The humble self-storage sector has long been helping UK residents turn chaos into clarity. Whether it’s those moving home, navigating personal changes or simply running out of room, self-storage is the ultimate solution to any life changes or challenges. In this blog, we’ll take a look at what’s driving people to hire a store in 2025. Once you know the lay of the land, you can better communicate with your audience and direct your attention to the avenue with the most revenue opportunities.
Let’s get into it…
What are the reasons behind hiring self-storage units in 2025?
Your customers are a diverse bunch, each requiring something different from a self-storage unit, whether that be size, duration or purpose. Let’s take a look at the primary motivations driving people to rent storage units in 2025:
1. Moving home:
Moving home remains a significant driver. The SSA Annual Report 2025 found 44% of domestic storage needs were move-related, up from 32% in 2024. That’s a huge proportion of your customers requiring your facility due to a property move.
Many of these homemovers will require storage space to bridge the gap between selling and buying. With a staggering third of property transactions falling through, many buyers will do whatever is possible to ensure their sale completes, and if that means moving in with family or renting in the interim, storage units can be a saviour. In fact, 28% of respondents to the SSA Annual Report 2025 found this to be the very reason. These customers were between properties, and self-storage was an essential purchase to allow them to sofa surf, temporarily move back in with their parents or rent short-term. We reported in our Q1 2025 Property and Homemover Report that the Time to Complete (the time between the house sale being agreed to and the buyer getting the keys) is currently sitting at 4.3 months. A terrible stat for homemovers, but good news for storage operators who can retain customers for longer while they wait for their conveyancer to complete their house move.
Those unlucky enough to have the sale fall through are also key target customers. We also reported in our Q1 2025 Property and Homemover Report that fall throughs are up 24% year on year, likely in part due to people abandoning their move after the Stamp Duty Relief deadline. More fall-throughs mean more people requiring temporary solutions. When a sale collapses, buyers and sellers are often left in limbo. They may have already boxed up their house and need storage space in the interim. Some may decide to empty the space to make it more attractive to potential buyers and then relist. Others may decide to abandon moving altogether and instead 'improve rather than move' to give themselves more space. Communicate to these homemovers that storage can save them money compared to the hefty cost of moving home! When moving plans stall, self-storage comes to the rescue.
You can capture homemovers before they even sell their home, too. The report found 5% of people hired a storage unit to declutter their home before putting it on the market, ensuring it was presented in the best light, free from daily disorder! Interest rate hikes have also seen many people downsizing, resulting in a lack of room for belongings – in fact, 3% reported that this was the reason for hiring a self-storage space. Your units are helping to get the nation moving, and with home moves listed as one of the most stressful life changes, self-storage can help to ease the pressure.
There’s good news for storage companies on the property market front. In Q1 2025, 451k new properties were listed for sale, and this is the highest we’ve seen in the last seven years! There are ample people in the home moving journey, nearly 1.47 million households in April, in fact, meaning there is plenty of opportunity to max out your occupancy by targeting homemovers.
We also found that a bigger proportion of movers in 2025 are in the older life stages – those over 45 years old accounted for 42% of all homemovers, whilst pensioners made up nearly 25%. Older movers are often downsizing from their large family homes and require storage space for belongings they don’t want to part with. They also tend to have more disposable income, so they can afford self-storage solutions. The older you get, the more belongings you accumulate, everything from furniture to family keepsakes. It’s essential to keep the demographics of homemovers in mind when creating your marketing communications. Another effective way to connect with homemovers is by highlighting how storage provides a moment to pause. It allows them to avoid making rushed decisions and gives them the extra time they need to carefully consider what to do with their sentimental belongings.
2. Significant life events:
Big life moments can often lead people to use self-storage. Losing a loved one, having a baby, going through a separation or divorce, or helping an elderly relative move into care can all leave people needing extra storage space. In the SSA Annual Report 2025, 9% cited a significant life event as the reason for hiring a unit. If the reason is a bereavement, storage space just gives people that breathing room before they decide what to do with personal things.
3. Renovation:
Homeowners having building work or doing up their home need space to store their items safely. The last thing renovators want is for their furniture and belongings to be damaged or covered in dust. In the SSA Annual Report 2025, 8% claimed this was the reason they turned to self-storage solutions.
4. Declutterers:
Some of your customers aren’t moving or renovating – they just want less stuff in their living space! The report showed 24% had no room for all their belongings, and 10% wanted to create more space in their home. The 2021 census found that around 1.1 million, or 4%, of households in England and Wales were considered overcrowded. A tidy space can make a huge difference to how big their home feels day to day. Storage can be like an extra room to their home – it’s just down the road!
Who are likely to be your main self-storage customers?
We’ve already outlined why homemovers are such an essential customer for self-storage firms, but who else? Well, businesses account for a quarter of storage customers, according to the SSA Annual Report 2025, so business trade is still an important customer to go after. In terms of demographics, older people tend to use self-storage more, as they are more likely to experience a greater number of life-changing moments. This goes hand in hand with more older people moving home – your key target audience! SSA Annual Report 2025 stated that they saw growth in the 35-50 age bracket and that the challenge for self-storage facilities is to get more people younger than 35 to use self-storage.
Your key customers are also those local to your site. The SSA Annual Report 2025 found that few people would travel more than half an hour to their self-storage facility. In fact, 60% only travelled up to 20 minutes and 79% up to 30 minutes. This means you should be targeting your advertising close to home.
How can TwentyCi’s MoverAlerts help boost your self-storage business in 2025?
Homemovers are a big customer base for self-storage facilities, and the residential property market is what we know inside out! We track 99.6% of all home moves and can provide you with address storage leads of those in the homemoving journey to allow you to market to these potential customers. We also offer direct mail fulfilment, so we can contact these customers on your behalf. You can choose at what stage in the homemoving journey you want to target – we know exactly what stage each mover is in the process. We can help you decide the best times to market to them. Only want to target specific postcodes? We can also help you with that. We even have an AI model that predicts who is likely to put their house on the market, allowing you to target people when they may be considering decluttering and ensuring their home looks good for estate agent photos. We can also help you target those who have fallen through or withdrawn and may want to store their belongings away. We even have access to planning application data and can tell you who was approved, so you can target those who are planning an extension and need to store furniture to avoid it getting damaged. We can even tell you who was declined and may need storage to create more space because their extension was declined. We are experts at self storage marketing and can help you drive revenue.
If you’re interested in finding out more about MoverAlerts marketing, one of our friendly team members would be happy to chat through our self storage marketing service and address storage leads with you.