Divorce, inheritance, indecision: The human stories behind the $2b storage-unit boom

This story is part of the February 22 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

Once a month, for about six years now, I’ve transferred about $90 out of my elderly mother’s bank account. If only it pinged off to a good cause, to a sponsor child or saving koalas or even to my own beleaguered account. Instead, it pays a bill to a storage company in a regional Queensland town to store her grandmother Maud’s hulking oak billiard table.

Each time I click “transfer”, I feel unwell; I refuse to calculate how much a sentimental family story has cost my mother. Circa 1900, Maud had three oak panels built to sit neatly over the billiard cloth so it could serve as the family dining table. In the 1930s, a widowed Maud moved into my grandparents’ Sydney home. The billiard-dining table did, too. It spent the next 50 years suspended from the ceiling of my grandfather’s garage (he somehow slung its ton-weight slate base from a wall). In the 1980s, when my grandparents came to live with my family in Queensland, the billiard table was trucked up, too. Dad paid handsomely to have it restored, and it became the centrepiece for entertaining nights during which billiard balls shot around the table and people drank beer. After my father died in 2010 and we emptied and sold the family home, Mum moved to a smaller place near the coast. The billiard table went into storage.

For the storage company, the table is earning what could be called “passive income”. My mother and I? Just call us suckers.

But we’re not outliers. Sam Kennard, the owner of 113 colossal orange and blue storage facilities around Australia (another 10 are on the way), recalls a conversation with a customer who stored a “crappy” 1970s couch. “She remembered every single stain on it ... which parties they came from; she’s never throwing it out because it has so many memories of being in a particular place and a particular time of her life,” Kennard tells me over the phone. So many suckers.

The author’s mother’s billiard table en route to storage.Credit: Courtesy of Stephanie Wood

The sinister storage facility is a film and TV trope: empty corridors stretching towards vanishing points, echoing footsteps, monsters, real or imagined, concealed behind metal shutters. In 1991’s Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster’s FBI trainee, Clarice Starling, finds a severed head in a storage unit. Lot 36, the first of director Guillermo del Toro’s 2022 Netflix horror anthology, Cabinet of Curiosities, unleashes a tentacled demon on a man who has bought an abandoned unit’s contents. In other shows, storage units are variously the settings for psychopaths, stalkers, organ harvesters and alien life-forms.

Mostly though, the real monsters in self-storage units are more prosaic: stuff. Monstrous and increasing amounts of stuff filling unfathomable expanses of space – in massive purpose-built structures, in suburban business parks, in endless rows of drive-up garages in regional towns, and in vintage industrial buildings (an early 20th-century Abbotsford shoe factory in Melbourne; in Sydney, a 1920s Lakemba bread manufacturing facility and a 1950s Petersham brewery).

An article in The Sydney Morning Herald in July 1980 about the construction of a self-service storage depot on the Princes Highway in inner-Sydney declared it “a new concept” for the city. But look at the numbers now: there are 2500 facilities across Australia (the Self Storage Association of Australasia says more than 250 new projects are in the pipeline across Australia and New Zealand). The industry turns over about $2 billion a year and investors are watching. Two storage REITs (real estate investment trusts) are listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. The second, Abacus Storage King, landed in mid-2023 to join the National Storage REIT; they’re worth a whopping $1.5 billion and $3.2 billion, respectively. In March last year, meanwhile, Singapore-based operator StorHub launched in the Australian market with five facilities and more to follow.

“The self-storage industry in Australia is at an inflection point, driven by multiple favourable tailwinds,” noted StorHub CEO Simon DeGaris in a public relations announcement.

Those tailwinds blow from all directions: population growth, immigration and the shift to apartment living; pandemic lockdowns during which self-storage occupancy and rental rates surged as people shuffled stuff into storage to make space for home offices; the housing and rental crisis; family and relationship breakdown; the renovation frenzy; international careers and long-term travel; an ageing population downsizing or moving into care, family homes of decades being emptied; the online shopping explosion (e-commerce businesses frequently house inventory in storage units).

Underlying that tangle is the inescapable fact that the explosion in self-storage is about stuff – too much stuff. It’s the result of half a century or more of rising affluence and consumerism, of cheap imported products and the Aldi- and Ikea-fication of our lives and spaces, our increasing disdain for the old, for antiques or “brown furniture”, and our insatiable appetite for new things, frequently things we don’t need.

But storage facilities are not just repositories for physical belongings: they are archives for the tear-stained human stories of contemporary society. Frequently, people are forced to rent units at some of the most difficult points in their lives, at times of upheaval, dislocation, tragedy, grief. “Storage customers are going through a life event,” Sam Kennard says, adding that about 75 per cent of customers are domestic and short-term, with the median length of stay six-and-a-half months.

Kennards Self Storage boss Sam Kennard: “Storage customers are going through a life event.”Credit: Louise Kennerley

In late 2023, my brother, David, and his wife separated. They dismantled their life together, boxes and grief gathered and, while David looked for somewhere to live, he rented a unit at a Storage King facility in southern Sydney’s Hurstville.

One day while I’m researching this article, I meet him there. The lift that takes us to the third floor creaks and shudders, and when the door slams behind us it’s a jump-scare. At the end of a long corridor, he unlocks a padlock to show me the remnants of his life, held in a space not much bigger than a broom closet. Stacked boxes to the ceiling, his bike and precious Danish chairs, the little wooden children’s table and chairs that our late father made for David’s now-teenage kids, their old rocking horse, a gas barbecue bottle. A life, condensed.

Back on the ground floor, I meet the then store manager, Gordon Hart. We sit at a table in his office and he tells me about the storage business. There’s an Australian Federal Police notice headed “Suspicious Behaviour: Watch for the Signs” and a box of tissues on the table. “I’ve seen a lot of tears. I’m like the local mum sometimes; some people do like to confide and I like to be empathetic,” says Hart. “I don’t want to call it a recession-proof business but we do quite well in hard times.”

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Susi*, a 40-something mother of two young children, separated from her husband in 2023. The sale of their Melbourne family home was finalised in September. “It was just really emotional,” Susi says, recalling moving day. Men going backwards and forwards, carting the contents of her four-bedroom, two-bathroom home to a truck, and she’s thinking, thinking: has she got everything, has she set aside what the kids will need, trying to make it all an adventure for them, retrieving bits and pieces, suitcases into the car and, at the last minute, what’s to be done with the pot plants? “Bless them,” Susi says, “my old next door neighbours are looking after them.”

The removal truck went one way – to a garage-sized, ground-level unit at a storage facility – Susi and the kids the other. “I’m sort of couch surfing at my mum’s house with the kids, living out of a suitcase; we’ve got our own room but it’s small,” Susi says. “At the moment, I’m just surviving and getting through it; it’s surreal, I feel very displaced.” She’s looking for a rental but as a single mother with no job – her work in her ex-husband’s family business ended with the relationship – she knows that, on paper at least, it doesn’t look good.

‘It’s almost like, if there was room, I’d pull up a deck chair and hang out there while I’m trying to find a house.’

Susi*

Initially, Susi was nervous about visiting the storage unit, not least because she says her ex has coercive and controlling behaviours; soon after the move, she discovered he’d planted a tracking device under her car and she worried he might attempt to break into her storage if he found its location. But since ripping out the device, she’s developed an attachment to the unit. Squeezed in behind a blue roller door is the jumble of her life: fridge, washing machine, lounge, beds, bike, tables, chairs, kids’ toys, sporting and gardening equipment, bikes. It has become, she says, “my little drop-off and pick-up station”.

She’s visited five or six times – most recently to offload winter clothes, pick up a suitcase with summer stuff and grab her kids’ scooters, although their helmets are in a box and she has no idea where that might be. “It feels like another little home away from home; it’s weird, it’s like, ‘OK, this is all my stuff, at least this storage part of things is mine for now.’ It’s almost like, if there was room, I’d pull up a deck chair and just hang out there while I’m trying to find a house.”

My brother developed a similar attachment to his unit. “It was a difficult place to visit but it became kind of precious to me: I’d go and look at it and think, ‘OK, this is the starting point of what I’m going to rebuild my life with,’ ” David says. While he camped in my spare room and looked for a rental, he returned to the unit frequently … to grab his own pillows and bed linen, tools to fix his bike, one of his favourite Japanese knives, and I think sometimes just to look at his earthly possessions and reassure himself that he was still of this world.

“It becomes a touchstone when your life’s falling apart,” says Jon Owen, pastor and CEO of Wayside Chapel in Sydney’s Kings Cross, who often hears visitors talking about their units. “They become that place that you know will not be changed.” Occasionally, however, that might not be the case. Gordon Hart recalls once renting a unit to a couple. Things seemed to be amicable between them; Hart had no reason to predict problems. One day, the husband came and emptied the unit. “About two weeks later, his wife came in and said, ‘I just want to get some winter clothes for my daughter.’ I had to say, ‘I’m sorry, your stuff has gone.’ She was in tears, it was a split-up.”

Squeezed in behind a blue roller door is the jumble of Susi’s life: “At the moment, I’m just surviving and getting through it; it’s surreal, I feel very displaced,” she says.Credit: Peter Tarasiuk

Rachel*, a Melbourne lawyer in her 50s, rented a storage unit in late 2019 after splitting with an abusive man – but for his possessions, not hers. The man, who had been living with her, wouldn’t remove his belongings from her home and returned frequently to harass her. “He was breathing down my neck in a really hostile, traumatising way. While I was having to go to court to deal with interim intervention orders and criminal charges against him, what was bringing him back was his stuff.”

The man attempted to break into Rachel’s house, smashed windows and cut off her electricity, but it was illegal for her to dump his belongings, including furniture, motorbikes and tools, outside his new accommodation or to take it to the tip. “I needed to get it all off my property.” The only solution she could see was to move the man’s things into a storage unit. “I felt quite nervous because I didn’t want to tell the removalists or the manager of the storage unit the full story. I felt ashamed and foolish and was worried that maybe they wouldn’t accept the stuff. I told a vague tale of a relationship break-up.”

She set a deadline for the man to empty the unit and, ultimately, paid about $400 a month for four months of storage. She needn’t have worried about “the storage guy”. He was empathetic, gentle.

Geoff Puttock, the national operations manager for Roomia Self Storage, says that, generally, people who work in the storage industry are “quite compassionate toward people”. He notes the “emotional triggers” that lead people to get storage. “There’ll be something in their lives that has changed quite drastically, quite quickly … and they need a solution for their problem, whatever it may be. I’ve definitely seen some tears; it’s almost like a little bit of a counselling session for some of the customers.”

But a compassionate approach can’t hurt business. “We’re sort of selling thin air; it’s an empty room with a roller door and we’re all selling the same thing,” says Puttock. “The thing that gets the customer over the line is that rapport, no doubt.”

Roomia, launched by Storage Investments Australia, opened its first site in the western Melbourne suburb of Truganina in 2023 and now has eight facilities around Australia. Reflecting the industry’s increasing sophistication, an ad agency developed a brand strategy for the industry upstart. The result is a breezy green logo and friendly marketing collateral featuring photos of shiny, happy people: packing boxes in neat homes, trundling trolleys along bright corridors lined with green doors and having cheerful conversations with staff. The female-friendly message is clear: If you think storage facilities are cold concrete fortresses with padlocked metal doors and stark lighting, you’re wrong. We care, we’re really your friends, we’re not like those other blokey places.

In his two decades in the industry, Puttock has noticed a shift in people’s reasons for needing storage; once, he says, it was more about house moves, purchases and settlement periods but it’s become increasingly clear to him that more people are renting storage in emotional circumstances. “It woke me up to realising that you’ve got to be prepared in life,” he says, “because who knows what curveballs are going to be thrown at you?”

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You might have spotted the memes on social media. Perhaps the one featuring a photo of a bed with a blue-floral coverlet, a chest of drawers, a rug and a Portaloo in a storage unit; the caption: “Mortgage and rent so high these days I just grabbed me a storage unit!” Another has a bed, a rug and a desk – and a car parked at the end of the bed: “Storage units is [sic] the new studio apartments” is the text. Setting aside the fact that AI is likely to have had some role in creating the images and that storage facility managers I interview for this article say their surveillance and security systems are such that it’s difficult for people to camp out in their storage units, it can happen.

One inner-west Sydney storage facility manager tells me it’s hard to stop people sleeping on site – it’s a 24-hour facility – but managers generally find out fairly quickly. He was once forced to terminate the account of “a very weird character” he believes was living out of a unit. The young man’s account was always overdue, he constantly smoked on site and sometimes would be seen half-naked in his unit which he accessed at unusual times. One day, he was taken away in an ambulance. The manager believes the man had mental health issues but was not taking his medication. “When we cut the lock off his unit … he’d been smoking in there, drugs, it was crazy, mattress in there, fridge.”

The manager says that people often tell him they need to put their belongings in storage because they have nowhere to live. “Sometimes people come to their lockers, get clothes, clean themselves up in the bathrooms. We try not to be too hard on them.”

The Wayside Chapel’s Jon Owen has spoken to people who tell him they’ve got mattresses and gas cookers set up in their units and have sometimes slept over. “They’ve gone to put stuff in their unit and have gone, ‘Holy crap, no one’s here,’ ” Owen says, “if you’re sleeping rough … for the ones who have storage units, it becomes their man cave.”

‘They’re the things that you hang on to because that was when your life made sense.’

Beverly Baker

Similarly, the units can become treasure chests for homeless women. “We’ve heard a number of women say that when they’ve gone to either couch surf or [through] any of the steps that they take to keep a roof over their head, that they’ve put their possessions into storage facilities,” says Beverly Baker, the chair of the Older Women’s Network NSW. “Other than their phone, their major expense is to keep their property in those places.”

For women who might have gone through a late-life divorce (“Just disastrous for women”, says Baker), household items salvaged from their old life are vital; even if they find accommodation, they might not be able to afford new appliances or furniture. Additionally, women typically cling to the memorabilia of a lifetime, perhaps items of family history handed down from parents or children’s artworks. “They’re the things that you hang on to because that was when your life made sense,” says Baker.

But the vulnerabilities that drive people to pay for storage space can extend beyond the circumstantial and lie in deeper psychological wounds. For Melbourne woman Tess*, a history of abuse and trauma triggered a chain of events which led to her paying tens of thousands of dollars for storage units over a decade. After leaving a violent partner in 2012, Tess’s mental health collapsed and she ended up unemployed and in unstable housing; initially, a rooming house with four men that only added to her distress. She started to scour hard rubbish piles, taking home “amazing things”: lamps, artworks, couches. “I surrounded myself with stuff and nested in my bedroom; it was all very orderly, it was never squalor. I’ve since learnt that the trauma of domestic violence can lead to hoarding disorder.”

Storage facility managers have found people sleeping on site. One says they “try not to be too hard” on homeless clients who use the bathrooms.Credit: Peter Tarasiuk

Tess, in her early 50s, now has a jammed public housing flat but doesn’t feel she has a home; after being the target of a stalker and burglars, she feels unsafe there, so sleeps on the couch at her elderly mother’s one-bedroom place. She has been on a “priority” transfer list for new housing for more than two years. A storage unit holding the overflow of her hoarded possessions costs $591 a month – the price increases by about $40 a year. She feels that storage facilities take advantage of customers in difficult situations. “I think they make money off people like me, people who are stuck and frightened.”

‘They called the police on me when I couldn’t move all my stuff in a certain amount of time.’

Tess*

She says her complex post-traumatic stress disorder makes it difficult to make decisions about the things she has collected. “There’s a lot of crap. I kind of just threw car loads of stuff into it … two bikes I don’t need, there’s my glass cabinet – I’d love to keep all my pieces of crystal and little treasures like that in it – and some furniture that I think I can sell, but because I don’t have a home, I don’t actually know what to keep and what to sell.” Tess hasn’t been to the unit in months. “There’s so much going on in my head, and the clutter of the flat and the storage unit is a reflection of the clutter in my mind.”

Tess knows she has to tackle the issue if she wants to hang on to her precious things; in 2018 she lost the contents of a previous unit because she couldn’t pay the bill. “They called the police on me when I couldn’t move all my stuff in a certain amount of time, and I had to leave it behind.” Tess became what’s described in the storage business as a “delinquent” customer. She knows enough about the industry now to know that the contents of her unit would have been auctioned off to the highest bidder.

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It’s hard to imagine there could be entertainment value in the stories of storage units but, in the US and the UK, a clutter of reality shows follow people who bid on units that have been abandoned or on which rent is unpaid. Storage Wars, for example, a testosterone-charged treasure hunt which has now had 15 seasons: Barry paid $US1500 for a unit, found a vintage arcade peep show, made $US5000. Dave discovered the unit he paid $US750 for held 6000 newspapers from the day Elvis Presley died. Estimated value: $US90,000. Darrell procured a unit full of paintings by 20th-century Mexican painter Frank Gutiérrez. Estimated value: $US300,000.

Australia might not have the reality shows, but it does have delinquent customers, abandoned units and an auction site, iBidOnStorage, which flogs people’s left-behind lives to the highest bidder. Spend any time browsing and you’ll witness the full eccentric sweep of human activity: one day, a human-sized Egyptian statue (is it Anubis?) is the highlight of a Storage King unit sale in Melbourne’s Burwood – top bid, $315 – another day, the wrecked body and bits of what looks like a vintage Morris Minor pop up at National Storage in Geelong North (top bid, $10). More often, though, the units for sale are filled with the dreary and the banal. Photos for an auction in the Gold Coast’s Robina, for example, show a mattress, camping equipment, a couple of bikes, scattered boxes and a double-door refrigerator smudged with fingerprints. Top bid when I last looked was $160 from someone with the handle “I SEE DEAD PEOPLE”.

When I chat with the inner-west Sydney storage manager, he tells me that two units at his facility are currently on IBidOnStorage. One is a deceased estate – there are no remaining family members; the other belongs to a woman in jail. Often, Flack says, people store stuff, then disappear because they’ve been incarcerated. “The hardest part is the repercussions afterwards when they get out of prison and come and say, ‘Where’s my stuff?’ ” When units are put up for auction, he does his best to salvage sentimental and personal items, holding them for around six months in the hope their owners will return.

‘I’ve got all this stuff because this is someone’s misfortune.’

Jamie Climo

For Jamie Climo, a former carpet cleaner, storage auctions became an obsession for a while. At one point, he bought about 30 units in a month. Now more selective, he sells the ephemera he picks up – LEGO sets, occult literature, comics, pottery, trading cards – at his Little Shop of Things housed in a Helensburgh storage facility between Sydney and Wollongong.

Climo likes to talk about the first unit he won at auction about six years ago. “It was an awesome unit to get; it had designer handbags and antique furniture. I paid $1700 for it.” Then, as he dug into boxes, he came across personal documents that cast shadows over the purchase; putting pieces together, he concluded that he’d bought the possessions of a woman who had killed herself and her family had been unable to cope with sorting through them. “[I realised] that I’ve got all this stuff because this is someone’s misfortune. It just makes you realise that we’re all very fragile, we’re not as tough as we think.”

But even without such tragedies, as the population ages, storage units will increasingly become haunted spaces, reflecting the intersection between the mortal and the material.

Rachel*, who hoped she might be done with storage units when her former partner finally emptied the one she rented for his stuff, was forced to take another unit out last year when she cleaned out her parents’ home after their deaths. Sixty years of marriage, five bedrooms, hobbies, books, photographs, paintings, furniture. Rachel filled an enormous skip with rubbish and tried to give as much stuff away as she could responsibly, even taking old X-rays to be recycled. But still there was more. “So then it was the things I wanted to keep. I couldn’t fit that all in my house and I wasn’t ready to go through it and be really ruthless.”

She has managed to downsize the volume she’s storing, but what remains fills her with anxiety; the sense of “a monkey on my back” intermingles with the grief she feels for her parents. But she knows that her parents are not their stuff. “The rational part of me says it doesn’t mean I love my parents any less if I get rid of their silver tea-set … but it’s loaded with all these emotions, like seeing my dad polishing it.” And then there’s the money: Rachel thinks she’s paid close to $5000 to keep the unit since she took it out.

It’s time I did some calculations on behalf of my mother: I look back on some old invoices and realise it has been nine years, not six, that she has been paying to keep her grandmother Maud’s oak billiard table in storage. Taking into account the steady and regular price increases, my estimate is that Mum has spent more than $8000 on this sentimental folly. I think it’s time we had a chat.

* Names have been changed to protect privacy.

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