SpareFoot is one of the companies in Silverton Partner’s portfolio. They’re the world’s largest marketplace for self-storage — a $20 billion-dollar market. Sparefoot also provides leading web marketing solutions for storage operators. Sparefoot was founded in 2008 by then-UCLA students Chuck Gordon and Mario Feghali (aka Chario), SpareFoot originated as a person-to-person storage website (“airBnB for storage”) that helped people rent extra space for storage in private residences. Then we realized there was a larger opportunity for this platform in the traditional self-storage industry.
The following post was originally written by SpareFoot.
The $22 billion self-storage industry is a hidden giant among us. You probably drive past at least one storage facility on your daily commute, with or without realizing it. They’re everywhere, but you don’t notice because self-storage is boring— a boring goldmine, that is. It’s one of the fastest-growing sectors of commercial real estate, with the amount of storage space in the U.S. doubling to 2 billion square feet in a mere five years from 2000-2005.
Americans have a lot of stuff, and no where to put it. This is clear from the popularity of self-storage here as compared to other countries. We’re responsible for around 86% of the entire global self-storage market, with 50,100 storage facilities in the continental U.S. as of last year.
You might think big brands like Public Storage and U-Haul dominate the market. But only 9.6% of all facilities are owned by the five biggest companies. This is testament to how small business entrepreneurs have come out in droves to meet storage demand. Power to the mom-and-pops! We’re proud to be part of such a robust, successful and growing industry dominated by small business owners like us. And if we learned anything in the past four years, it’s a lot less boring than you might guess.
