Revenue Durability and Project Feasibility in RV and Boat Storage

Why an asset class can strengthen even as new-unit sales fall, and what separates a financeable project from a risky one.

There is a paradox sitting at the center of the RV and boat storage market right now, and most coverage of the sector misses it. New RV shipments fell 13.5 percent year over year through the first four months of 2026, and the RV Industry Association cut its full-year forecast to a median of roughly 314,000 units, an 8.2 percent decline from 2025 (2). New powerboat sales dropped 8.8 percent in 2025, to 215,237 units (4). By the logic that governs most consumer-durable industries, that should be bad news for everyone who stores those products.

It is not. Over the same stretch, rents for dedicated RV and boat parking rose 4.4 percent year over year, the strongest reading since Yardi Matrix began tracking the segment (1). Institutional capital exceeding 2.5 billion dollars has moved into the sector since 2021 (5, 9). Cap rates for stabilized Class A assets have compressed into the high-5 percent range (5). The asset class is strengthening while the products it stores are selling more slowly.

The explanation is the single most important thing a lender or investor needs to understand about this sector, and it is the foundation of everything that follows. RV and boat storage is not financed against what Americans are buying this year. It is financed against what is already sitting in the national fleet, and increasingly, against what cannot legally sit in the driveway. That distinction is what makes the revenue durable. It is also why feasibility in this asset class turns on questions that have very little to do with the headline sales figures and almost everything to do with the local supply pipeline, the entitlement path, and how a given operator handles a defaulted tenant.

This piece lays out the durability case, tests it against the data, and then maps where that durability holds and where it bends. The goal is the question every credit committee actually asks: will the projected revenue support the debt through the full term of the loan, and what could break it.

The durability case: why the income holds

Three structural features give RV and boat storage revenue its resilience. None of them is cyclical, and that is the point.

The first is that storage demand tracks the installed base, the stock, not annual sales, the flow. This is the load-bearing insight, and the recent data makes it unusually clear. RV shipments peaked at 600,240 units in 2021, fell to a trough of 313,174 in 2023, then recovered modestly to 342,220 in 2025 (2). Boat sales followed a similar arc. The flow has been volatile.

The stock has not. Roughly 8.1 million U.S. households owned an RV in 2025, with another 16.9 million reporting intent to buy within five years (3). On the water, the United States carried 11.8 million registered and documented boats in 2024, plus an estimated 3.6 million unregistered vessels, for a fleet near 15.4 million (4). Combine the two and roughly 25 million American households own an RV, a boat, or both (6).

That parked fleet is what needs storing, and it does not shrink when sales slow. A household that bought a fifth wheel or a wake boat during the 2020 to 2022 surge still owns it. The owner of a 90,000 dollar boat does not sell it because the equity market had a bad quarter, and even when an owner does exit, the unit usually transfers to a new owner rather than leaving the fleet. The 2025 pullback in sales pulled down the flow; it left the stock at or near record levels. Storage revenue is anchored to the stock.

There is a second layer here worth drawing out. The pandemic-era buyer cohort did not just enlarge the fleet, it changed its composition in a way that favors paid storage. The median age of an RV owner fell from 53 in 2021 to 49 in 2025, first-time owners now make up 36 percent of the base, and median annual use rose from 20 to 30 days (3). Younger owners are far less likely to own the acreage a motorhome needs and far more likely to live in a community that prohibits storing it at home. The newest buyers are the ones most dependent on a commercial facility.

A regulatory floor under demand

The second structural feature is the one that turns ordinary demand into something closer to mandatory demand. A growing share of American households is legally barred from storing a recreational vehicle or boat at home.

A record 78.1 million Americans now live in roughly 373,000 community associations, about one in four residents and more than 35 percent of all U.S. homes (7). The trend is accelerating: 65.7 percent of newly completed homes and 81 percent of homes sold in 2025 were inside a community association, up from less than half of new construction in 2009 (7). Nearly half of Gen Z homeowners are already in an HOA (7), which means the constraint is propagating to the youngest and fastest-growing band of buyers.

The overwhelming majority of these associations restrict or prohibit parking an RV, boat, or trailer in a driveway, a yard, or on the street. Municipalities are tightening in parallel, with overnight bans, two-hour limits on oversized vehicles, and permit regimes appearing across cities of every political stripe. The physical reality compounds the legal one. The median new single-family lot has fallen to about 8,506 square feet, near its record low, while modern fifth wheels and Class A motorhomes routinely run 32 to 45 feet, and side-yard setbacks in new subdivisions have compressed to as little as 7.5 feet (7). Bigger rigs, smaller lots, stricter covenants. The owner who would happily park at home increasingly cannot.

Demand built on a legal prohibition behaves very differently from demand built on preference. It does not soften when discretionary budgets tighten, because the alternative is not store it cheaper, it is store it nowhere. And it grows mechanically as more housing stock falls under HOA governance. This is the closest thing to a structural floor that exists in any storage asset class.

Margins that do not erode

The third feature is the cost structure, and it matters because durable revenue is only useful if it survives the trip to net operating income.

Open-lot RV and boat storage runs lean. There is no climate control to power, minimal on-site staff, and a low insured building value because the asset is mostly graded land, fencing, lighting, and a gate. Operating expense ratios for dedicated facilities run in the range of 35 to 37 percent, which puts net operating income margins around 63 to 65 percent, and the most efficient technology-enabled platforms reach 70 to 74 percent (9). Customer tenure runs two to five years, monthly churn sits around 1 to 2 percent, and delinquency stays under 1 percent because owners of high-value assets rarely walk away from them (5, 9).

Compare that to the broader self-storage sector, where 2025 told a cautionary tale about cost inflation. The publicly traded operators saw same-store expenses rise 4 to 9 percent, roughly double their revenue growth, and same-store net operating income fell across the year even with occupancy near record levels (12). Property taxes were the worst offender, with REIT tax lines climbing 11 to 19 percent year over year (12). The lesson is that durable top-line revenue does not automatically produce durable net operating income. What protects the RV and boat storage margin is that its cost base is concentrated in slow-moving fixed items rather than the fast-inflating payroll and utility lines that pressure enclosed product. The open-lot model is the most cost-durable format in storage.

What the performance data actually shows

The durability thesis is structural, but it has to show up in the numbers, and it does.

National street rents for dedicated parking reached 6.38 dollars per square foot annualized in September 2025, up 4.4 percent year over year (1). The figure matters less than the trajectory and the comparison. Traditional self-storage rents were essentially flat over the same period, growing under 1 percent after two years of decline (1, 19). The spread between the two segments widened from roughly 130 basis points in early 2025 to nearly 380 basis points by the fall (1). Money that wants storage exposure is finding more of it in vehicles.

The rate structure varies sharply by format, and the gradient is the developer's most important product decision. Open and uncovered parking, the lowest-cost format, rents in the range of 75 to 150 dollars per month in most markets and costs roughly 30,000 to 100,000 dollars per acre to build. Covered or canopy parking commands a 40 to 80 percent premium. Fully enclosed drive-up units run 150 to 400 dollars per month, and climate-controlled enclosed product, the premium tier built for high-end coaches and boats, commands 300 to 500 dollars and more, at two to three times the open-lot rate, while costing 60 to 100 dollars per square foot or more to construct (9). The economics push in two directions at once. Open lots offer the leanest cost base and the fastest path to break-even; enclosed product offers the highest rents and the strongest defense against informal competition. The right answer depends entirely on the market.

It is worth being precise about the revenue basis, because the durability argument depends on it. The honest measure for any storage thesis is effective revenue, not asking rent, because concessions and bad debt sit in the gap between the two. RV and boat storage performs well on the effective basis precisely because the gap is narrow. Concessions are modest in a supply-constrained market, churn is low, and delinquency is minimal. The headline rent and the realized rent are closer together here than in almost any competing asset class.

Occupancy is the one place where the data is genuinely thin, and a rigorous analysis should say so. No major data provider publishes a national physical occupancy figure for dedicated RV and boat storage; the trackers measure rents, cap rates, and supply, not occupancy. The available occupancy figures are operator and market specific. Facilities in strong markets routinely report occupancy above 95 percent, Sun Belt markets are commonly cited in the low- to mid-90s, and the most granular public benchmark, a Texas facility documented at 97 percent sustained occupancy across four years, sits at the top of that range (9). These figures are directional rather than nationally measured, and any feasibility analysis should treat them that way, building occupancy assumptions from local comparable facilities rather than national averages.

Supply is the binding constraint

If demand is the durable part of the story, supply is the variable that decides whether a given project works. The national picture and the local picture point in opposite directions, and reconciling them is the heart of feasibility.

Nationally, the sector is structurally undersupplied. Yardi Matrix tracks roughly 2,060 dedicated facilities (1), against an installed base of 25 million owning households. StorTrack counts fewer than 5,000 purpose-built facilities even when hybrid sites are included, and estimates that inventory needs to roughly double to meet demand (6). Toy Storage Nation puts the gap higher, at something like five times current supply, and notes that closing it would require new facilities to open at a pace the industry has never sustained (9). By any of these measures, the country needs far more storage than it has.

The pipeline is not filling that gap quickly, which is good news for existing assets. Under-construction supply fell to 2.3 percent of inventory in the fall of 2025, down from a peak of 4 percent in late 2023 (1). Higher financing costs and the difficulty of entitling large vehicle lots have throttled new development, and that slowdown is exactly why rents inflected positive. Supply discipline, more than demand strength, drove the 2025 rent recovery.

But the national shortage masks a real and growing problem at the local level. A cluster of markets absorbed heavy deliveries between 2022 and 2024, and they are now paying for it with flat rents. This is the single most important fact for site selection, and it leads directly into geography.

Geography is destiny

In RV and boat storage, the relationship between recent supply and rent growth is close to a straight inverse line, and it is the most reliable feasibility signal in the data.

Consider the two ends of the 2025 distribution. The strongest rent markets were Los Angeles, up 12.8 percent to nearly 15 dollars per square foot; New York and Connecticut, up 11.4 percent; Charleston, up 11.4 percent; and Grand Rapids, up 10.6 percent, with the highest large-unit rent growth in the country (1). What these markets share is not high ownership counts. It is that none of them had a single new dedicated facility delivered in three years (1). Scarcity, plus high barriers to new entry, equals pricing power.

The weakest markets tell the mirror-image story. San Antonio posted zero rent growth, Houston grew 0.5 percent, Jacksonville 1 percent, the Southwest Florida coast 1.2 percent, and Dallas-Fort Worth 1.9 percent (1). These six markets averaged 19.7 percent trailing three-year supply growth, against a national figure of 13 percent (1). San Antonio increased its inventory by nearly 48 percent in three years and is still building, with more than 11 percent of inventory under construction even as rents went nowhere (1). That is the clearest oversupply warning in the sector, and it is a direct caution against assuming that a high-ownership, high-growth state is automatically a good place to build.

This is the trap that catches developers who underwrite to ownership data alone. Texas leads the nation in new RV registrations, with more than 54,000 in 2025, and holds the most dedicated facilities of any state at 953 (6, 18). Florida carries roughly 1.2 million registered boats, the most in the country (4, 20). Both states are demand-rich. Neither fact protected their most overbuilt metros from rent compression, because supply ran past even strong demand. Ownership establishes the ceiling on demand. The local pipeline determines whether that ceiling is reachable.

The geography of ownership itself is worth understanding, because it is not uniform. Total RV and boat counts concentrate in the populous Sun Belt, in California, Texas, and Florida. Per-capita ownership tells a different story: the Mountain West, Great Plains, and Upper Midwest lead, with Alaska, Oregon, Montana, Minnesota, and South Dakota at the top of the RV list (17). Boating is bifurcated between the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest, where Minnesota carries an extraordinary 143.6 registered boats per 1,000 residents, and the warm-water South Atlantic and Gulf, where Florida and the Carolinas are growing fast (4, 20). The Great Lakes region alone accounts for roughly a third of national boat registrations, and that demand is highly seasonal, which makes cold-climate markets natural homes for winter storage and for enclosed product.

The migration data adds the forward-looking layer, and it has shifted in a way that reshapes the opportunity map. The Census Bureau's 2025 estimates show South Carolina as the fastest-growing state in the country, with North Carolina leading all states in net domestic migration and Tennessee close behind (10). Florida and Texas, the pandemic-era migration champions, decelerated sharply, with Florida falling to eighth in net domestic migration (10). The significance for this sector is that the Carolinas and Tennessee are absorbing population without yet having absorbed the dedicated-storage building wave that hit Texas and Arizona. Charleston is the live proof of the pattern: strong in-migration meeting zero new supply produced double-digit rent growth. The forward opportunity is to follow migration into markets where supply has not yet responded, and to avoid chasing it into the metros where supply already over-responded.

One more regional category deserves attention because it carries distinct underwriting characteristics: the snowbird and recreation markets. Arizona, the Texas Rio Grande Valley, and Florida's Gulf Coast experience counter-seasonal demand as northern owners store rigs near their winter destinations. Quartzsite, Arizona, a town of about 2,400 permanent residents, swells toward a peak approaching a million visitors from October through March (9). The Rio Grande Valley hosts an estimated 100,000 Winter Texans annually (9). These markets reward a wider trade-area analysis, often a seven-mile radius rather than the three to five miles a feasibility study would draw for traditional self-storage, because facilities draw tenants across state lines. They also support longer average length of stay, which strengthens revenue durability. The caveat is that the core metros, Phoenix and the larger Texas markets, are seeing supply catch up; the snowbird tailwind is strongest in the smaller, harder-to-enter submarkets such as Apache Junction or Mission than in the major metros around them.

The capital side: why lenders are leaning in

The durability of the income translates directly into the durability of the debt, and the capital markets have noticed.

Stabilized Class A RV and boat storage now trades at cap rates of 5.75 to 6.25 percent, with roughly a 50-basis-point spread to lower-quality assets (5). That range sits inside the band for traditional self-storage, a notable inversion of the historical discount the niche used to carry, and a direct sign of institutionalization. The compression is supported by the asset's fundamentals: the two-to-five-year tenure, the low churn, the sub-1 percent delinquency, and the high margins all reduce the perceived risk that justified wider cap rates in the past.

Capital has followed. Beyond the 2.5 billion dollars in specialized commitments since 2021, the sector saw RecNation assemble a portfolio of 65 to 70 facilities backed by a 500 million dollar credit facility, Madison Capital fold its boat and RV brand into the Go Store It platform in early 2026 to create a 189-property operation across 27 states, and a Centerbridge and Reframe Holdings venture launch with a 350 million dollar aggregation facility from JPMorgan (5, 9, 25). The broader signal came in March 2026, when Public Storage agreed to acquire National Storage Affiliates in a transaction valued at 10.5 billion dollars (24). That deal concentrates traditional self-storage rather than dedicated vehicle assets, but it is the clearest institutional endorsement of the storage complex in a generation. The sector remains roughly 85 to 90 percent owned by independent and family operators, which means the consolidation runway is long (9).

The rate environment is the genuine headwind, and it should be named plainly. As of its June 2026 meeting, the Federal Reserve held its policy rate at 3.50 to 3.75 percent for a fourth consecutive time, and the projections pointed to the next move being as likely a hike as a cut, driven by re-accelerating inflation (15). The 10-year Treasury sat near 4.46 percent (15). Commercial real estate carries a large debt maturity wall, with the Mortgage Bankers Association estimating roughly 875 billion dollars of commercial and multifamily debt maturing in 2026 (16). That wall is concentrated in office and older bridge debt, and cash-flowing storage is relatively insulated, but every refinancing now has to clear updated assumptions and often fresh equity. Higher-for-longer rates keep both acquisition and development underwriting disciplined, which is healthy for the sector even as it slows the pace.

For lenders specifically, the most important fact about this asset class is that it is financeable through the Small Business Administration, and that changes the feasibility math in the borrower's favor. Self-storage, and by extension boat and RV storage, has been SBA-eligible since 2010, treated as an owner-operated business rather than a prohibited passive real estate holding, because the operator runs the entire facility and provides services such as security, access management, and tenant administration (14). That eligibility unlocks up to 90 percent financing.

The two SBA programs serve different deal profiles. The 504 program, with its two-loan structure, requires roughly 10 percent down on an acquisition and 15 percent on most ground-up construction, offers long-term fixed rates on the CDC portion, and recently funded at all-in rates in the high-5 percent range (14). It suits a stabilized, long-term hold. The 7(a) program, with a practical ceiling of 5 million dollars and a 25-year fully amortizing term, can roll land, construction, soft costs, a lease-up payment reserve, and working capital into a single loan, which fits a ground-up project that needs to carry itself through lease-up (14). For an owner-operator, the SBA path is materially more capital-efficient than conventional financing, which typically demands 25 to 35 percent equity (14).

The eligibility comes with a higher bar than it did two years ago. The SBA's revised operating procedures, effective June 2025, reverted to stricter pre-2021 standards: a mandatory 10 percent equity injection on startups and changes of ownership, seller notes counted toward that injection only on full standby and capped at half the requirement, a higher minimum credit score, collateral required on smaller loans, and reinstated tax-transcript verification (14). The tightening followed the 7(a) program's first negative cash flow in over a decade, attributed to defaults among underqualified borrowers. The practical effect for this sector is that sponsor quality and a defensible, independent feasibility study matter more than they used to. A credit committee evaluating a ground-up RV and boat storage loan in 2026 will want to see conservative lease-up assumptions, verified equity, and evidence that the local market is not one of the overbuilt ones. The durability of the asset class supports the loan; it does not excuse weak underwriting on the individual deal.

The honest counterweight: where durability bends

A rigorous analysis earns its credibility on the downside, not the upside. The durability thesis is strong, but it is conditional, and four risks deserve direct treatment.

The first is cost inflation, which is real but turning. The cost story of 2023 through 2025 was a warning. Property taxes, the largest single operating line, rose at double-digit rates across the public operators, driven heavily by reassessment after acquisition, the risk that a jurisdiction resets a property's assessed value to its purchase price (12). In annual-reassessment states such as Texas, a buyer who models taxes off the seller's stale bill can see that line jump several-fold. Insurance was the second shock, with premiums in catastrophe-exposed markets such as Florida, Texas, and the Gulf coast rising 30 to 50 percent over the hard-market years, alongside the spread of percentage-based wind and hail deductibles (11, 13). The encouraging development is that the insurance market has turned. A relatively disaster-light 2025 flipped the cycle, and by early 2026 commercial property premiums were posting their first broad decline in years, with the steepest cuts in the most catastrophe-exposed accounts (13). The cost side of net operating income durability is improving. The two residual threats are reassessment on acquisition, which a feasibility analysis must model to a post-purchase basis rather than the seller's historical bill, and the fragility of the insurance reprieve, which a single major catastrophe year could reverse.

The second is cyclicality, the stress case the bull thesis underplays. RV and boat purchases are textbook discretionary, debt-financed, leading-indicator spending, and the sales side is unambiguously cyclical. The relevant question is how storage demand behaves in a downturn, and the honest answer is that it is stickier than sales but not counter-cyclical. Self-storage broadly proved resilient in the last recession; it was the only property sector to post positive REIT returns in 2008, and same-store revenue declines were modest (11). But household storage benefits from a feature that recreational storage lacks: downturns generate life events, downsizing, relocation, divorce, that create storage demand. Recreational storage has no such counter-cyclical engine. In a deep or prolonged downturn, financial stress drives some owners to sell, repossessions rise, and a sold or repossessed unit vacates the space. RVs depreciate roughly 30 percent off the lot, so financed owners are chronically upside-down, and the repossession-auction channels for both RVs and boats are active and well-developed (9). The current consumer backdrop is mixed rather than alarming: aggregate household debt-service burdens sit well below their 2007 peak, but the lower-income borrowers who disproportionately finance entry-level rigs are showing visible strain in delinquency data (21). There is a related risk specific to the recent boom. The 2020 to 2022 surge pulled demand forward and may have created a one-time bulge in the ownership base. If that cohort exits faster than new buyers arrive, certain overbuilt submarkets could face attrition meeting excess capacity at the same time. The prudent response is not to avoid the sector but to underwrite a downturn scenario with elevated attrition, longer lease-up, and modest rent concessions, and to apply that haircut most heavily in the markets that absorbed the most pandemic-era ownership.

The third is titled-vehicle lien law, a genuine drag unique to this asset class. This is the risk most often overlooked, and it is specific to storing titled property. When a self-storage tenant defaults, the operator can sell ordinary goods through a straightforward lien-sale process. An RV or boat cannot be sold at auction without first clearing the certificate of title, which is difficult when the owner cannot be located and requires working through abandoned-vehicle procedures that can take months (11). During those months, the unit sits on the lot accruing rent the operator may never recover. Worse, a lender's lien on a financed vehicle is senior to the storage lien, which means an operator who does manage to sell is often just working to satisfy the bank (11). The litigation exposure is real. Wrongful-sale claims are strict-liability conversion torts, and they arise from simple procedural mistakes rather than bad intent. Reported verdicts have ranged from roughly 78,500 dollars to over 1.2 million dollars, including cases where following the abandoned-vehicle statute did not shield the operator because notice was deficient (11, 22). More than 40 states have adopted some form of tow-in-lieu-of-sale remedy that gives operators a cleaner exit, but the statutes are non-uniform and require precise compliance (11). The practical consequence for revenue durability is that bad-debt recovery in this asset class is structurally weaker than in household storage. The mitigants are that monthly rents are low, so per-unit default exposure is limited, and that disciplined operators use careful lease addenda and state-specific procedures. A feasibility analysis should reward the operator that has those procedures in place.

The fourth is entitlement risk, the most common reason a project never gets built. Zoning is the largest feasibility risk in the sector, and it is jurisdiction-specific. Municipalities across at least 15 states have imposed moratoria, confined storage to industrial zones, or banned new development outright over the past several years, frequently citing aesthetics, low job creation, and low sales-tax yield (11). Conditional-use approval for an RV and boat lot routinely takes six months to two years, and it is common to spend 25,000 to 150,000 dollars on the approval process before financing is even in place (11). Large vehicle lots draw neighborhood opposition over traffic and appearance, and a planning commission can deny a project that staff recommended for approval. The environmental and site-development layer adds cost and time, though it is rarely a deal-killer: any lot disturbing an acre or more triggers federal stormwater permitting and a pollution-prevention plan, and large impervious surfaces intensify detention requirements (23). The implication for feasibility is direct. A lender should want evidence that a project is zoned by right or fully entitled before funding, should treat moratorium-prone jurisdictions as elevated risk, and should price the carry cost of a six-to-twenty-four-month approval window into the pro forma.

There is also a competitive structural risk worth flagging. Peer-to-peer marketplaces such as Neighbor.com offer driveway and lot storage at roughly half of traditional rates, with a regulatory-light model that pushes liability onto hosts (9). That informal supply is invisible to the data providers, so formal market metrics understate effective competition in dense suburbs. It cannot match the security, title-handling, or amenities of a professional Class A facility, which is precisely where institutional operators defend their pricing, but it does cap pricing power at the low end of the market.

What this means for the model

Pull the threads together and a clear framework emerges for evaluating an RV and boat storage project. It is not the demand question that decides most deals, because demand is the durable part. It is the site.

Screen for supply discipline first. Before looking at anything else, examine the local trailing three-year supply growth as a share of inventory. Markets above roughly 18 percent of inventory added in three years, San Antonio, Chicago, the California Central Valley, Minneapolis, Dallas-Fort Worth, Jacksonville, warrant heavy skepticism. Markets at or near zero recent deliveries, paired with positive in-migration, are the high-conviction targets. A local under-construction pipeline above 7 percent of inventory should flatten near-term rent assumptions to flat or negative.

Overlay migration on the supply-disciplined markets. Among the low-supply candidates, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Idaho combine strong population growth with comparatively thin dedicated supply, and they have not yet seen the building wave that neutralized the migration tailwind in Texas and Arizona. Charleston is the proof case. High-barrier coastal and urban metros, Los Angeles, New York and Connecticut, the Bay Area, offer extreme rents and near-impossible entitlement, which means durable pricing power for any operator that secures a site.

Match the format to the geography. Cold-climate Great Lakes, Upper Midwest, and Mountain West markets reward enclosed and covered product built for winter protection. Sun Belt snowbird markets favor open and covered parking with amenities such as wash bays and dump stations for high-value rigs. Coastal boating markets reward proximity to water and trailer-friendly access. A blended unit mix, roughly half open lot with the balance in covered and enclosed, hedges format risk in markets where the optimal product is uncertain.

Diligence the operator and the entitlement path as first-order risks, not afterthoughts. Confirm the zoning is secured before committing capital. Require the operator's state-specific procedures for titled-vehicle defaults. Model property taxes to a post-reassessment basis. And stress the pro forma against a downturn, with elevated attrition and a longer lease-up, applying the heaviest haircut in markets that absorbed the most pandemic-era ownership.

A project that clears those tests has a genuinely durable revenue profile, and durable revenue is what supports durable debt. That is the throughline of this entire analysis: an asset class whose income holds across cycles can carry financing that holds across cycles, provided the individual deal is sited and structured with discipline.

Outlook

The forward picture is one of a sector still working through a near-term adjustment while the long-term fundamentals strengthen. The 2026 decline in new RV and boat sales is real, and it will moderate the rate at which new demand forms. But it does not touch the installed fleet that drives storage demand, and that fleet sits at record levels. The supply pipeline is decelerating, which supports existing assets, even as a handful of overbuilt metros work off their excess. The regulatory floor under demand, the spread of HOA governance, is not only intact but expanding. And the capital markets are signaling conviction through institutional consolidation and cap-rate compression, tempered only by a rate environment that keeps everyone disciplined.

For the lender or investor, the takeaway is not that RV and boat storage is uniformly attractive, because it is not. It is that the asset class offers genuine revenue durability that most of its peers cannot match, and that the difference between a strong project and a weak one lies almost entirely in execution at the site level. Get the geography right, secure the entitlements, structure the financing through the right program, partner with a disciplined operator, and stress-test the downside, and the durability does the rest.

That discipline is the difference between a number an investor hopes holds and a number an underwriter can defend in committee. It is the standard MMCG builds its feasibility studies to, across more than thirty asset classes and every major lending program. To discuss how the revenue, supply, and feasibility picture pencils on a specific storage project, book an introductory call.

June 21, 2026, by Michal Mohelsky, J.D. Principal of MMCG Invest, LLC, feasibility study consultant serving feasibility studies for assisted living facilities.

Reach out to discuss how our methodology supports your lending decision.

Michal Mohelsky, J.D. | Principal | mmcginvest.com 

Contact: michal@mmcginvest.com

Phone: (628) 225-1125

Disclaimer: This report is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Data presented herein is derived from proprietary MMCG databases and third-party sources believed to be reliable; however, MMCG Invest makes no representation as to the accuracy or completeness of such information. Figures from third-party industry databases have been independently verified and, where appropriate, adjusted to reflect MMCG's proprietary analytical methodology. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

1. Yardi Matrix, RV & Boat Storage National Report, Fall 2025.

2. RV Industry Association (RVIA), monthly shipment data and Summer 2026 RV RoadSigns forecast (ITR Economics).

3. RV Industry Association and Go RVing, 2025 RV Owner Demographic Profile (conducted by Ipsos).

4. National Marine Manufacturers Association (NMMA), 2024 U.S. Recreational Boating Statistical Abstract and 2025 retail sales data.

5. Cushman & Wakefield, RV & Boat Storage 2026 Investment Insider.

6. StorTrack, Vehicle, RV and Boat Storage Data, February 2026.

7. Foundation for Community Association Research (Community Associations Institute), 2025 Statistical Review.

8. Outdoor Industry Association and Outdoor Foundation, Outdoor Participation Trends Report, 2026.

9. Toy Storage Nation, industry research and operator commentary, 2025 to 2026.

10. U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 Population Estimates (released January 2026).

11. Inside Self-Storage and Modern Storage Media, including the 2024 Self-Storage Expense Guidebook (with Newmark) and coverage of zoning and lien law.

12. Self-storage REIT public filings: Extra Space Storage, CubeSmart, Public Storage, and National Storage Affiliates, 2025.

13. Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers (CIAB), Commercial Property and Casualty Market Survey.

14. U.S. Small Business Administration, SOP 50 10 8 (effective June 1, 2025) and associated lender guidance.

15. Federal Reserve, Federal Open Market Committee statement and projections, June 17, 2026.

16. Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), commercial and multifamily mortgage maturity estimates.

17. ConsumerAffairs, RV Ownership Statistics 2026.

18. Statistical Surveys Inc. (SSI), 2025 RV registration data (reported via RV News).

19. StorageCafe and RentCafe, self-storage and RV-storage market reports, 2025 to 2026.

20. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), vessel registration data.

21. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Household Debt and Credit Report, Q1 2026.

22. Gonzales v. Personal Storage, Inc. (1997); Dubey v. Public Storage, Inc.; McCants v. CD & PB Enterprises (2024).

23. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, NPDES Construction General Permit and Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plan requirements.

24. Public Storage, announced acquisition of National Storage Affiliates, March 16, 2026.

25. Walker & Dunlop; Centerbridge Partners and Reframe Holdings self-storage joint venture, 2025 to 2026.