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Business and Financial Review

Our core proposition remains a high quality product, competitively priced, with excellent customer service, providing value for money to our customers.

Delivering results

Trading performance

We are pleased to report a solid trading performance for the six months with growth in both occupancy and achieved net rents. Like-for-like revenue growth in the first quarter was 8%, which moderated to 6.5% in the second quarter, with the average for the half year of 7.2%.

As we have often said, the biggest risk to this business is around competition and new supply in our areas of operation. Competitor store openings remain constrained, particularly in London and our other core areas of operation, due to the scarcity of land and competition from other land users. In the market as a whole, new capacity is increasing at around 1 to 2% per annum.

Broader awareness of self storage continues to grow as a result of wider use of the product and the marketing spend from Big Yellow and the industry as a whole. We expect to continue to see this growth in awareness incrementally improve demand for self storage. We are confident that Big Yellow benefits disproportionately from this improving market for our product, due to our market leading brand and operating platform with our focus on London, the South East and large metropolitan cities. Our digital platform now accounts for 87% of our prospects, of which half come through our mobile site.

Store occupancy

Prospects for the six months were in line with last year, albeit on average we saw a slightly lower conversion to move-in which could reflect some hesitancy before, and indeed after, the referendum.

Occupancy growth over the six month period was 210,000 sq ft (2015: 200,000 sq ft), this includes 76,000 sq ft of occupancy acquired in the Nine Elms and Twickenham 2 stores (which are shown within mature stores as they have been open for more than six years). The net occupancy growth in the period was therefore 134,000 sq ft.