League table of biggest UK self storage companies

Storage.co.uk has researched the self storage market and worked out which are the largest 15 companies by number of stores.  The table below shows the number of storage centres which each company had in mid-2010:

Safestore                            92

Big Yellow Self Storage      76

Access Self Storage           58

Storage King                       25

Shurgard Self Storage        24

Lok’nStore                          24

Evans Easyspace               19

Space Maker Self Storage  17

Alligator Self Storage         13

Sentry Self Storage            12

Ease the Squeeze              12

Lock Stock Self Storage     10

Big Box Storage Centre       8

Ready Steady Store             8

Bishop’s Move                      8

Leaders in self storage

One can see that the quoted companies (Safestore, Big Yellow and Lok’nStore) rank highly taking the 1^st, 2^nd and 6^th position in terms of number of self storage facilities.  Storage King is a hybrid as it acts as a branding organisation and manager, whilst privately-owned groups also feature very prominently.

The top ten storage companies have 360 of the UK’s stores and, taking into account the top 15, the big operators have 406.  This represents 34% or just over a third of all the self storage facilities in Britain – though these companies are disproportionately prominent because they tend to have larger stores, they are often more centrally located, and they spend more on advertising than smaller operators.  It makes sense to spend money on building up a brand when you have a national chain, which at least the top eight can claim to have.

Varieties of self storage

Some of these companies are very concentrated regionally, such as Lock Stock Self Storage who have a heavy footprint in North Wales, which makes it sensible for them to advertise regionally – and indeed they have a network of adverts on roundabouts as well as a complementary sister firm offering van hire, called Take Stock Van Hire.”

Within this table Bishop’s move is unusual in that it is clearly integrated into a national removals company whereas most of the others work closely with local removals firms. But it is also unusual in that it runs two companies, because it also owns Ease the Squeeze which appears in the top 15 table. Taking this into account, Bishop’s should perhaps be ranked as the 7^th largest by number of stores.

What’s in a name for self storage companies?

Two of the top companies have lock-related names (Lok’nStore and Lock Stock Self Storage) and the word “store” or “storage” appears in 12 or the 15 companies.  There is one animal name (Alligator), one colour name (Big Yellow) and several alliterations where the first two words start with the same letter (Big Box, Sentry Self Storage, Evans Easyspace, and Shurgard Self Storage).  It is interesting for the team at storage.co.uk that only one of the big operators uses a single word and that is itself totally descriptive of what the company does.

Self Storage: A big three emerge

Another feature of the top 15 list is that it doesn’t show a single completely dominant player – but a group of the big three has emerged: Safestore, Big Yellow and Access.

It seems likely that, with the pressure on both rates and occupancy, there will be some consolidation and that some of those storage operators in the bottom half of the league table will be taken over by some of those in the top half.  In terms of mergers, some are more compatible than others and warehouse-type self storage operators have historically been resistant to taking over companies running containerised storage facilities such as Lock Stock Self Storage.