How to check a market research report before you pay for it

Check a market research report before you buy it by testing what the vendor publishes for free: the definition, the base year, the growth arithmetic, a reconciliation against government and public-company data, whether the number is just being syndicated, and who else relies on it. None of this needs the paid report. It takes an afternoon. At the end you know whether the headline can go on a slide, and which assumption to ask about before you pay $3,000 to $5,000 for a licence. Below are the checks, then one real figure, $45.34 billion for the US self-storage market, run through them against Census and SEC data. This page does not rate firms. It tests a number.

Two related guides: why market size reports disagree compares eight firms’ estimates for one market, and is Statista reliable traces an aggregator’s figures back to their originals.

The checks to run before buying

1. Read what the free page and sample disclose. Most report pages publish the headline size, base year, forecast, CAGR, segments and a methodology note, and offer a sample. Note what is missing. If the free page has no definition and no method, the paid report rarely adds one.
2. Pin the base year and the definition. Write down the year the headline describes and one sentence on what revenue is in and out. Two figures for “the same market” are comparable only if both match.
3. Compound the CAGR yourself. Start value × (1 + CAGR) to the power of the years should land on the forecast. Then compare the rate with the largest companies’ own same-store or organic growth. A forecast growing several times faster than the incumbents needs a reason.
4. Reconcile with primary data. Economic Census receipts, BLS establishment counts and public companies’ 10-K revenue rarely match a vendor’s definition, but they bound it. Divide the public companies’ combined revenue by the headline and compare that share with what the companies say about their own share.
5. Search the exact number in quotes. If one firm’s figure shows up on newswires and blogs, the copies are one source. If the same firm’s press releases carry different values for the same market with no new edition date, ask which one the paid report has.
6. See who relies on it. A figure quoted in a company filing or a lender’s memo is being relied on by someone with money at stake. A figure repeated by blogs with no attribution has been copied, not checked.

A worked check: $45.34 billion for US self storage

Mordor Intelligence’s United States Self Storage Market page, last updated 31 July 2026, puts the market at $45.34 billion in its 2025 base year, $47.28 billion in 2026 and $57.79 billion in 2031, a 4.10% CAGR. The buy button shows $4,750 for a single-user licence. Self storage is a good test case because Census publishes a matching industry code and the largest operators are public REITs that file audited revenue with the SEC.

The free page discloses enough to test

The page defines the market as “annual revenue earned from renting secure, self service storage space in the United States to personal and business users, using flexible rental terms”, covering “units, lockers, container based space, and parking bays”, and excludes portable moving trailers returned within twenty-four hours. The method is “a top-down build that reconstructs revenue from the active storage supply and how it is monetized”: start “from total rentable area and facility counts”, apply occupancy, and convert “to revenue using observed street rents”. It names its sources, including “US Census Bureau NAICS data for self storage operators” and operators’ filings. Many free pages say far less. Without this, the rest of the check would not be possible.

One detail is wrong. The page dates the Extra Space and Life Storage merger to “July 2024”. Life Storage’s SEC filings end with a deregistration notice filed on 31 July 2023. A wrong date in the narrative does not make the market size wrong. It is still worth raising with the vendor.

The growth arithmetic holds

$47.28 billion compounded at 4.10% for five years is $57.80 billion, which matches. The step from 2025 to 2026 is 4.3%. Against that, Public Storage, the largest US owner, reports same-store revenue of $3,786.3 million in 2023, $3,763.6 million in 2024 and $3,764.8 million in 2025 in its 2025 10-K. Flat for two years. A 4% forecast can still be right for an industry that keeps adding space, but it is not coming from rent growth at the biggest operator.

Census counts less than half of it

The 2022 Economic Census (sector 53 file) reports NAICS 531130, lessors of miniwarehouses and self-storage units, at 18,465 employer establishments with receipts of $20.62 billion. The 2017 file gives $12.63 billion, so receipts grew about 10% a year. BLS’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages shows establishments up 7.8% from 2022 to 2025 and employment up 4.4%. The industry has not doubled since 2022.

So the vendor figure is 2.2 times the latest Census total. That is not a contradiction on its own, and Mordor’s page anticipates it: “Some published figures lean narrower by sticking close to employer firm revenue classifications.” The Economic Census covers only establishments that “have paid employees”, and it codes each one by its “primary business/activity” (2022 methodology). Storage run by owners with no staff is left out, and storage run as a sideline can be coded to another industry. Nonemployer Statistics does not help: at national level it stops at all lessors of buildings combined, so self storage cannot be separated. Treat the Census figure as a floor.

Public company revenue is consistent with it

The four listed self-storage REITs reported these 2025 revenues in their SEC XBRL data:

Company	2025 total revenue
Public Storage	$4,824.1M
Extra Space Storage	$3,377.5M
CubeSmart	$1,123.1M
National Storage Affiliates	$752.9M
Total	$10,077.7M

That is 22.2% of $45.34 billion. Public Storage’s 10-K says “we believe that we own approximately 9% of the self-storage square footage in the U.S. and that collectively the four largest self-storage owners in the U.S. own approximately 22%, with the remaining 78% owned by regional and local operators.” It does not name the other three, and these four REITs are not necessarily them. The totals also include ancillary income such as tenant insurance. So this is a rough test, and it passes: the REITs’ share of the vendor’s revenue figure is close to the top four’s share of space.

The same filing allows a second test. Public Storage consolidated 229 million net rentable square feet. If that is 9% of the US, the country has about 2.54 billion square feet, and $45.34 billion across it is $17.82 per square foot a year. Public Storage’s own self-storage revenue, $4,489.4 million, works out to $19.60.

Other publishers do not confirm it independently

IMARC’s US self storage page puts 2025 at $30.6 billion, growing 1.73% a year to $35.8 billion by 2034, with a single-user licence at $2,999. Mordor’s own comparison table lists an unnamed “Industry Publisher B” at “USD 30.60 B (2025)” and says it “likely applies a tighter revenue lens”. Market Data Forecast puts 2025 at $45.33 billion. A TIKR article from September 2025 quotes “about $45.4 billion in 2025” and names no source. Two publishers within $10 million of each other are not two confirmations unless each shows its own build. The blog figure counts for nothing.

The figure holds up, and the gap is one assumption

The $45.34 billion figure passes every test public data can run. What separates it from IMARC’s $30.6 billion is one assumption: what the 78% of space held by regional and local operators earns per square foot. On the figures above, the four listed REITs earn about $18. At $45.34 billion, everyone else earns about $17.77, nearly the same. At $30.6 billion, everyone else earns about $10.34, a little over half. No public source settles that. Ask the vendor, and cite the market as a range with its definition, not as one number.

Questions to send a vendor before paying

• Which base-year inputs come from primary data, and which from your own model?
• How does the headline reconcile with Census receipts for the matching NAICS code?
• What revenue per unit (square foot, customer, device) does the headline imply, and for which segment?
• Has the base-year value changed between editions or press releases, and why?
• Does the licence allow the figure in an external deck?

The same checks work on any firm a “reliable?” search turns up, including Grand View Research, Fortune Business Insights, IMARC, MarketsandMarkets and Precedence Research. Reliability belongs to a figure and its documentation, not to a brand.

Where Hyperresearch fits

Everything above came from public pages: Census files, BLS series, SEC filings and the vendors’ free summaries. A Hyperresearch run does that legwork. It fetches each source, keeps it in a searchable workspace vault, cites every figure to the page it came from, and checks each citation against that page on a verification receipt. Syndicated copies of one figure count as one source. It does not read the paid report, private databases or anything behind a login, and it does not interview operators. A Light run is $9 and targets about 30 to 40 minutes; a Deep run is $49 and targets 150 to 200 sources in 3 to 5 hours. Those are targets, not measurements. How it works lists every step.