In the most recent ISS expo I attended, once again I saw that Millennials have become 20% plus of self-storage customers, up from about 16% a year ago.
I remember some of the stereotypes many had a few years ago about the millennial generation:
- Avocado toast and $7 lattes. The Tim Gurner quote in 2017 said that young people couldn’t afford homes because they were spending $19 on avocado toast (i.e., financially irresponsible).
- Lazy and entitled. The “participation trophy generation” framing: coddled and couldn’t take criticism.
- Failure to launch. Living in parents’ basements into their 30s, delaying marriage, delaying kids, delaying home purchase.
You know the ones we have all heard.
This has not been my experience. I have partners who are millennials, one in particular, Charlotte, who is a partner in my commercial real estate company and is a real force of nature. She is smarter than me and runs circles around what I ever did in my productive years of real estate. I thought perhaps she was an outlier. But the facts just don’t support that.
Given that they are a growing percent of our customers, in my attempts to look into the future and see how millennials can impact storage demand, I decided to do some research on my own and not just rely on industry reports or talking points.
I was surprised with what I discovered and want to share it with you. Not only is my partner a force of nature, this wave of the U.S. population is as well, especially on future demand for self-storage.
First, the sheer size of this generation is economically impactful.
Here’s the 2025 snapshot:
- Millennials (1981–1996): 74 million, about 22% of the U.S. population, the largest generation.
- Gen Z (1997–2012): 71 million – 21%.
- Gen X (1965–1980): ~65.6 million – 19%.
- Baby Boomers (1946–1964): ~64 million – 19%.
Next, my idea that they didn’t own assets couldn’t be further from reality.
Here is what I discovered:
Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts data shows millennial household wealth grew roughly 101 percent in real terms between the end of 2019 and the end of 2023, and another 12.7 percent in 2024 alone. In 2024, the average household net worth of millennials was roughly $333,000, but it is estimated that 62% of millennials expect inheritances in specific real estate. This has a tremendous impact on storage demand as they deal with estate liquidations, downsizings, and “what do I do with Mom & Dad’s stuff?” Self-storage is the default answer and that usually means being a customer for at least 6 to 18 months. Also, according to my research, we are just now starting to enter the steepest part of that transfer curve.
But it is not just about inheriting assets. Millennials are acquiring assets, in significant and growing quantities, but the pattern looks very different from the one Boomers followed. Millennial households have roughly quadrupled their wealth since 2019, crossed $15 trillion in aggregate assets in 2024, and at comparable ages are now wealthier than both Gen X and Boomers were. Homeownership among mid-30s millennials sits near 57 percent, and real estate investing, house-hacking duplexes, fractional platforms, and short-term rentals are a core wealth strategy as well.
At comparable ages, the numbers also favor millennials. St. Louis Fed analysis of 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances data puts the median millennial’s net worth then at $84,941, and adjusted for inflation this puts them about 8 percent ahead of Gen Xers at the same age in 2007, and 46 percent ahead of Boomers at the same age in 1989.
Interestingly, millennials also own assets at a near-universal rate: 99.3 percent of millennial households held some form of asset in 2022, compared with 97.5 percent of Gen Xers and 93.8 percent of Boomers at equivalent ages.
These assets are also interesting.
- Real estate remains the dominant asset in millennial balance sheets, undercutting the story I had that this generation has given up on owning stuff. It turns out 57% of this generation in their mid-30s own their residence, and millennials in their early 40s have become the highest-earning home-buyer cohort in the country, with a median household income around $132,700 among buyers. But it is not just homes. Other asset classes I discovered on their balance sheets were…
- House hacking. Buying 2–4-unit properties as owner-occupants to get primary-residence financing, then renting the other units to cover the mortgage.
- Short-term rental augmentation. Renting a room or accessory dwelling unit on short-term platforms to offset carrying costs on a primary residence.
- Fractional and crowdfunded real estate. Platforms like Arrived, Fundrise, and others let millennials put $500–$5,000 into residential or commercial real estate without qualifying for a mortgage.
- Entrepreneurship through acquisition. Older millennials increasingly buy cash-flowing small businesses with SBA financing — a strategy that often bundles commercial real estate into the acquisition.
- Roughly 63% to 66% of millennials own stock, and millennials lead ETF adoption at 58 percent versus 47 percent of Gen X and 37 percent of Boomers.
As for self-storage demand, the millennial story is the opposite of the “they don’t own anything.” They own a lot of stuff that doesn’t fit in their homes, they move more often, and they run more side businesses. This demographic will have a real impact on self-storage in the upcoming years. Specifically, it is estimated the next 5 to 10 years of increased millennial homebuying, inheritance-driven downsizing, and small-business formation all point the same direction… more demand.
I am going to really focus on trade area demographics and try to specifically trend this generation, looking for their numbers and growth or decline rate. This won’t be the determining factor, but it was something I had zero attention on before.
So it turns out my partner Charlotte is not necessarily the outlier, but I still will bet she can run circles around any other millennial… or Boomer for that matter.
