Simply Self Storage Brand Guidelines: Orlando 2003, Brookfield, Blackstone & Public Storage

A founder-led storage company in Florida.

Simply Self Storage was a US self-storage owner and operator based in Orlando, Florida. It was founded in 2003 by Kurt O’Brien, who was still its president in January 2016, Inside Self-Storage reported. It is no longer an independent brand: Public Storage completed its purchase of the company from Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust in September 2023, and in November 2026 the Simply web address forwarded visitors to Public Storage’s own website.

By the mid-2010s Simply was one of the larger operators in the United States. In the 2015 Inside Self-Storage Top-Operators List, an annual ranking of the top 100 operators by square footage, it placed seventh, with a footprint of nearly 13.5 million square feet and a total portfolio of 175 owned and managed facilities across 18 states and Puerto Rico, the magazine reported. It was still seventh on the 2017 list, behind U-Haul.

Ownership changed three times in less than eight years. In January 2016 Inside Self-Storage, citing IPE Real Estate, reported that Brookfield Asset Management had agreed to buy Simply for its Brookfield Strategic Real Estate Partners II fund. Simply planned to buy individual facilities and small to mid-sized portfolios in secondary markets and to consider new developments, according to the same report. Brookfield’s own interim report for the third quarter of 2015 had described a planned purchase of a North American self-storage company with 90 locations that it hoped could be “a cornerstone investment” for a larger national business. Later reports in Inside Self-Storage and REBusinessOnline date the Brookfield acquisition to 2016.

Brookfield, Heitman and Blackstone.

Under Brookfield ownership, which began in 2016, the Orlando company kept opening new facilities and buying others, including in Texas. It opened a 733-unit facility in Frisco, in the northern Dallas suburbs, in early 2019 after about a year of construction, with a mix of climate-controlled, interior and drive-up units, and two Long Island facilities, in Lindenhurst and Hauppauge, totalling 1,945 units, in May 2019, REBusinessOnline reported. On the 2020 Inside Self-Storage lists it placed 15th among 100 facility owners and 21st among 50 management companies, with owned and managed space of more than 10.3 million net rentable square feet across 23 states.

In October 2020 Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT), a non-traded REIT managed by a Blackstone subsidiary, agreed to buy Simply from a Brookfield affiliate, and the purchase completed on 18 December 2020, according to BREIT as reported by Inside Self-Storage. REBusinessOnline put the portfolio at about eight million square feet when it reported the Blackstone agreement in October 2020. BREIT said the deal made it the third-largest non-listed owner of self-storage in the United States. Under BREIT, Simply bought a 14-facility portfolio in the Houston and Dallas areas in November 2021, with more than one million net rentable square feet, nearly two-thirds of it climate-controlled, REBusinessOnline reported.

How storage operators present themselves.

Self-storage is a property business that has to sell itself to people at a moment of change: a move, a renovation, a smaller home or a growing stock of inventory. The way operators present themselves follows from that. The building is the first advertisement, and cladding, roll-up doors and roadside signs can all carry a brand colour. Where a company publishes its building colours or signage system, this guide reports them as the company’s own description.

Online, the category has settled on a familiar set of tools. An operator’s website can lead with a store finder, a unit size guide that explains what fits in each space, a choice of unit types such as heated or drive-up storage, packing supplies and an account page for paying rent and booking. When one owner runs several regional brands, those sites can share a single template, with only the name, the city list and the colours changing, as StorageVault’s Access Storage and Sentinel Storage sites did in November 2026.

Campaigns and characters do the work the buildings cannot. Some operators use mascots, slogans or sports sponsorships to make a functional service memorable; StorageVault, for example, took stadium and broadcast signage with the Toronto Blue Jays in 2023, according to Inside Self Storage. When a guide mentions a mascot or campaign, it says where and when the company used it.

Behind the shop front sits a corporate layer. Some operators are listed companies or real estate investment trusts, or are owned by private-equity firms and family groups, and their investor pages explain store counts, rentable area, acquisitions and listings. Those figures are given here only as a dated source states them, and mergers or takeovers that have not closed are described as pending, with the date they were announced.

A 2023 sale and the end of a brand.

The last change came in 2023. On 24 July 2023 Public Storage, the storage REIT based in Glendale, California, agreed to buy Simply from BREIT. At that point Simply owned 127 facilities and operated 25 more for third parties, a total of more than 11 million net rentable square feet across 18 states, with about 65% of the portfolio in Sun Belt markets and occupancy of 91%, REBusinessOnline reported. Public Storage said the 25 managed properties would move into its own third-party management platform. Its chief executive described the purchase as part of a growth platform built on acquisitions, development, redevelopment, expansion and third-party management, and the company said that after closing its portfolio would comprise 3,222 properties, 3,004 owned and 218 operated for third parties, with more than 214 million net rentable square feet.

The timing was notable in the industry. Inside Self-Storage reported that the agreement came four days after Extra Space closed its purchase of Life Storage, which the magazine said made the combined company the largest operator in the industry. Public Storage then had interests in 2,877 facilities in 40 states and a 35% interest in Shurgard, the European storage company, according to the same report.

The deal completed in September 2023; Inside Self-Storage dated its update 15 September. Public Storage’s chief executive welcomed Simply’s team, customers and third-party management partners to Public Storage’s brand and platform. Simply Self Storage therefore ended as an independent operator in 2023, twenty years after its founding, and the simplyss.com address now forwards visitors to the Public Storage website.

For a design guide, Simply Self Storage shows the life cycle of a mid-sized storage brand: a founder-led Orlando company in 2003, seventh in an industry ranking by 2015, held by a Brookfield fund and then by BREIT, and absorbed by Public Storage in 2023. Compare it with Public Storage, its final owner, and with SmartStop. For this guide we use a grove green, a citrus yellow and a pale mist with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Simply Self Storage’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.