Tony Wang9 min readSelf-Storage Is About as Consolidated as Banking. Almost Nobody Talks About It.
We mapped 50,513 US self-storage facilities by website domain. The top public REITs combine for ~32-38% of listings — rivaling this series' banking findings.
Self-storage doesn't get the "hidden monopoly" treatment the way funeral homes or dental practices have in recent years — there's no single dominant player quietly buying up unrelated-looking storefronts the way Service Corporation International did with funeral homes elsewhere in this series. What self-storage has instead is something closer to banking's shape: a handful of large, fully public, openly-branded companies controlling a meaningful chunk of the market, with a genuinely enormous tail of small independent operators underneath.
The top of the market looks like banking, not funeral homes
| Chain | Share of a 500-record national sample |
|---|---|
| Extra Space Storage | 15.0% |
| Public Storage | 10.0% |
| CubeSmart | 4.4% |
| SROA (Storage Rentals of America) | 2.4% |
| Top 4 combined | 31.8% |
| U-Haul | 2.4% |
| Top 9 combined (adding 5 smaller chains) | 37.6% |
| Independent / other (271 total unique domains in sample) | 62.4% |
For comparison, this series' bank branch density study found the 9 biggest banks combining for 31.2% of listings — self-storage's top 4 alone essentially matches that figure, and its top 9 clears it by six points. That's a genuinely unusual level of concentration for a category that rarely comes up in "hidden monopoly" conversations the way funeral homes, dental practices, or hotel franchising do.
A merger finishing in real time
CubeSmart: the brand you see isn't always the owner
Per-capita density: the fourth confirmation of the same pattern
| Rank | State | Listings | Per 100k residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Montana | 399 | 35.56 |
| 2 | Maine | 388 | 28.01 |
| 3 | Arkansas | 830 | 26.88 |
| 4 | Vermont | 164 | 25.29 |
| 5 | South Dakota | 227 | 24.55 |
| 6 | Wisconsin | 1,468 | 24.33 |
| 7 | New Hampshire | 331 | 23.49 |
| 8 | Oklahoma | 961 | 23.47 |
| 43 | New Jersey | 786 | 8.27 |
| 44 | Arizona | 571 | 7.53 |
| 45 | District of Columbia | 40 | 5.70 |
| 46 | Idaho | 93 | 4.65 |
| 47 | Hawaii | 51 | 3.55 |
This is the fourth time in this series the same shape has shown up: rural states need proportionally more physical locations per resident because a sparse population can't be served by a small number of large, centrally-located facilities the way a dense metro area can. It matched bank branches, credit unions, and hotels and motels — self-storage joins the list rather than breaking it. We're reporting it briefly here for completeness rather than treating it as a new discovery.
How we did this, and the caveats
Every number above comes from a live search/facets call against Crawlora's Google Maps business dataset, 2026-08-27 snapshot, cross-referenced against US Census Bureau Vintage 2025 (July 1, 2025) state population estimates and independently sourced company reporting.
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Per-capita ranking | category=self_storage_facility, 50,513 US listings across all 50 states |
| Chain-penetration | 500-record national sample (has_website=true, sort=updated_at_desc, deduplicated), classified by website domain |
| Merger check | Recency-sorted sample (0 live lifestorage.com links) plus a targeted text search (1 stale genuine "Life Storage" listing found, alongside heavy contamination from the words "Life" and "Storage" separately) |
| External facts | Extra Space/Life Storage merger terms, Public Storage's location count, and CubeSmart's owned-vs-managed property split are all independently sourced from public company reporting, not derived from the Google Maps dataset |
Caveats worth stating plainly: the chain-penetration percentages are sample-based and internally relative, not national extrapolations — as the Extra Space/Public Storage mismatch shows, a recency-sorted sample can meaningfully over- or under-represent a specific company relative to its true real-world footprint, especially around a recent merger or rebrand event. This measures physical facility locations, not unit count, square footage, or occupancy — a large suburban facility with hundreds of units and a small urban one with a few dozen count identically here. We did not attempt to verify SROA's or U-Haul's real-world location counts independently the way we did for Extra Space, Public Storage, and CubeSmart, so their sample shares should be read with the same relative-not-absolute caveat as everything else in the chain-penetration table. And as with every study on this dataset: it's live-growing, and self-storage ownership continues to consolidate through further M&A, so a re-pull months from now will likely show a different, probably more concentrated, picture.
If you want to run your own consolidation or density checks on this data, that's exactly what Crawlora's Google Maps business API is for — the same structured-data approach behind our hotel chain consolidation, bank branch density, and casino gambling density studies.
Query 132M+ Google Maps business listings directly
Crawlora's Google Maps dataset turns business listings into structured, queryable JSON — filter and facet by category, country, state, county, city, rating, and website status. 2,000 free credits a month, no card.
Frequently asked questions
How consolidated is the US self-storage market?
More than most people assume. A 500-record national sample classified by website domain found the top 4 domains — Extra Space Storage, Public Storage, CubeSmart, and SROA (Storage Rentals of America) — combining for 31.8% of listings, close to the 31.2% this series' banking post found for the 9 biggest banks combined. Extending to the top 9 self-storage domains reaches 37.6%, against a long tail of 271 unique domains in the same 500-record sample.
Is the Extra Space Storage and Life Storage merger visible in Google Maps data?
Yes. Extra Space acquired Life Storage in an $11.6 billion all-stock deal that closed in July 2023, creating the largest self-storage operator in the US with 3,500+ combined locations. A recency-sorted sample of the Google Maps data found zero listings still linking to lifestorage.com, while a separate text search turned up one stale 'Life Storage'-named listing in New York that hasn't yet migrated — the merger's rebrand is essentially complete in the freshest data.
Why does Extra Space Storage show a bigger sample share than Public Storage, even though Public Storage has more real locations?
Public Storage has more real-world self-storage locations (4,600+) than Extra Space (roughly 3,500 combined post-merger), yet Extra Space's sample share (15.0%) is higher than Public Storage's (10.0%). The likely explanation is sample bias from Extra Space's recent merger-driven mass rebrand: a recency-sorted sample naturally over-catches a company whose listings were all recently bulk-updated, the same mechanism this series first documented with Wells Fargo's sample share in the banking post.
Does CubeSmart own all the self-storage facilities carrying its brand?
No. Per CubeSmart's own 2024 financial filings, the company directly owned 631 self-storage properties, while it markets 1,500+ facilities under the CubeSmart brand. The gap is made up of properties CubeSmart manages for third-party owners rather than owns outright — a smaller-scale version of the franchise-ownership pattern this series documented for major hotel brands.
Which US state has the most self-storage facilities per capita?
Montana, at 35.56 facilities per 100,000 residents, followed by Maine and Arkansas. Hawaii is last at 3.55 per 100k. This is the fourth time in this data series the same rural-density pattern has appeared, after bank branches, credit unions, and hotels/motels — sparsely populated states need proportionally more physical locations per resident than dense metro areas do.