We full? Atlanta tops U.S. in new self-storage facilities.
If you need additional room to store your stuff, more options are popping up around Atlanta every day — more so than anywhere else in the country, according to a recent report.
The Atlanta market led the nation in 2025 with 2.2 million square feet of newly built self-storage facilities, according to a report from industry research firm StorageCafe. That’s about double the floor space of offices within the former CNN Center in downtown Atlanta.
Aside from the red-hot data center market, most types of construction slowed in 2025 as developers grappled with high costs and economic uncertainty.
Overall, the amount of completed self-storage facilities in the U.S. also declined in 2025 by 21% year-over-year.
But Atlanta’s self-storage market bucked the trend, joining Phoenix as the only two to top 2 million square feet of new construction.
“Most of the top developers over the past three years have slowed their pace and are carefully selecting areas of growing demand and undersupply,” Doug Ressler, business intelligence manager at StorageCafe’s parent company Yardi Matrix, wrote in an analysis of the report.
He highlighted Georgia as an outlier, citing its population growth as a reason for the spike in self-storage demand.
A lot of Atlanta’s growth was fueled by real estate investment trusts, or REITs, which control about 48% of Atlanta’s self-storage inventory. Atlanta has more than 54 million square feet of self-storage inventory, making it the country’s fifth-largest market, according to StorageCafe. That’s the equivalent of 34 Lenox Square malls of space.
Savannah and Athens also added sizable amounts of new self-storage space, roughly 267,000 square feet and 96,000 square feet, respectively. The report credited Savannah’s growth with demand spurred by the fast-growing Georgia ports. Athens, home of the University of Georgia, mirrored an expansion trend in college-centered markets.
About the Author
Zachary Hansen, a Georgia native, covers economic development and commercial real estate for the AJC. He's been with the newspaper since 2018 and enjoys diving into complex stories that affect people's lives.
