Industry Grows Around 'things We Don't Need'

Sun Herald

Sunday October 26, 2008

By KATE DENNEHY

MORE Australians are putting their possessions - or those they want to hide from spouses - in storage units, as the downsizing trend continues.

The bizarre items stored at South-East Queensland self-storage facilities include 100,000 empty lipstick containers, two semitrailer loads of lucerne hay, 30,000 plastic ducks for the Great Brisbane Duck Race, hundreds of teddy bears and an $80,000 Holden ute that a lucky gambler hid from his wife.

Brisbane musician Matt Fairhurst's rock band, Alibi, have used a 20-square-metre unit at Virginia to rehearse for the past three years.

Fairhurst, of Ashgrove, said the unit was a little cramped but had many advantages. The $240 a month rent was about the same as time in a rehearsal studio.

"We had a lot of complaints about noise when we rehearsed in houses," he said. "We also tried a studio for a while but it was too expensive and took forever to set up and pack up every time. Now we just leave the gear set up and we've had no complaints."

Kennards Self Storage managing director Sam Kennard said the company's first stand-alone storage facility had opened in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley in 1979. Kennards now had eight facilities in Queensland and 60 around Australia. It also had eight sites in New Zealand.

Mr Kennard said storage units were often the answer to expensive rents for burgeoning businesses, with on-site meeting rooms with business facilities as part of the service.

"The facilities have 24-hour access and many people starting out in business use storage units as a cheap alternative to renting office space," he said.

Gun and wine enthusiasts often use units for their collections. Temperature-controlled units are popular for medicines, naturopathic goods and computer equipment and data.

Social researcher Mark McCrindle, of McCrindle Research, said the backyard shed's demise and changing life- styles had led to sky-rocketing demand for self-storage units.

The Australian self-storage industry had started during the 1970s and had grown by 20 per cent last year, with about one in 25 households having units in 1000 facilities nationally, he said. The growth was "a social comment on our times".

"Parents of baby boomers instilled in them the need to save and keep, yet today's world is one of upgrades and obsolescence," Mr McCrindle said.

"Austerity has given way to aspirationalism. People shaped in an age of scarcity now live in an era of abundance and the result is an accumulation of stuff."

The cost of a unit - as cheap as $30 a month for a one-square-metre locker-sized unit - was often more than the contents were worth, he said.

"There's something ironic about buying space that we don't have to store things that we don't need," he said. "Perhaps it's time to acknowledge that we simply own too much."

Gen Y would need storage because of their mobile lifestyles and global careers, he said.

Blackwell Consulting Group said the number of Brisbane and Gold Coast facilities rose from 106 in 2001 to 148 this year.