rise because central banks are just going to gold. No one's really buying the treasury. There's not a huge demand for it. So, we'll obviously see how that plays out. Chris Berg: But, wanted to do a quick video here from again the beautiful city of San Antonio. Get you prepped for what's going to be happen here throughout here. Let me see if I can give you a better view of this. Actually, get you prepped for what's going to be happening this week uh from SSA here in San Antonio. Chris Berg: Again, a lot of great conversations. I'm hoping to actually get an interview. I don't want to say his name yet because it's not confirmed, but a great interview with somebody from Public Storage. We can talk about this giant merger that took place on Monday, was announced $10.5 billion with NSA. I said it earlier this week, but a $77 billion enterprise value now for Public Storage for storing people's stuff. Like that's just incredible to me. Chris Berg: So, we'll have updates throughout the week. Tomorrow is the economic summit. Hopefully, just going to be like on the floor live, possibly more like Thursday. I think that's when everything's really really sort of kicks off with the event. So, we'll get some interviews there from other people here at the event. And um I'm not sure why this thing's scrolling across the bottom, but I'm as you can tell sort of doing this on the and uh just want to let you know what's happening here with housing demand, which equates to storage demand, which is exactly why I can't encourage you enough to go check out the app that we put together. Storagedemandscore.com. Chris Berg: I'm going to share this with you if I can bring this up. Here it is. You just go to storagedemandscore.com. I'll put the URL up here for you. Um, we are continually working to improve this app for you. So, if you haven't been there for a while, you can see the aesthetics have improved dramatically. Chris Berg: I think what's really, really exciting about this site right now is you can go there and it's pretty much automated for the most part. Put in your address here. Put in the projected net rentable square feet that you want to uh put inside of a marketplace, whether it be 100,000 net rentable square feet, 75,000 net rentable square feet, whatever it is. Then you click this blue button. And here's what's amazing. It will give you the household supply. Chris Berg: And then watch this. I just made an interesting addition to this recently. Now, this could be cached, so I can't promise it's going to work, but let's see if it does. And there you go. So, and look at that. I recently added also the rates in the market. So, you now can go there. You can see the household supply, what the actual rates are. So, you can give an idea of, hey, those are good rates. I like that. And then you click here for your demand score. And boom, there it is. And it also will show you again how we come up with that particular demand score for yourself. Chris Berg: So, I'll continue to go through this with you more and more. Uh, but self, excuse me, storagedemandscore.com. Again, storagedemandscore.com. Continuing to make that app better. If you've got suggestions, obviously, let me know. If you're going to be out here in San Antonio for the SSA, let me know that as well, just because it I mean, the skyline here in San Antonio continues to get better and better to the point where it's like I just want to sort of continue to look at that. Chris Berg: That's the American flag. I don't know what that building is, but that's the American flag. I mean, that is fantastic, right? That that we are going to have a really good week here at the SSA. So, thank you for joining us. If you ever want to comment on these videos, please do so. This is live, but I do want to go back to the storage demand score so you can continue to see what's happening here as we improve storage demand score for you. Chris Berg: This walks you through the formula of itself. Total demand, total supply. And if you're just joining us here earlier in the video, I was talking about what's happening with demand right now and self storage. It's just abysmal. Nobody's moving. Nick Gurley put out that February was the lowest pending home sales ever, ever. Which tells you that there's just not a lot of demand in marketplaces, which is why it's so important that you go to storagedemandscore.com, at least just get an idea of what the demand is in your marketplace. Chris Berg: Um, because as we all know in this industry, like the biggest enemy of self-storage is just more self-storage. So it was funny today, I mentioned this earlier, went to go get barbecue talking to a couple realtors in Austin, you know, they're like, "Oh, storage. Yeah, that's like great business. Super easy." Like so many people think, "Hey, grab a piece of dirt, throw it out some steel, and make money." Just it's just not how the business works. It's just not how the business works as we all know. Chris Berg: So, um, thank you so much for joining us here. If you're just joining us, check out storagedemandscore.com. At least we Here's the goal of storagedemandscore.com. It's really to number 1, improve your returns on your asset. So, ideally, that's what's going to happen there when you get a better idea of what the demand is. Number 2 is really just to give you a a greater margin of safety. We all see again, you put a great asset in because you think, man, I got low supply, good rates, and next thing you know, you got 2 or 3 other people putting assets right next to your asset. And we all know the lease battles, they're not fun. Nobody wants to be in a lease battle and self-storage. Chris Berg: So, it's another piece here where the person that actually gave me the 3X came from the New York Self Storage Association. He spoke, he's with Guardian Storage out of Pittsburgh, Steve Con. He's like, "Look, I need 3x demand in my marketplace before I even think about putting other assets on the marketplace because I don't know where the person's going to go." Hey, free piece of dirt. I can put storage up and make money. Let's go. That's sort of the the perception that people have. As we know, as we're in the business, that's not how this thing always plays out. Chris Berg: So, the 3x in this demand formula is really to help increase your margin of safety. So when you go and start building there and someone else says, "Hey, I also want to build next door," you've given yourself enough of a buff buffer in the lease phase to make sure that you're going to hit some good numbers and ideally again produce great returns for your investors. Chris Berg: Um, thanks so much for joining us here. Please share this with your colleagues and again, if you're going to be in San Antonio for the next few days, let me know and I look forward to seeing you here. Okay, I got I gotta do this just because it it keeps getting better and better. I mean, stunning, right? It's just I'll get out of the way for you. I wish I had like some sort of remember like CBS Morning when they would have the great nature music at the end and you just walk out to maybe if you can just hear the birds and we'll go out that way. Wow. Okay. Have a great night. Ciao. — END OF TRANSCRIPT —