NSA Looks to Next Phase of Growth a Decade After IPO

National Storage Affiliates Trust (NYSE: NSA), celebrating its 10th IPO anniversary this year, is positioning itself for the next phase of growth as it moves away from the organizational structure that has driven the company’s success for the past decade.

NSA was formed in 2013 when three private storage operators— Optivest Properties, Northwest Self Storage, and SecurCare Self Storage—joined forces, realizing that though each was a pretty good size regionally, there came a point where there wasn’t enough scale to get to the next level.

David Cramer, president and CEO of NSA, previously served as CEO at SecurCare, and was instrumental in making the partnership come together. “We work in an industry that’s very fragmented and it’s hard to grow scale, so we reached out to Optivest and Northwest to see if we could come together and form a company where we could access public money, and what that would look like,” he says.

So, in the first half of 2013, Optivest Properties, Northwest Self Storage, and SecurCare Self Storage formed NSA utilizing a participating regional operating (PRO) structure in which the affiliated operators would continue to manage and self-brand their contributed portfolios under the NSA umbrella.

By the time the IPO was completed in 2015, NSA had grown to approximately 250 properties and a total enterprise value of more than $1 billion. Over the years, NSA grew to such a scale that in 2024 it internalized the PRO structure and centralized all operations, revenue management, and technologies.

At the start of 2025, NSA’s portfolio consisted of 1,074 self-storage properties with approximately 70.2 million rentable square feet. “Today we have an enterprise value of approximately $9 billion,” Cramer says. “We’ve had a tremendous amount of success with this differentiated PRO structure, which worked really well to help us grow to where we are today, while the internalization of the structure facilitates our next phase of growth.”

A Winning Portfolio

With a diverse portfolio situated in 42 states and Puerto Rico, including several of the top 50 markets, NSA has been looking to densify in markets and has found success in secondary markets as well.

“We thrive in suburban and secondary markets; that’s really been our primary focus,” Cramer says. “We’ve been able to look at markets like Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Riverside, where we’ve been able to get really good scale, very good operational efficiencies, and we’ve had tremendous success.”

In the last couple of years, NSA has also focused on pruning its portfolio to be more operationally efficient.

“We’ve had a really good growth story since the IPO,” Cramer says. “We had a banner year in 2021 when we bought $2.2 billion of properties in a very vigorous period of growth for us and our peers.”

However, the portfolios that NSA acquired included some assets that didn’t necessarily fit the company’s core growth strategy, whether due to geography, size, or local market dynamics.

“That’s why we’ve actually been disposing of assets, to get our portfolio optimized from a geographic and operational perspective,” Cramer says. “We’ve been reinvesting that money into markets where we want to be and densifying our existing markets. The best part about the self-storage industry is that it’s still highly fragmented so there are lots of opportunities for growth. We like where we’re positioned, and we like the ability to continue to consolidate in a highly fragmented industry.”

Shaping the Company

After completing its IPO in 2015, NSA did several things that helped move the company in the right direction.

“We formed our first JV in 2016; Having JVs broadens our sources of capital and facilitates growing in a way that is capital-light to NSA,” Cramer says. “All of the PROs had long partnerships with private money, so now as a public company we’re able to find some of these larger investors who want to be in the self-storage industry, but don’t have platforms. This has allowed us to continue to grow our operating platforms and build out our technologies.”

Through the 2016 JV, NSA acquired the iStorage portfolio for $630 million. The portfolio consisted of 66 properties and 4.5 million rentable square feet, located across 12 states. Additionally, NSA acquired the iStorage property management platform, including a property management company, a captive insurance company, and the iStorage brand.

Since then, NSA has added three more JV relationships. Some of the JVs could be brought onto the balance sheet when the opportunity is right, Cramer notes.

“In 2020, we started the internalization of the PROs, and started really adding bulk to the corporate team,” he says. “We were able to build strength on the bench and build technology and build platforms, and so starting with the internalization of SecurCare, it really allowed NSA to accelerate its ability to operate on a large scale.”

Evolving Industry

As you look at NSA today, Cramer says, “the things that we’ve done over the last 10 years around positioning the company, positioning the portfolio, and working on technology, the team, and strength of the corporate bench have all made it a winning REIT.”

As examples, he points to the REIT’s digital marketing platforms and digital customer acquisition platforms, its full-service customer care center that can answer phone calls 24/7, and its solid revenue management platform that is “learning every day with the new tools that we’re applying and the new data points that are added.”

All of the knowledge that started with regional operators has enabled NSA to evolve into a “very sophisticated company that has the reach and the ability to have success in all the markets we operate in,” Cramer says.