Late on Sunday, a spokeswoman for Blackstone Group Inc said, the asset manager has reached an agreement to acquire Simply Self Storage from Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management Inc for around $1.2 billion.

The news confirms an earlier report from the Wall Street Journal which stated Blackstone’s non-traded real-estate investment trust, BREIT, is acquiring the 8 million-square-foot portfolio of self-storage facilities.

Incidentally, in 2016, the Canadian company had purchased Simply Self Storage for $830 million. The company had then 90 locations. Currently it has more than 120 locations across 23 U.S. states.

Launched in 2017, BREIT has a net asset value of $19 billion. It plans on continuing to purchase smaller assets in the fragmented industry under the Simply brand, said Tyler Henritze, head of acquisitions in the Americas for Blackstone’s real-estate group. Significantly, Self storage has remained resilient through economic cycles, as well as during the COVID-19 pandemic as people no longer tied to office locations have moved out of cities or gone to stay with relatives, said Henritze.

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