How Many U.S. Storage Facilities Don't Have a Website?

Out of the 73,000+ self-storage facilities in our dataset, somewhere around 18,000 don't have a working website. If you're in the business of buying storage, that blank is one of the better leads you'll find.

It's a question we hear from buyers all the time: how many storage facilities don't have a website? So we ran it against the whole dataset. Of the 73,000-plus facilities we track, close to one in five has no site you can actually use, either none at all or one that's been dead for years.

How many storage facilities have no website?

• ~18,000 U.S. facilities with no website, or no working website, in our dataset.
• ~16,000 have no website at all. No domain, nothing to point a tenant at.
• ~2,000 to 3,000 own a domain but the site doesn't work. A parked page, a stale legacy site, or a domain that no longer resolves.
• ~20% of everything we track, right around one in five.
• Almost all independent. Nearly all of them are single-facility or two-to-three-facility operators. REITs and large regional operators have universal web coverage.
• Geographically uneven. The share climbs in rural and tertiary markets and falls in metros where the competition is already fighting for tenants online.

Why no website matters

For a storage operator, the website does most of the real work. It's where tenants find the place and reserve a unit, and it's how the owner moves rates when the market gives them room. A facility without one is usually run by an owner who fits one of a few profiles:

• Operating on legacy demand. The phone still rings, units still fill, and the owner has never had a reason to spend on anything digital.
• Underpricing the market. When a facility is operating on legacy principles, the owner is usually holding rates flat for years instead of running ECRIs against the market.
• Exit-curious. Someone who hasn't built a website in twenty years usually hasn't refinanced or repositioned either, which is exactly what a buyer sourcing off-market deals is looking for.

An owner who never put up a website almost never pushed rents either. The gap between what the place makes and what it could make is the whole point of value-add storage.

How to find them on Storage Stats

The filter for it lives in the right-hand filter menu at the bottom. Under Data Availability, the Website control now has three settings, All, Has Website, and No Website. Set it to No Website and the map drops to facilities without a working site, the ones that never had a page and the ones whose domain has gone dark. Layer on operator type (independent), facility size, and whatever trade-area demographics matter to you, and you're down to a short list, with each candidate's facility profile a click away. Download a facility and owner report to automatically create your prospecting list, so the next move is a call instead of chasing down a broker.