Commercial real estate brokerage Colliers' De Jong Self Storage Team has launched a dedicated buy-side representation service for investors acquiring self storage assets, expanding a practice that has historically focused on listing and advisory work. Led by Executive Vice President and Founding Principal Tom de Jong, SIOR, the team says roughly half of its transactions this year have represented buyers rather than sellers, a shift that prompted the new offering.
The service brings on Colin Phelan, who spent the past decade at a family office acquiring self storage properties, where he was directly involved in underwriting, financial analysis and acquisitions. Phelan and Dylan de Jong are building systems that compile available self storage listings from across the market and categorize them by market, price and other criteria. The team is currently tracking 453 active listings.
The launch matters because self storage listings are scattered across LoopNet, Crexi, List Self Storage, individual broker websites and dozens of other sources, forcing buyers to search piecemeal. According to the team, most self storage buyers go unrepresented, seeing only what is actively marketed and underwriting off numbers the seller has built, a dynamic that can leave investors with incomplete information and lopsided negotiating leverage.
The team pools those listings in one place, pre-screens each opportunity, runs a quick analysis and underwriting, and recommends which properties fit the buyer's buy box. De Jong described the practical effect: if a buyer calls looking to enter the self storage space with up to $5 million to spend, the team can send 50-plus listings right away, and depending on the requirement, anywhere from 20 to 100 opportunities.
"We're focused on building tools that help buyers be much more efficient," de Jong said. "There are a hundred different places you can go to find listings. We pool all of that based on our years of experience, so buyers see the full universe of what's available. Then we do the screening, so they don't have to go through each listing to find the good and the bad." He added, "You could call us your outsourced acquisitions team."
The buy-side service covers deal sourcing, operator-level underwriting, and support through closing, including debt and equity coordination and post-close operational setup. For buyers, the offering could compress the time between deciding to acquire and identifying viable targets, while introducing independent underwriting into a market where seller-prepared numbers have often gone unchallenged. For the broader self storage sector, the move signals that representation is migrating toward the demand side, potentially sharpening competition for well-priced assets and raising expectations around due diligence.
The De Jong Self Storage Team at Colliers provides full-lifecycle brokerage and advisory for self storage owners, developers and investors nationwide, from site selection and development through stabilized asset sales and buy-side representation. Led by Tom de Jong alongside his son Dylan de Jong and Phelan, the team has closed more than $2 billion in self storage transactions across 32 states.
