I’m not sure if it’s our inflation-free (TM) economy or that self-storage places underprice at move-in time and then raise the rent according to how difficult they think it will be for you to move your stuff, but the local self-storage place (Compass) just bumped our rent by 24 percent after six months (54 percent annual inflation rate), effective today.
Is this
- a sign that inflation is alive and well?
- an indication that South Florida continues to prosper?
- a standard bait-and-switch tactic by self-storage places?
Rents for apartments and prices of houses are rising only gradually here right now, as far as I know, so I don’t think the “South Florida is booming” explanation is correct.
I think it is standard bait and switch. It happens in SoCal where I am.
It pays to watch for new storage units at your own storage place. Sometimes you can get a new lower rate and you just have to move all your stuff. Dumb but it works.
The other method that works at the place I use is to pre-pay for 9 months at a time. If I pre-pay then they will not raise the rates during the 9 months. Then I go in at 8 months and pre-pay again before they raise the rates again.
After 6 months, you’ve got snowbirds moving back to NY. Otherwise, everyone’s getting out of FL because they have to go back to the office & instead of moving all the crap from their garages to their new 400sq ft slice of CA paradise, they’re moving it to storage.
A sign of cornered market? Can you easily find alternative storage?
That is how they do it!
https://slate.com/business/2025/01/self-storage-price-increases-28-day-billing-unit-sales-facility-managment.html
I think it’s the bait-and-switch. I have experienced this is two times. I think they have a theory for it. Intuitively, it’s related to minimalism. So there’s a minimalism experiment that if you put all your stuff in boxes and then take out only the stuff that you need from those boxes, you’d soon realize that most of your stuff is still boxed-up. Now we replace the boxes with storage unit and we see what they are doing. I think they have figured out that most people have way too much stuff and they don’t need it, so why don’t we make money off of it? By lowering initial prices they just giving us the “boxes” for free.
So the storage-units have figured out what people are doing but people (myself included) haven’t reflected (or taken action) on their own behavior and the storage-units are making tons of money off of it.
Example: https://www.theminimalists.com/packing/
> After three weeks, 80% of my stuff was still in those boxes. Just sitting there. Unaccessed. I looked at those boxes and couldn’t even remember what was in most of them. All those things that were supposed to make me happy weren’t doing their job.
It is certainly not “an indication that South Florida continues to prosper.” Self-storage companies do better and raise rates during recessions.
The New York Times says that self-storage slumped during the 2009 recession. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06self-storage-t.html
Well, I’m wrong again. I was under the impression that recessions increase demand for storage, businesses close, people move…. In any case, it’s worth noting that the NYT article states that “occupancies at storage facilities nationwide are down, on average, about 2 or 3 percent.” That is not bad, considering the circumstances of the 2009 recession,
It seems that self storage is mostly indifferent to booms and busts. During booms the ROI doesn’t grow that much because capacity keeps getting built. During busts the reduction in revenue is nowhere near what happens to other commercial real estate.
One of America’s richest women is a storage unit mogul. You should be happy to pay more to enrich the already absurdly wealthy. Lower taxes for billionaires! Taxing billionaires doesn’t impact the deficit! Sock it to the little guy (even an 8-figure millionaire like “Dr” Phil) to suck wealth upward! Tamara needs a ninth billion dollars! Eight is NOT enough, contrary to the eighties sitcom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_Gustavson
When does Biden-flation become Trump-flation in “Dr” Phil’s world? Or is it like Trump himself: “Is Trump responsible for the performance of stocks? He thinks so, but only if they’re up.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-stock-market-biden-tariffs-selloff-sp500-correction-bear-market-2025-4
Official Bidenflation was about 22%. Maybe the real number for typical upper middle class folks who buy houses was 35%? (Take out the “owner equivalent rent scam”) So I guess if official inflation seems on track to reach 20% during Hitler v2.0 we could start referring to “Trumpflation”.
Top 1% pays 40% of taxes.
But “muh billionaires are not taxed enough”!
And despite your cartoonish idea of how beibng rich works, the wealth of UHNWIs is mostly in stock, not cash (in cartoonish sacks with $ on a side). They cannot liquidate a significant portion of it without tanking the stock price. Their massive wealth is not easily accessible in practice but is tied in as capital necessary for businesses to exist.
Try to be less retarded, Mike.