I operate self-storage facilities across the Midwest. I built StorScale to answer one question quickly: what should each unit type rent for this week?
Extra Space Storage averaged 94.1% same-store occupancy in the third quarter of 2025. A company that full is not guessing at its rates.
A REIT has people whose job is to know what the competitors within a few miles charge, by unit size, and which of its own sites are priced under the market. None of that takes genius. It is information collected on a schedule by people paid to collect it.
An independent operator can get the same information. It is spread across a dozen competitor websites, a Google Business Profile, a reviews page and a spreadsheet nobody opens on a Tuesday. So rates get set once, from experience, and looked at again at renewal. Competitors move in the meantime, and the gap between what a facility earns and what it could earn grows without anyone making a mistake.
What you can check in twenty minutes
You do not need StorScale for this. Open the websites of your three closest competitors. Write down each one's advertised 10x10 rate, the standard rate, with any promotion noted separately. Take the middle of the three and compare it with yours.
Say your 10x10 is $15 below the middle rate and you have forty occupied 10x10s. If those units were at the middle rate, that is $15 x 40 x 12 months, or $7,200 a year.
If you are above the middle rate and occupancy is soft, price may not be the problem. Check whether anyone can find you on Google before you start discounting.
A pen and a spreadsheet are enough to start. The full routine is in how to check your competitors' rates, and rent increases on existing tenants covers the other half of the problem.
The catch is how quickly the check goes stale. A competitor can change a rate on Monday, and you will not look again until next quarter. That is the part I wanted off my own plate.
What StorScale does
StorScale runs that check across every unit size and every competitor near you, and puts a dollar figure on the gap. The free report covers pricing, local search visibility, reviews, your website and your ads.
Optimize goes a step further and recommends a rate for each unit type. It runs alongside the management software you already use and does not replace it. You make the change in your own system.
How StorScale is offered and priced today is on the founding page.
Start with the free report. It takes about a minute, and the findings are yours whether or not you ever become a customer.
The figures here are illustrative, not taken from my own facilities, so check them against your own numbers.