Capital intensive, labour intensive, long lead times, heterogenous high regulation. That keeps out serious players from office or residential real-estate. However, there are many self-storage startups that are doing quite well.

Any two of those factors above can be dealt with, but all four in concert is problematic. The reasons why are:

- Capital intensive: on its own, this is VC-funded business heaven. However, combine with labour intensive and you can't get good margins; long lead times and you can't iterate; heterogenous high regulation environment and you can't get economy of scale.

- Labour intensive: on its own, this is fine, but the labour here will cut into margins because it is not R&D-markable and it is controlled (unions). Combine with long lead times and your payback period is insufficient to maintain cash flow without massive funding; combine with heterogenous high regulation and you can't hire labour consistently across places

- Long lead times: This is okay for businesses where you have cheap acquisition and the demand variability is low; but real estate markets are fixed, it costs a lot for you to ship your product. Combine with heterogeneous high regulation and you cannot rely on being able to take your product to the new place if local demand has changed.

- Heterogeneous high regulation: Homes are heavily regulated. Some of these are for safety, and others are because of the idiosyncrasies of local markets (SF's "windows must be made of wood"), so you have no fungibility of product. You need cheap customer acquisition, low counterparty risk, and low demand variation for this to work.

Uber was capital-intensive, and labour intensive, but I think the lead times were short. They could spin up and spin down markets quite fast, and though some markets had regulation heterogeneity, most were unprepared for Uber and the regulation was not strongly enforced.

WeWork solved the problem with offices by acquiring existing buildings. This is a strategy that is commonly used in high-regulation environments: one of my friends acquired a FedRAMP-compliant company and another acquired a compounding pharmacy to advance their startups. You can bypass the regulation by acquiring someone who has achieved compliance. But compliance in RE is a per-product outcome!

Gusto/Rippling et al. solved the labour intensiveness of things through automation. This is great in non-tangible domains. You don't have a physical product. Automation is easier to build for that than something that requires robotics.

Long lead times are the real killers, though. You need a real technological or regulatory advantage to break that open. Tesla had a bunch of those: pioneer of mass-market EVs, regulatory EV credit timing. SpaceX also did: government contracts. Honestly, dealing with long lead times (and the resulting customer payback period) is probably the hardest thing in the world, and his rare skill at doing that is why Elon Musk is so wealthy.

Honestly, you can build a debt-funded self-storage company and it takes grit and good location choice. There's no formula to it, and you will likely do better making L7 at Amazon, but it's a thing you could do. But otherwise, I'd stay away from real-estate unless you have the sheer bullheadedness it takes to deal with a high-reg environment.