Swiss private market asset manager Partners Group has given a A$100m (€67m) mandate to StoreInvest to develop self-storage facilities in Australia.
Under the mandate, Queensland property group StoreInvest has created a fund, which will have a combined end value of A$120m.
The fund would be seeded with three assets in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.
Euan Kennedy, member of management, private real estate, at Partners Group, told IPE Real Assets that the plan is to build a platform of about 8-10 assets across Australia.
StoreLocal runs 30 self-storage sites in Queensland, NSW, Victoria and Western Australia.
Kennedy said the investment provided the firm with exposure to Australia’s highly fragmented self-storage market.
The Australian investment followed Partners Group’s foray into the Asian self-storage industry last year when it entered an investment to aggregate self-storage assets in Singapore with a combined gross floor area of about 640,000sqft.
Kennedy said: “(like Australia) the self-storage industry is also nascent and highly fragmented in Asia compared to the US.
“Institutional players will be able to gain competitive advantage through higher specification facilities and more sophisticated operations that incorporate the latest technologies.”
He said shrinking housing sizes across major Asia-Pacific cities would drive up demand for self-storage as people looked to store unwanted goods and equipment.
Kennedy added that people living in Asia were just starting to learn about self-storage and growing awareness would increase demand.
The firm believes that an undersupply of self-storage facilities in Asia Pacific underpins the future growth of the sector, which is an “attractive income-generating assets with potential for value creation”.
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