By Ryan Dezember
A leading maker of roll-down doors and other storage-specific building products said high borrowing costs have choked off business from mid-sized and mom-and-pop outfits, who flooded into the market during the pandemic storage-investing frenzy.
Shares of Janus International Group lost about 30% of their value Tuesday after it reported quarterly earnings that fell short of Wall Street's expectations and cut its 2024 sales and profit forecasts by 10% and 24.5%, respectively. The stock has never traded lower.
Janus went public in a 2021 merger with a blank-check company. At the time, a self-storage-investing mania was spreading among individual investors via podcasts, online investing clubs and internet influencers, who touted self-storage ownership as an easy way to get rich without working too much.
The message resonated with herds of young men, who took to calling themselves "storage bros" and launched their own podcasts and social media personas.
Janus CEO Ramey Jackson said that big storage owners, which include stock-market stars like $Public Storage(PSA-N)$ and Extra Space Storage, are doing business as usual. It is the smaller investors who have pressed pause.
"The true mom-and-pops are 100% on the sidelines right now from an interest rate perspective and lending requirement perspective," Jackson said.
For more on the pandemic storage boom, read:
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 29, 2024 16:00 ET (20:00 GMT)
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