If you’ve taken a look around Atlanta in the past several years, you’ll likely notice something happening regularly — new apartment buildings springing up.
In the city and the metro area, it’s easy to see glimpses of new townhomes, apartments and mixed-use developments with multifamily dwellings in development. With all that new construction not just in recent years but within the last decade, many Atlantans have required extra space to store their belongings as they move.
Recently, RENTCafé released a report showing exactly where Atlanta and other cities around the U.S. rank in delivering on much-needed storage.
“Self-storage is now as American (and as popular) as apple pie. In fact, there are currently more self-storage facilities in the US than all the Best Buy, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Walmart, McDonald’s and Subway locations combined,” the online platform that provides nationwide storage listings said. “The 2011-2020 period was the third-most active decade in the history of self-storage development, with over 295M square feet of self-storage space coming online across the nation — or about 20% of the total existing inventory in the US — per Yardi Matrix data.”
To come up with the ranking, RENTCafé analyzed self-storage and multifamily development in the biggest 100 U.S. metro areas by population. The apartment data is tied to rentals in buildings with more than 50 units. The website pulled multifamily and self-storage data from its sister division Yardi Matrix, a business development and asset management tool for brokers, sponsors, banks and equity sources.
In order to determine the largest 100 cities, the site obtained population data from the newest U.S. Census Bureau estimates. They also used the Bureau of Labor Statistics to collect data on the average wage. Decade-over-decade wage increases were not fixed for inflation.
Dallas is the top spot on the list, as the city and its metro area has accounted for 16.2 million square feet of self-storage construction in the last decade. Meanwhile, 173,000 apartments have been built.
Five spots behind Dallas is Atlanta. RENTCafé says the Peach State’s capital city has the 6th most active market in the nation.
“Southern charm may still be drawing people to Atlanta but it’s mostly the metro’s employment opportunities that encouraged the massive residential development over the past decade,” the website said. “The impetus from the booming apartment market spilled into the self storage sector too. The Atlanta metro area added over 8.1M square feet of self storage space, making it the sixth-most active self storage market during the decade. The development trend continues in ATL as more than 1.3M square feet of storage space are planned to be delivered in 2021.”
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