Self-storage feasibility study: what it costs, and the demand check you can do first

A self-storage feasibility study tells you, and your lender, whether a site can lease up at rents that carry the loan. At the vendors that publish prices, a standard single-site study costs $3,500 to $7,700 and takes one to four weeks; one vendor quotes up to $15,000 for a multistory urban project. About half of the work is demand analysis from free public data, which you can do yourself in an afternoon. The other half is competing supply, local street rates and the development budget, and the supply data is sold by subscription. This page does the free half for Tucson, Arizona, so you can decide whether the paid study is worth buying. It is a pre-study. It does not replace a third-party study your lender requires, and it is not investment advice.

What paid studies cost

Prices from each vendor’s own page, read on 2026-09-27:

Vendor	Product	Price	Turnaround
Box Pro Consulting	Abbreviated market study (demographics, supply and demand, competitors, rents)	$3,500	Not stated
Box Pro Consulting	Feasibility study, remote	$5,700	7 to 10 days
Box Pro Consulting	Feasibility study with site visit	$7,700	3 to 4 weeks
MMCG	Self-storage feasibility study	From $4,900; $7,500 to $15,000 for multistory urban	9 to 16 or 14 to 21 business days (the page gives both)
Self Storage 101	Market and feasibility study	$6,750 plus travel	Not stated
StorageStudy	Site review, credited toward a full study ordered within 30 days	$500	Not stated

StorageStudy does not publish the price of its full study. Its $500 site review is the only published option between doing it yourself and a full study.

What a feasibility study contains

The vendors list much the same sections. MMCG covers trade areas on 1, 3 and 5-mile rings plus drive-time zones, competitors including permitted and under-construction projects, unit mix and pricing, operating expenses, construction cost and a 10-year pro forma. Box Pro lists square feet per capita, competitor rates and occupancy, a unit mix, a construction budget and a 7-year pro forma with lender metrics such as debt service coverage and debt yield.

Section	The question it answers	Free public source	Can you do it yourself
Trade area	Where tenants will come from, usually 3 to 5 miles	Census tracts in the ring	Yes
Demand	How many people, households and renters, and how often they move	ACS, Census population estimates	Yes
Supply	How many rentable square feet exist and are coming, per person	None; Yardi Matrix, Radius+ and similar are paid	Partly, by counting by hand
Rents	What a 10x10 rents for, climate-controlled and not	Operators’ websites; REIT 10-Ks for trends	Partly
Lease-up	How long until the facility is full and at market rent	REIT 10-Ks	Only as a benchmark
Development budget	Land, building and fit-out against the stabilized value	None	No

Five Census tables cover demand

All are free, and all work at county, metro or tract level.

• Population and growth. ACS table B01003 for the level, and the Census Bureau’s county population estimates for yearly change and migration.
• Households and renters. B11001 for households and B25003 for owners against renters. Renters in apartments have less room to keep things.
• Housing type. B25024, units in structure, separates apartments from houses with garages.
• Mobility. B07003 counts people who moved in the past year. A move is the most common reason to rent a unit for a few months.
• Existing operators and their revenue. County Business Patterns counts establishments in NAICS 531130, lessors of miniwarehouses and self-storage units (CBP 2023 county file). The Economic Census adds revenue every five years (2022, sector 53).

The business counts have a gap. CBP counts only establishments with paid employees, so a facility run remotely with no staff is missing. The Nonemployer Statistics series, which would catch those, publishes only the broad NAICS 5311 group (all lessors of real estate), not storage on its own. Treat the CBP count as a floor.

For a real trade area, pull the same ACS tables at census tract level from the 5-year release and add up the tracts inside your 3-mile and 5-mile rings.

REIT 10-Ks give rents, occupancy and lease-up

The four listed self-storage REITs report occupancy and rent every year across thousands of stabilized stores. From their FY2025 annual reports, filed in February 2026:

REIT	Same-store average occupancy, 2025	2024	Rent per occupied sq ft, 2025	2024
Public Storage	92.0%	92.4%	$22.54	$22.43
Extra Space Storage	93.7%	Not stated	$19.91	$19.99
CubeSmart	89.7%	90.4%	$22.73	$22.71
National Storage Affiliates	84.3%	86.0%	$15.71	$15.74

Each REIT defines rent a little differently (Extra Space’s is net of discounts and bad debt), so compare the trend within a row, not the levels across rows. Occupancy fell at every REIT that reported both years.

Public Storage wrote that “softness in demand for our storage space has led to lower move-in rental rates for new tenants and lower average occupancy in 2025.” Extra Space signed new leases at $13.16 per square foot while its existing tenants paid $19.91. That gap is the one to watch, because every tenant in a new facility’s lease-up arrives at the move-in rate. Public Storage also breaks out its large markets and pools the rest: its “all other markets” line shows $16.28 per occupied square foot at 91.5% occupancy.

On lease-up, Public Storage says a new or expanded facility “typically takes at least three to four years” to stabilize its revenue. Physical occupancy can come in two to three years “through offering lower rental rates during fill-up.” It underwrites new developments to stabilize at about an 8% yield on cost. Extra Space counts a store as stabilized after three years open, or one calendar year at 80% average occupancy. These operators have national brands and revenue-management systems. A first facility should not assume it will fill faster.

Supply is the part you cannot get free

Square feet per capita, the headline supply number in most studies, needs a list of every facility with its rentable square footage, plus the pipeline. No public agency publishes one. Yardi Matrix, which tracks 32,266 completed U.S. facilities, and Radius+ sell it by subscription. The paid studies buy it, and that is a large part of what the fee pays for.

You can approximate it for one trade area. List every facility within 5 miles from map searches and operators’ websites. Get building square footage from the county assessor’s records, and new projects from city and county permit and zoning records. Write down the posted rate for a 10x10, climate-controlled and not, at each one. It takes a day or two, and it will miss projects that are permitted but not yet public.

Worked demand check: Tucson, Arizona

The Tucson metro area is one county, Pima, so every county table is also the metro table. At about 1.08 million people it is big enough that the Census publishes its storage revenue instead of suppressing it. Public Storage’s 10-K lists 7 Tucson facilities with 439,000 net rentable square feet at the end of 2025.

Indicator	Tucson (Pima County)	United States	Source
Population, 2024	1,080,149	340,110,990	ACS B01003
Population change, July 2020 to July 2025	+2.8%	+3.1%	Census estimates
Population change, year to July 2025	+1,229 (0.1%)		Census estimates
Households, 2024	453,787	132,737,146	ACS B11001
Renter share of households	33.7%	34.7%	ACS B25003
Homes in buildings of 5+ units	18.3%	19.5%	ACS B25024
Mobile homes	8.9%	5.4%	ACS B25024
Moved in the past year	15.0%	11.8%	ACS B07003
Moved from another state	3.3%	2.1%	ACS B07003
Storage establishments with employees, 2023	61	18,564	CBP
Per 100,000 people	5.7	5.5	CBP, Census estimates
Change in establishments, 2018 to 2023	+3.4%	+10.1%	CBP 2018, 2023
Storage revenue, 2022	$59.2M	$20.6B	Economic Census
Revenue per person, 2022	$56	$62	Economic Census, Census estimates
Change in revenue, 2017 to 2022	+84%	+63%	Economic Census 2017, 2022

What the table says:

• People move more in Tucson. 15.0% of residents moved in the past year, against 11.8% nationally, and a larger share came from another state. Moves drive short rentals.
• Renter and apartment shares are close to the national average, so they tell you little. The high share of mobile homes, which have little storage, is a mild plus.
• Growth has stalled. The county added 7,000 to 9,000 people a year from 2022 to 2024, then 1,229 in the year to July 2025, when more people left for other U.S. counties than arrived (net 350). A study that projects the earlier pace forward is optimistic.
• Storage revenue grew faster than the nation’s, 84% from 2017 to 2022 against 63%, while the number of employer establishments barely moved. Tucson still spends a little less per person than the country. Multi-site operators do not all report revenue by location the same way, so per-person revenue is rough.

A cross-check on occupied space, using my own arithmetic: $59.2 million of 2022 revenue at Public Storage’s $16.28 pooled rent is about 3.6 million occupied square feet, or 3.4 per person. That is not supply per capita. Census revenue includes fees and insurance, which inflates it. Unstaffed facilities are missing, which deflates it. And the rent is a national pool, not Tucson’s. It shows the size of the market, not whether one more facility fits.

For Tucson, demand looks about average, with high mobility and flat recent growth. Nothing here rules a site in or out. That depends on supply and street rates within 3 to 5 miles of the parcel, which is what the paid study is for. If your own count finds several facilities opened since 2020 inside the ring, or posted rates well below the REIT figures, you have your answer before spending $6,000.

When the paid study is worth buying

Buy it when your lender requires one, or when your own check leaves the decision open. The free work can settle it on its own if the trade area is losing people or several new facilities nearby are leasing up at discounted rates. When demand looks sound and supply is unclear, the paid study buys you facility-level supply data and a pro forma you cannot build from public sources.

A cited pre-study for one address

A Hyperresearch report can run this pre-study for a specific site, with every figure cited and every sampled citation checked against the source it cites. It reads Census files, REIT filings on EDGAR and public web pages such as operators’ posted rates; it does not read Yardi, Radius+ or any subscription database, so its supply count will be incomplete. A Light run ($9) targets about 20 to 50 sources in about 30 to 40 minutes, and a Deep run ($49) about 150 to 200 sources in 3 to 5 hours; both are targets, not guarantees. It does not visit the site or price construction. It is research input before you commission a study, not an independent third-party feasibility study, and it cannot stand in for one a lender requires. See pricing and the verification receipt.

For sizing a local market from the same Census files, see how to calculate market size.