Storage Intelligence — a map for an opaque industry

A private data platform that tells you, for any square kilometre of Australia, how much self-storage exists, how much is being built, who owns it, what it charges, and whether the locals actually need any more of it.

It's a working system, not a slide. A 217 MB intelligence database sits on top of a 15.7 GB corpus of council planning documents, provider scrapes, and ABS demand data. It's the map I wish existed when I first started looking at storage as an asset class.

Why it exists

Self-storage in Australia is a $2B industry that behaves like a cottage trade. Supply data is scattered across fourteen provider websites. Demand data lives inside the ABS. New-build intelligence lives inside forty-three different council DA portals, each with its own PDF template and renaming scheme.

Nobody sees the whole thing at once. So everyone guesses — operators guess occupancy, developers guess catchment gaps, investors guess what they're really buying.

The market has CoreLogic for what's already built and Cordell for what's under construction. Neither reads the council DA portals, and neither ties any of it to the underlying demand signal. That gap — the cross-pollination of supply, pipeline, and demand in one reconciled view — is where the real insight lives. Storage Intelligence is the system that closes it, built first for self-storage. The pattern — fuse the three silos, reconcile, keep it fresh — transfers to any market where they live apart.

The capital is there. The information isn't — it's stuck in forty-three council systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Storage Intelligence is what happens when you decide to stop guessing and do the unglamorous work of wiring those systems together.

What's inside

Three loops, each running on its own cadence:

• Supply loop. Facility-level data — location, net lettable area, operator, site owner — reconciled nationally, rolled up to state, suburb, and five-kilometre catchment. Supply-per-capita indices at every level.
• Demand loop. ABS population, dwelling density, household formation, business registrations — the signals that actually predict storage demand. Not proxies. The underlying data.
• Pipeline loop. An NSW Development Application ingestor that reads council planning portals, classifies applications as storage-relevant, extracts approvals and knockbacks from the PDFs, and tracks each one through to outcome. 180 extractions pending, 494 gated for review. NSW first; QLD, VIC and WA are templated to follow.

All three feed a single intelligence.db. A contract audit governs the semantics — sites have owners, facilities have operators, and the pipeline refuses to overstate certainty on mixed portfolios. The database will tell you it doesn't know before it tells you something wrong.

Why it's interesting

Most "market intelligence" in property is a PDF that arrives twelve months late, costs $40K, and describes a market that no longer exists. The ones that run continuously — CoStar, Real Capital Analytics — skip Australian storage entirely because the market is too small to industrialise.

That gap is the whole opportunity. A small, focused system can cover this market deterministically. Every facility geocoded. Every DA classified. Every approval traced. The interesting bit isn't the data — it's that the data refreshes itself. The platform improves monthly without anyone touching it, because the council portals keep filing new PDFs and the pipeline keeps reading them.

The output is a second moat on top of storageprices.au: consumers get honest prices, operators and developers get honest market intelligence. Both work because they come from the same neutral place.

That's the leverage today. The trajectory, for deterministic asset classes where planning envelopes are standardised and development is routine — car parks, light industrial, fuel stations — is a foundation that carries. What you can do with reconciled supply, demand and pipeline data on one asset class, you can do on the next.

Status

Running in production on the Reforged stack. NSW pipeline live and ingesting. First external use cases under discussion with independent operators and small developers. Productised outputs — a monthly NSW DA insight brief and a site-level market-entry report — are the first paid layer.

If you operate, develop, or invest in Australian self-storage, this is the lens. The first conversation is concrete: pick a suburb, pick an asset type, we send a one-page catchment read within a week. Get in touch.

Karl Howard · Reforged · 14 April 2026