Mediaboss Marketing

The best real estate investment in the past decade was found at the opposite end from trophy resorts and office towers, in 5-foot-by-5-foot lockers.

Self-storage companies, which rent units to small businesses and consumers, produced the best risk-adjusted return among 10 U.S. real estate investment trust indexes in the past decade, according to the Bloomberg Riskless Return Ranking. They had the highest total return and the third-lowest volatility, for a risk-adjusted gain of 10.6 percent. Owners of offices, hotels and warehouses fared among the worst, hurt by price swings.

Public Storage, CubeSmart, Extra Space Storage Inc. and Sovran Self Storage Inc. attracted investors with low debt ratios and steady cash-flow growth in a decade that saw commercial-property values soar to records along with sales of mortgage-backed bonds to finance a wave of takeovers. The debt-to-assets ratio for Public Storage, the largest in the group, is 22.5 percent, half the average 45 percent for REITs, said Michael Knott, managing director of real estate research firm Green Street Advisors Inc., making the stock less susceptible to large price swings if the economy worsens.

"Public Storage has incredibly low leverage compared to the average REIT," Knott said. "It's typically not as volatile."

Demand tends to be driven by life changes, which often entail moving, such as college graduation, job changes, divorce or death.

"If you get married, you don't necessarily throw your couch away, you don't necessarily throw away the buffalo head, what have you," said Clemente Teng, vice president of investor relations for Public Storage. "You put it in storage."

Public Storage has about 1 million tenants at any given point in time, with the average lease of existing tenants running about 36 months, Teng said. More than half its tenants have rented their units for more than one year, he said.

"People always think, 'I'll just house it for a couple of months and then get it all out, but the problem is once you get all your stuff in, the last thing you want to do is spend a Saturday cleaning it out," Teng said.

Storage units are relatively cheap to build and "when we re-rent a space, all we have to do is sweep it out," said Teng. "We don't have to change the carpeting, paint the walls."

Increased usage of Internet marketing has helped storage REITs attract more customers from smaller operators during the sluggish economic recovery, said John Murphy, a vice president at Cohen & Steers Inc. The storage business is fragmented, with the publicly traded REITs accounting for just 10 percent of the U.S. market, he said.

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Self-storage packs top low-risk real estate return