Extra Space Storage Q3 2026 Earnings with CFO Jeff Norman

Extra Space Storage reported another quarter of improving performance in Q3 2026, continuing a trend the self storage sector has been watching closely. In this episode, Chief Financial Officer Jeff Norman joins host McKall Morris to break down the results, explain what investors were focused on, and put the quarter in the context of the broader industry.

Transcript & Chapters

00:00 About Inside Extra Space Storage Podcast

Norman: I think one other thing that helped in this quarter in particular is we've already had a couple of these strong quarters, but we were kind of the only one in the sector who had really shown that change in performance. I think people were a little cynical, like, “Oh, is it really getting better, or is it just Extra Space?”

Morris: Yeah.

Norman: Now the whole sector is improving, and Extra Space is leading the charge.

Morris: On Inside Extra Space Storage, we sit down with the experts building, operating, and scaling Extra Space Storage, one of the most recognizable names in the self storage industry. If you care about where Extra Space and the self storage industry are headed, you're in the right place.

00:42 Welcome Jeff Norman, CFO

Morris: Welcome to Inside Extra Space Storage, the podcast where we sit down with Extra Space leaders and talk about the company and the industry. Today especially, we're going to be talking about company performance. Just to timestamp this, I'm here with Jeff Norman, our CFO. It is November 1, 2026, and we're doing an earnings call recap. Welcome, Jeff.

Norman: Thanks for the call. Good to be here with you.

Morris: We did our earnings call a little over a week ago, and we're hoping to release this within the next week. So, in timestamping this, we're about two weeks within the window of our earnings.

01:15 Q3 2026 Earnings Recap

Morris: To start, let's get the most foundational piece out there. How did we do? What's our earnings recap summary? Give me the one-minute rundown.

Norman: Sure. We had a great quarter. Our same-store revenue was up 2.7%. That's our fifth consecutive quarter of sequential revenue growth and improvement in performance, and that's the trend we've been wanting to see and that Wall Street has been wanting to see from us.

Norman: We've continued to see expenses be very controlled, which has yielded net operating income growth of about 4.6%. This is a great trend. This is what everybody's been watching for over the last year to year and a half. Most importantly, that's led to core FFO growth per share, or earnings per share growth, of 4.3%.

Norman: Those are all great trends. While the whole earnings season isn't over for the REITs, best we can tell, those will be the best headline numbers of any of our peers.

Morris: Yeah, we love to see it. Good quarter.

02:19 Self Storage's Slow and Steady Recovery

Morris: You talked about how that's what people have wanted to see in this trend. Where is self storage in the trend cycle? Real estate is always cyclical. How does this trend look to you? Where are we in the self storage industry?

Norman: It's a great question. I mentioned people have been watching this for the last 18 months or so. The reason is we've had a lot of new supply delivered into the storage sector over the last several years. That has started to moderate over the last year or two, and as it's been moderating, the question has been whether there's any catalyst that will make demand better.

Norman: If not, can storage see reaccelerating revenue and earnings-per-share growth without some demand catalyst? What we've been telling people is that demand is just steady. We all hear it on the news. Interest rates are high. Housing mobility is slow. We haven't really seen anything that has made people get really excited to go out and rent in a bigger way than they did a year or two ago.

Norman: But even with that flat demand backdrop, because new supply keeps getting absorbed, we're seeing fundamentals improve. Rates are going up, occupancy is going up, and overall we're seeing this slow and steady recovery of the sector.

Norman: I think one other thing that helped in this quarter in particular is we've already had a couple of these strong quarters, but we were kind of the only one in the sector who had really shown that change in performance. I think people were a little cynical, like, “Oh, is it really getting better, or is it just Extra Space?”

Morris: Yeah.

Norman: Now the whole sector is improving, and Extra Space is leading the charge.

Morris: That gives a little more context around how self storage is doing. I remember last quarter especially it was like, “Is Extra Space just this crazy outlier?” And it's like, no, we were just maybe one quarter ahead on some of these things.

Norman: Yep, that's exactly right.

04:18 What Wall Street Wanted to Know

Morris: Thinking about how these numbers and this data are being interpreted by Wall Street, what were some of the key questions analysts had this quarter? What were some of the sticky points for them or things they really wanted to dive into?

Norman: That was the biggest one. Was this the outlier? Is this the exception, or is this a trend? Now that we've had a few quarters in a row of it, people are getting more comfortable that this is a trend.

Norman: One statistic we pointed out is that in the third quarter of 2025, 12 of our top 30 markets had positive same-store revenue growth, so less than half. This quarter, that was 27 out of 30. You've really seen this reversal where it's not just a few markets that have got their footing and are taking off, but the portfolio as a whole has largely recovered and is accelerating.

Morris: That's great data to back up that talking point. Is there anything the analysts didn't really ask about that surprised you? Anything you thought would be interesting or something people should be looking at but maybe didn't see?

Norman: Nothing that they missed. I think they have a good handle on what the key issues are.

05:32 Operations and Capital Allocation

Norman: Something that's maybe a little underappreciated is that we often see quarters where they're really interested in external growth. How many management properties are you adding? How much are you acquiring? How much bridge lending are you doing? Or they focus on operations.

Norman: Sometimes it doesn't seem like they're looking at both together. This is a really great quarter where we have an example of both happening. We had great same-store-level performance, which we already outlined, but in addition to that, we added 78 third-party management properties to the platform. We acquired about $46 million worth of properties. We did about $20 million in bridge loans.

Norman: At the same time, based on where our stock was trading over the last 12 months, we've repurchased almost $500 million of our own shares at about $134 a share, which is about 14% below where we're trading today.

Norman: It was a really good quarter from a capital allocation standpoint. We have lots of different ways to grow and allocate capital, and we're happy to do any of them given the environment we're in.

Morris: Yeah. It's both pieces of it. Operations are really performing well. Our expenses are impressive. Our revenue is impressive. But we're also doing all these other things. Look at the whole package.

Norman: Yep.

Morris: Again, it's a really positive quarter, which makes it much more fun to talk about than any other type of quarter.

07:00 How Self Storage Compares Across Real Estate

Morris: We talked a little bit about the sector and how self storage is doing. How about real estate in general? Where is self storage placed in real estate earnings? I know you already mentioned not all of the real estate companies have reported yet, but how are we looking?

Norman: Looking good. One of the things we'll look at to see how attractive storage is relative to other real estate sectors is our earnings multiple, or our FFO multiple.

Norman: Of, call it, 150 publicly traded equity REITs, we're in the top 20 in terms of multiple. I think it shows that people are interested in storage. They recognize it's a really durable asset class. There's a lot of safety and predictability in the earnings and income streams related to storage, and I think that's reflected in the multiple.

Norman: There's also real value in platforms. Not just anybody can operate a storage property. We truly have a technology advantage, a scale advantage, and a data advantage, and I think that's all reflected in the multiple.

Morris: I love that.

08:06 The Outlook for Self Storage and AI

Morris: Going back to what you were talking about with the self storage sector being durable, how do you think about looking forward? I know there's some instability and questions about demand. You can't crystal-ball the future, but where do you see us moving in the next couple of months, quarters, or years?

Norman: The trend is really encouraging. As I mentioned, the biggest headwind to the sector for several years now has been new supply. That's being absorbed. At the same time, interest rates are really high, construction costs are high, labor costs are high, and land costs are high. So it's hard to justify new development in this environment.

Morris: So supply isn't going to suddenly shift on us?

Norman: I don't think so. I think we've got a pretty decent runway here before it will make sense to develop, where these fundamentals keep improving. That should continue to fuel this slow and steady recovery. Then, when and if some of these demand catalysts kick in, be it housing or anything else, those would just be tailwinds that drive it further.

Norman: The other one that will be interesting and that we're watching is AI. You can hardly watch or read the news without hearing something about AI. We're hearing about it in every sector, and storage is an example of that as well.

Norman: We have to go out and find hundreds of thousands of customers every single month. We have a large portfolio and a relatively low length of stay compared with some other real estate asset classes, so we're always finding customers. With AI, this opens up a whole new channel for where we can find customers and where we can leverage our data and scale to make it easy to do business with us and help customers find us where they're searching for solutions.

Norman: It's still really early. The volume is pretty small in the big scheme of things. But we're seeing large operators like Extra Space front and center in that landscape.

Morris: It's a place where our innovation, scale, and technology all come together to allow us to have this new channel and hopefully capitalize on it really well.

Norman: Yep, exactly right.

10:23 Noah Springer's First Earnings Call as Incoming CEO

Morris: Talking a little bit more about this earnings call, there was one new thing on the call that we haven't mentioned. Noah Springer had been announced as our incoming CEO starting in January 2027, so this was the first call after that announcement. How did it go in the room having Noah there presenting on the call? How did investors respond to Noah?

Norman: It went really well. It was kind of a cool passing-of-the-torch moment. This was Joe Margolis, our current CEO's, final earnings call. He made some really great opening remarks expressing his confidence in the team, in the platform we've built, and in Noah as the next CEO of Extra Space.

Norman: Then he turned the mic over and really let Noah take the call from there, both in terms of prepared remarks and Q&A. Noah was awesome. One of the things that's great is he's a known commodity on Wall Street. He's been out at investor meetings for a number of years. People know him. Everybody in the industry knows him.

Morris: Yeah. He's been here at Extra Space for around 20-plus years. He's a self storage expert, for sure.

Norman: Exactly. Everybody knows him. Everybody has a lot of confidence in him, and he was great. One of the strengths and advantages we have with this deep bench and this team that everybody knows is that it's business as usual. Everyone has the same level of confidence in Noah that they had in Joe, and that puts us in a great position as we head into 2027.

Morris: I'm glad to hear that the transition is going well. With that first earnings call all together as a group, Joe's last one and Noah's first one coming in, it sounds like everything went smoothly.

Norman: Yeah, he did a great job.

12:09 Closing Thoughts on the Quarter

Morris: Are there any other questions I should be asking you before we cut for time? Any final updates from this earnings call that we should hammer?

Norman: No real other updates. I think you covered the key things. It's just exciting to see the industry as a whole getting its footing and for us to be at the front of the pack. We're always excited when we can outperform the sector as a whole.

Norman: That's what we take a lot of pride in doing. That's our goal year in and year out, and this quarter was a great example of it.

Morris: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me, and thank you to everyone who listened to our quick earnings recap here with Jeff Norman. We appreciate you. If you enjoy content like this, like, subscribe, and follow. There'll be more conversations like this coming in the future. Thank you.

Norman: Thanks, everyone.

Morris: Thanks for listening to Inside Extra Space Storage. Each episode features conversations with leaders and teams behind one of the most recognizable names in the self storage industry. To connect with today's guests, reach out to them directly on LinkedIn. And don't forget to follow the show for more insights inside the industry. Until next time, have a great day and an even better tomorrow.

About the Host and Guest

Jeff Norman, Chief Financial Officer

Jeff Norman has been with Extra Space Storage since 2012, and has served on the company's senior management team since 2014, operating in various roles including Director of Financing, Vice President of Investor Relations, and Senior Vice President of Capital Markets and Treasury. Norman was instrumental in establishing the company's bridge lending platform, Extra Space Capital, as well as its sustainability program. Prior to joining Extra Space Storage, Norman served for over eight years at Zions Bank's National Real Estate Group in multiple roles and concluding as a Vice President. He holds a Master's in Business Administration and a Bachelor of Arts in Finance from the University of Utah.

McKall Morris, Director of Corporate Communications

McKall Morris is the Corporate Communications Director at Extra Space Storage. She joined the company in March 2019 after several years in the airline industry. Since joining Extra Space, Morris has played a key role in advancing internal and external communications initiatives, helping shape how the company is represented across all channels. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Communications from Brigham Young University and an MBA from the University of Utah.

Read more about Chief Financial Officer Jeff Norman in his Q&A or hear more from him in a recent podcast episode. To learn more about Extra Space Storage, visit our investor site, or explore the next step in your career by viewing current job openings. This transcript was auto-generated and edited, including paraphrasing for readability. For the full conversation and exact quotes, listen to the complete episode on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify.