If you grow by acquisition, a broker will now screen deals for you from the buyer's side. That can save you hours on sourcing. It doesn't replace your own read of a store's rent roll.
What happened
The De Jong Self Storage Team at Colliers launched a buy-side representation service for storage investors, per Modern Storage Media. The team says about half of its 2026 deals have had a buyer as the client instead of a seller. That's the team's own claim.
It's tracking 453 active listings, the article says. They come from LoopNet, Crexi, List Self Storage and individual broker sites. The team sorts them by market and price, pre-screens each one, runs a quick underwrite and names the ones that fit a buyer's buy box.
Tom de Jong gives an example. A buyer with up to $5 million to spend could get 50-plus listings right away, and 20 to 100 depending on the requirement, per the same article. His summary, per that article:
"You could call us your outsourced acquisitions team."
The service also covers operator-level underwriting, help lining up debt and equity, and setup after closing. Colin Phelan, who joined after a decade acquiring storage for a family office, builds the screening with Dylan de Jong.
The release is a broker's marketing. It names no fee and gives no results for any buyer.
What it means for your facility
Pooled listings fix a time problem. Say a first pass on one listing takes you 30 minutes, which is our assumption. Screening all 453 is 226.5 hours. The 50-listing example above is 25 hours. If you're buying every year, that's real time you could hand off.
Screening speed isn't underwriting quality, though. A quick underwrite reads the headline numbers. The headline number most operators read first is occupancy, and it can hide the upside or the risk.
A separate Modern Storage Media case study shows how. A management company says it took over a store at 88% occupancy with rents that hadn't been adjusted to the market, and grew monthly revenue 27% over 10 months without adding units or losing occupancy. That's one self-reported case. The article we had was also cut off, so the starting revenue and the rent figures aren't available. Treat the 27% as an anecdote, not a benchmark.
The mechanism is what matters for a buyer. Here's the arithmetic on our own assumptions, not that company's numbers.
- Take 50,000 NRSF at 88% occupancy, which is 44,000 occupied NRSF.
- At $1.20 a foot a month in rent, that's $52,800 a month.
- If in-place rents sit 10% under what the market would pay, the gap is $5,280 a month, or $63,360 a year.
That gap is either upside you can earn or a number a seller wants you to pay for. Someone has to decide which, and the answer depends on what's behind the rents. We run 2.5M+ rentable square feet. The numbers that move a price are rarely the headline ones. They're how old in-place rents are, how many tenants are still on a first-year rate, and how the street rate is trending nearby.
One more question is about structure. The team also does listing work for sellers, per the same article. Ask whether it ever shows you a property it's marketing for a seller, and how it handles that.
What to check this week
- Write your buy box in one paragraph: markets, NRSF range, price ceiling, minimum occupancy. Any screener, in-house or outsourced, is only as good as that page.
- Ask any buy-side broker three things: how it's paid, whether it represents sellers on properties it might show you, and whether you get the underwriting model or only a verdict.
- Pull one deal you closed or passed on. Check its rent roll for in-place versus street rate, and for physical versus economic occupancy. See whether a quick underwrite would have caught what you found.
- Ask for recent buyer-side closings you can confirm with the buyers themselves.
- Run your own screen in parallel on the first few deals a service sends you. Compare what each of you passes on.
- Line up financing early. Our capital stack explainer covers what today's rates change.
Whoever finds the deal, you still have to fill it. Our self-storage marketing service covers the Map Pack, ads and website work that get a new acquisition to stabilized occupancy.