Rent vs. Store: the economics of downsizing in Dublin, London & Amsterdam

Renting extra floor vs storing the overflow (monthly), by city

Rent the extra floor Store on Packhood

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A permanent DOI for this dataset is being registered with Zenodo — until then, cite the URL below.

Methodology

To keep ~14 m³ of overflow at home rather than store it, a household needs extra usable floor area. We assume ~2 m of practical stacking height, so 14 m³ ≈ 7 m² of extra floor, held constant across cities. We price that floor at the city’s published residential rent reference (per m²/month, from Daft.ie for IE, Rightmove for UK and Funda/CBS for NL — the same anchors used in the State of Storage index). The alternative is Packhood’s peer-to-peer monthly reference price for storing the same ~14 m³. The saving is the difference between renting that extra floor and storing the overflow. This is a like-for-like marginal-space comparison, not a full model of moving costs, deposits or the lumpiness of the rental market.

Full shared method (sampling, normalisation, audit): packhood.com/state-of-storage/methodology.

Limitations

• Pre-launch: the Packhood storage figure is a reference list price, not realised booking data.
• The 7 m²-of-extra-floor figure derives from a fixed 14 m³ overflow and a 2 m stacking-height assumption; both are transparent modelling choices, not official statistics.
• Rental markets are lumpy — you cannot usually rent exactly 7 m² more. The comparison prices the marginal floor at the average per-m² rent; in practice the next size up may cost more or less.
• Moving costs, deposits, agency fees and the disruption of upsizing are excluded; including them widens the gap in favour of storing.
• Rent references are area-level averages; individual rents vary by exact location, condition and timing.

Sources

• Residential rent references: Daft.ie (IE), Rightmove (UK), Funda / CBS (NL)
• State of Storage — peer-to-peer storage reference rates & methodology
• Rent-vs-store interactive calculator (Dublin / London / Amsterdam / Cork / Rotterdam / Waterford)
• CSO Census 2022 (IE) / ONS Census 2021 (UK) / CBS (NL) — dwelling floor-area context ↗

Questions journalists ask

Is it cheaper to rent a bigger home or store the overflow?

In every city modelled, storing ~14 m³ of overflow peer-to-peer costs much less per month than renting the ~7 m² of extra floor needed to keep it at home. The gap is widest in London and Dublin, where per-m² rent is highest. Figures use public rent references and Packhood’s reference storage rates; the marketplace is pre-launch.

How much extra floor space does home overflow need?

We model ~14 m³ of overflow as roughly 7 m² of extra floor at ~2 m stacking height. That is a transparent modelling assumption rather than an official figure — see the methodology and limitations.