Supply is counted four different ways, demand is not counted at all, and investors pay the difference in lease-up months and loan terms.
Statistics Canada’s September estimates put the country’s population growth at 0.5 percent, the lowest in 110 years, and the only age group that shrank was the 20s, where the student exodus landed. My reading is that those were never storage customers, and that the customers who matter are still arriving. But I built that reading from housing, wealth and household data, because there was nothing else to build it from. No dataset in this country records who rents a storage unit, why, or for how long. That gap is the subject of this piece. It is not an academic complaint; it is priced into every lease-up, every construction loan and every zoning decision the industry lives with.
What other markets know about their customers
The United States has measured its storage customer since 2004. The Self Storage Association’s Demand Study is in its seventh edition; the 2025 version screened more than 10,000 households and businesses and ran a detailed survey with 3,456 renting households and 935 business renters. It reports household penetration (12.6 percent of American households rented a unit in 2024, up from 9.0 percent in the first edition), usage by generation, race, income, tenure and residence type, length of rental, unit size, monthly cost, travel time, reasons for renting, items stored and how customers shop. It runs to more than 300 pages and sells for US$550 to non-members.
The United Kingdom’s association has published an annual industry report for 19 years, the last ten with Cushman & Wakefield. The 2025 edition drew on 70 operators with 760 stores, a customer survey of 1,253 renters and a YouGov poll of 2,055 adults. It is how the UK knows that its peak customer age band has moved from 45 to 49 up to 55 to 64, now 31 percent of all customers, and that 39 percent of customers have stored for more than three years. Australia and New Zealand run a biennial State of the Industry that surveyed 2,550 consumers in its 2022 edition; 9.2 percent of adults there use storage. Europe’s association has run 14 annual surveys with CBRE and can tell you that about 4 percent of Europeans use storage and 36 percent have never heard of it.
Canada, with somewhere between 3,000 and 3,900 facilities depending on who is counting, has nothing comparable.
What Canada knows
Start with supply, which ought to be the easy part. StorTrack reported 3,481 Canadian facilities and 116 million square feet last November, 3,616 stores in its December pricing report, “over 3,800” by April and 3,572 stores with 118.4 million square feet in its second-quarter review this September. StorageVault’s investor deck puts the market at 90 million square feet across 3,000 stores and 2.5 square feet per person; StorTrack says 3.2; CBRE said two to three in 2023; our own count at JBW runs closer to 3,900 facilities and 124 million square feet. Even the per-capita figure depends on which population you divide by: StorTrack’s 3.2 only works against about 37 million people, the 2021 Census count, and against Statistics Canada’s July 2026 estimate of 41.8 million the same 118 million square feet is 2.8. Statistics Canada’s business register lists 2,059 self storage locations, 839 of them with employees. Published figures for Toronto run from one square foot per person to four; Public Storage’s acquisition deck this June put it at 2.8, with Calgary at 4.1 and Montreal at 1.6. One business paper printed Ontario and BC at 32 and 31 square feet per capita, a tenfold slip that nobody caught, because there is no reference number to catch it against.
Now demand. Statistics Canada’s Survey of Household Spending asks one question that touches the industry: how much the household spent on moving and storage services. The answer was $109 per household in 2023, up from $68 in 2019, with Alberta at $206, BC at $126 and Saskatchewan at $38, on figures Statistics Canada revised again this September. Renters spend more than owners ($131 against $98), the top income quintile spends more than two and a half times the bottom ($160 against $61), and households headed by someone 55 to 64 spend the most while those 65 and over spend the least. That is the entire Canadian demographic record on storage. It mixes moving vans with rented units and does not say what share of households rent one. The Canadian Housing Survey does not use the word storage. I could find no Ipsos, Leger or Angus Reid poll that has asked. The only usage figure in circulation is a single unsourced line in a REIT investor deck: one in 20 Canadians had used storage in 2015. The same deck’s industry average length of stay of 13 months and its 80 percent residential, 20 percent commercial split carry no source either, and I have repeated numbers like them myself.
So the industry cannot answer, with Canadian data, the questions an investor most needs answered. What share of households in a trade area rent. How that share differs between a 30-year-old renter, a 45-year-old owner and an 82-year-old widow. Whether a household that arrived from abroad three years ago rents at the same rate as one that arrived thirteen years ago, a question that matters more in Canada than anywhere and that none of the existing studies ask. How long a downsizer stays compared with a mover. What share of units are really businesses.
What the gap costs
Without propensity data, Canadian feasibility work runs on the American template: draw a drive-time trade area, multiply population by an equilibrium ratio of seven to eight square feet per person, subtract existing and pipeline supply, and call the remainder demand. The ratio comes from a market with 7.3 square feet per person, more than double Canada’s density, and that market’s own analysts have been questioning it for years. Radius+ found no correlation between square feet per capita and unit pricing across US markets in 2017. Inside Self-Storage ran a piece in 2024 arguing the metric “has no useful basis in gauging market health.” Newmark’s appraisal guide notes that many demand reports “are based on rules of thumb or estimates unsubstantiated from market data.” Bluebird’s Jason Koonin gave the Canadian version last December: the US averages eight to ten square feet per capita, most of Canada is under three, and so “95 percent of Canada is undersupplied.” StorageMart’s Alex Burnam, in the same piece, described the reality inside that average: “a market can look oversupplied on a headline basis while a one-square-mile pocket still pencils,” and “everything is tracking below on almost every metric.”
Both are right, which is the problem. A national undersupply figure and a local lease-up miss are consistent with each other when nobody knows the propensity of the people in the trade area. The cost lands in three places. Lease-ups that pencilled at 24 months in the Vancouver suburbs in 2022 now run 36 to 42. Schedule I banks, unable to size demand, size the sponsor instead: pre-leasing comparables, stronger balance sheets, lower loan-to-cost. And municipalities regulate the use with the only number they have, which is jobs. Vancouver restricted storage near three transit stations and in Mount Pleasant in 2022 on the basis that facilities “don’t require a large staff,” and a 2022 Toronto count found 66 facilities employing about 200 people. Nobody at either table could say how many of the neighbourhood’s own residents and small businesses were the customers, because nobody has counted.
What is measured, and where
| Measure | United States | United Kingdom | Canada |
|---|---|---|---|
| Facility count and supply per person | Yardi Matrix, StorTrack, Radius+; 7.3 sq. ft. per person | SSA UK annual report: 3,143 stores, 0.94 sq. ft. per head | StorTrack, REIT decks and StatCan disagree: 2,059 to 3,800 plus facilities; 2.5 to 3.2 sq. ft. per person |
| Share of households renting a unit | SSA Demand Study: 12.6% of households (2024) | YouGov poll for SSA UK: 5% of adults | None; one unsourced 2015 line in a REIT deck |
| Renter age profile | SSA Demand Study, by generation | SSA UK customer survey: 55 to 64 is 31% of customers | None; a spending line by age in the Survey of Household Spending |
| Reasons for renting | SSA Demand Study | SSA UK customer survey | None |
| Length of stay by reason | SSA Demand Study, length of rental | SSA UK: 39% stored three years or more | None; an unsourced 13-month industry average |
| Immigrant status and years since arrival | Not asked (race and ethnicity only) | Not asked | Not asked |
| Business share of customers | SSA Demand Study business survey, 935 firms | SSA UK: 24.1% business | None; an unsourced 80/20 split |
| Operator and investor sentiment | Cushman & Wakefield investor survey and others | SSA UK operator survey, 70 companies | JBW Sentiment Survey (in preparation) |
What a Canadian study would ask, and who should pay
The instrument is not complicated; the American and British versions are the template. Screen 10,000 or more households across the census metropolitan areas, run the detailed survey with the 3,000 or so who rent or have rented, and weight to the census. Measure penetration, propensity by age, tenure and household type, reasons, duration by reason, unit size and rent paid, travel time and business use. Add the question none of the existing studies ask and Canada cannot do without: immigrant status and years since arrival. Repeat it every two years. Then validate the duration findings against the tenancy data that already sits, unpooled, inside the management software most Canadian operators run.
The budget is low six figures by my estimate, a rounding error against one mistimed lease-up. The obvious funders are the parties who pay for the gap today: the REITs and large private operators who underwrite lease-ups, the lenders who price them, and the software platforms that hold the tenancy data.
JBW is preparing an annual Canadian Self Storage Sentiment Survey of operators, developers, investors and lenders, covering conditions, operating metrics, pipeline, capital markets, risk and policy. It will give the industry its first recurring Canadian benchmark of what the supply side thinks. It will not tell anyone who rents a unit. That is the harder question, and the more valuable one.
For investors
Until the data exists, treat every Canadian demand claim, including the ones in my own articles, as an argument rather than a measurement. Ask whoever prepared your feasibility study which propensity rate they applied and which country it came from. Underwrite lease-up to what the last three openings in the trade area actually did, not to a per-capita gap. And if you own or manage a portfolio of any size, notice that your management system already holds the Canadian data nobody has: move-in reason, tenure and duration, by unit and by market. Pooled and anonymized, it would answer in a year what the industry has been guessing at for two decades.
Talk to JBW
If you are underwriting a development or an acquisition and the demand number in the feasibility study came from an American ratio, I am happy to talk through what the trade area’s own openings show, or to provide a confidential Broker’s Opinion of Value. JBW also offers transaction audit services for buyers, sellers and lenders: a physical site inspection and rent roll verification that reconciles every unit’s existence, size, condition, occupancy and rate paid, so that buyers and lenders underwrite the store that actually exists and sellers avoid a retrade. Contact Patrick Wood at pat@jbwcommercial.com or 250-589-0034.
Data sources: Self Storage Association (US) Demand Study, 2025 edition and prior editions; SSA UK annual industry reports 2025 and 2026 with Cushman & Wakefield; Self Storage Association of Australasia State of the Industry 2022 and 2024; FEDESSA European Self Storage Annual Survey 2025 with CBRE; StorTrack Canada market reports (November 2025, February and April 2026, and the Second Quarter 2026 Canada Market Review, September 2026); StorageVault Q2 2026 investor presentation; Public Storage, Public Storage Canada acquisition presentation (June 2026); CBRE Canada (August 2023); Statistics Canada population estimates for July 1, 2026 (September 23, 2026); Statistics Canada Canadian Business Counts (June 2026) and Survey of Household Spending 2023 (tables 11-10-0222-01 to 11-10-0227-01, as revised September 18, 2026); Radius+ (2017); Inside Self-Storage (May 2024); Newmark 2024 Self-Storage Almanac due diligence chapter; Modern Storage Media 2026 Canadian outlook (December 2025); City of Vancouver and City of Toronto 2022 planning coverage; JBW Commercial, Five Things Canadian Self Storage Investors Need to Watch in 2026 (May 2026). All dollar figures Canadian unless marked US$.