Public Storage (NYSE: PSA) and Welltower (NYSE: WELL) have established a strategic data science partnership, integrating Welltower’s data science-driven capital allocation expertise with Public Storage’s operational, pricing, and customer analytics capabilities.
Welltower, an S&P 500 company focusing on rental housing for aging seniors across the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, launched its industry-leading data science platform in 2016. This platform, which encompasses machine learning, deep learning, and AI, is led by a multidisciplinary team of Ph.
D. computer scientists, engineers, statisticians, and mathematicians. It is designed to dynamically direct capital to high risk-adjusted return opportunities across acquisitions, developments, dispositions, and lending, having facilitated over $80 billion in capital allocation activities in recent years. The company has reduced transaction timelines from 5-9 months to mere weeks through advanced mathematical models.
Public Storage, an S&P 500 member that primarily acquires, develops, owns, and operates self-storage facilities across 40 states in the United States and has a 35% common equity interest in Shurgard Self Storage Limited in seven Western European countries, has developed operational data science capabilities. These capabilities include revenue management, customer behavior modeling, demand forecasting, and operating efficiency analytics, serving as core drivers of net operating income growth and margin expansion, central to its PS4.0™ strategy.
Under the partnership, Public Storage will license bespoke models from Welltower to deploy capital with enhanced velocity and precision for granular acquisitions, aiming for stronger risk-adjusted returns. These models utilize supervised and unsupervised learning to identify micro-markets with high return and growth potential. Concurrently, Public Storage will share its operational data science capabilities to further enhance Welltower’s operating performance and analytics-driven decision-making across the Welltower Business System.
Both companies, as leaders in their respective sectors with extensive histories, possess proprietary data repositories. These data sets are not accessible or replicable by competitors, third-party providers, or large language model interfaces, providing a durable asymmetric information advantage.
Tom Boyle, Public Storage’s incoming Chief Executive Officer, stated, “Both Welltower and Public Storage have built differentiated data science capabilities that create a durable competitive advantage. By integrating Welltower’s data science-driven capital allocation capabilities into our PS4.0 platform, we expect to further sharpen how we deploy capital and accelerate value creation. Over time, our operational analytics capabilities will help enhance Welltower’s operating platform, as well.”
Welltower’s CEO, Shankh Mitra, commented, “While real estate is the world’s largest asset class, it has historically been characterized as a local, ‘gut-feel’ industry that has proven to be one of the most unscalable businesses. While some have attempted to scale the business through service models, we believe that the only way to truly scale this business is through the data generated by the assets.” He added, “We are delighted to announce this partnership with Public Storage, a truly iconic company. Harnessing the power of Welltower’s data science platform, Public Storage will be deploying quantitative models for the real world – a world of science and math, not language and images – trained on decades of actual, proprietary performance data. This will significantly accelerate capital allocation decisions, demonstrating a tangible, real-world application of AI.”
