Kiwi Movers director, Regan McMillan, has written a guest blog for The Leaders Council, looking at the effects Covid-19 has had on the business over the past 12 months. Assessing the changes in working practices as well as knock on effects from hospitality closures and the need for self-storage as offices complying with social distancing rules. The company has a long history across Greater London and the South East working in storage, removals, transport and logistics.
Our now year-long journey with Covid-19 has brought about many changes to our way of working at Kiwi Movers. Our staff, like workforces across the UK, have adapted to social distancing practices, remote working, additional hand hygiene measures and the requirement for face coverings. As well as adaptations to our working procedures there have been striking changes to the use of our services – the reasons for and durations of self-storage use have varied during this past year.
The stamp duty holiday has seen a 7% increase in house sales in London and southern England since the summer of 2020. As a result, we have seen a higher than usual turnover of units. An increased number of people need space to store their home contents in between selling their house or finishing a lease and taking the keys to their newly purchased home. Additionally, with people confined to their homes, DIY has increased as people make the space they live in more appealing or start projects they have been putting off. This often requires the use of storage units while they undertake work.
University students, in particular those from overseas, will often use our self-storage facility during summer holidays to safely contain those items that need to move with them year-to-year, but are not required during the 2-3 months of their summer break. Think about what a tome a multilingual dictionary is or what to do with a favoured reading lamp and a couple of treasured mugs – you don’t want to be without them when you move to your next digs, but neither do you want to ship them home each summer only to lug them back with you come autumn time.
With COVID effectively closing campuses and many students moving away from their university to take up online learning from home, we’ve seen a rise in demand for smaller units to store these kinds of essentials until regular university life resumes. Self-storage is a more cost effective and secure solution than continuing to pay rent for a room.
We have all become aware of the accelerated growth of e-commerce that this pandemic and the ‘stay at home’ requirement has fostered. Traditional brick and mortar retailers are going online or expanding their online presence due to stores being required to shut. A self-storage facility presents an opportunity for a range of retailers to operate their online sales from – we’ve seen everything from sweet sellers to furniture producers turn to us for help.
Hand in hand with the growth in working from home has been a natural growth in home offices, with a recent enquiry for space from a company that is now booming with installing desks for home offices. Self-storage has also become a natural partner for ‘last mile delivery’ for small distribution hubs including the storage of PPE for NHS Trusts during the early part of the pandemic.
People working from home are also seeking to streamline their spaces and are taking some of our smaller units to store what otherwise would have been occupying their newly adapted home office space. Indeed, much of the nation at large has engaged to greater or lesser degrees of de-cluttering on account of many of us now spending most of our time at home with the entire family.
Some will have turned to eBay or Facebook Marketplace to find new owners for unwanted clutter. Others, not quite ready to part from their belongings, decide that a short-term solution at least is taking a unit at our self-storage facility to safely keep items until there is the need or space to have them back at home.
The disruption to the retail and hospitality sector in particular has also led to significant changes in how they operate, limiting the number of customers they can have at any one time. This has meant that many have turned to self-storage to store retail equipment and tables and chairs.
The Self-Storage Association UK reports that the industry has increased average occupancy at facilities across the UK from 76.2% to 82.3% year-on-year for 2020. This represents an 8% increase. Throughout the lockdowns of the past 12 months self-storage facilities have remained open and have been safe places for customers to visit requiring minimal, if any, contact with staff.
Covid has also fast-tracked technological change within the Self-Storage industry. This includes the ability to reserve units online, contactless check-in including the signing of contracts, to the use of Bluetooth technology locks for accessing both facilities and individual units. This accelerated change in the use of technology is also influenced by our changing buying behaviour, be it through Uber, Amazon or Deliveroo, our phones unlock and control our homes, and self-storage is just an extension of this.
Self-storage is not what you would consider a dynamic industry, but the last year has shown its resilience and increasing importance to the wider UK economy and personal lives.
