It’s all good and well to have an ad campaign going, but how much are you even supposed to spend?

Do you find yourself wondering, “How much should I spend on marketing?” when doing your storage facility’s yearly budget?

While you can track how effective your storage facility’s marketing spend is, it’s still nice to know what ballpark figures you should expect to look at.

Maybe you’re spending $1,000, and it’s showing a great return on investment—but is that enough?

You may not get a great answer if you knock on your competition’s door and ask how much they spend on marketing each month, but there are ways to figure it out if you know where to look!

Today, we’re going to dive into reports from the REITs to see what they’re spending (on average) per store each quarter.

Let’s dive in!

REIT marketing spend by quarter (The Data)

We’ve assembled this graph based on the REITs’ quarterly reports.

As publicly traded companies, they report on earnings and expenditures. This helps us (and you) get a glance behind the curtain of these large operations.

Let’s take a look at just the last two and a half years (or ten quarters):

Note: These are the dollar amount averages of their same-store spending per quarter. They may spend more or less per store, but it averages out to these values.

Now, before we dive deeper, here are a few disclaimers:

These numbers are averages, and the REITs don’t spend the same exact amount at each store.
This is same-store year-over-year data. It only factors in the same stores as the same quarter the previous year. But the averages are still close.
This data only looks at stabilized facilities. Lease-up facilities are not included in this data, and their marketing spend is most likely higher.

With that all in mind, what do these numbers tell us about what we should be doing?

The Extra Space Approach

If you look at the data above, you’ll notice that Extra Space’s same-store marketing budget for stable stores is basically just climbing each quarter recently.

If you were to look at just the last couple of years, you could almost say that Extra Space’s marketing budget strategy is “always pay more than you did last quarter.” It looks like they’re on a spending spree!

Even looking beyond the last couple of years, it is hard to define an approach for Extra Space. There’s a vague idea of spending more in the middle of the year, but it’s inconsistent.

At least we can get a decent idea of roughly how much Extra Space stores in your area might be spending (so long as they’re not still in lease-up): around $8,000-9,000 per quarter, probably.

The Public Storage Approach

The data from Public Storage has a much more consistent pattern.

The first takeaway from Public is that they spend more on average in the colder, slower months of the year.

Q1 and Q4, the Autumn and Winter months, see them spending the most. Their marketing expenditures then drop slightly as warmer seasons approach.

What can we take away from this?

They seem to pump their marketing budget when demand is slow to capture as much of what's out there as possible, shoring up the slower season.
They then reduce their spending during the busy season, probably expecting that they won’t have difficulty hitting their targets with the higher demand.

Another interesting point is that Public Storage has been significantly increasing the marketing budget for each store since 2022. In fact, they almost doubled it for Q1 in that time.

The CubeSmart Approach

CubeSmart’s approach to the marketing budget is inverted from Public Storage’s.

Looking at the data above, we can see they scale back their marketing when business is slow and then pump it high during the busy season.

In fact, CubeSmart goes from spending the least of any REIT in the first quarter to spending the most of any REIT in the second and third quarters. That’s a huge shift.

This year alone, they spent only $4,816 on average in Q1, but then they more than doubled that to $11,307 in Q2.

This pattern holds with previous years, too. CubeSmart consistently spends the most in Q2 and Q3, and then the least in Q1, with Q4 somewhere between.

So what does it mean?

CubeSmart probably believes that their money is better invested in capturing as much traffic as possible during the busy season.
They then scale back their marketing during the slow season since every dollar spent is theoretically worth less in that timeframe due to a drop in demand.

It’s probably also worth noting that CubeSmart also increased their marketing budget since 2022 in terms of their peak quarters, although their Q1 spend has dropped below where it was even in 2022.

With this strategy, CubeSmart spends more in a year (on average) per storage facility than both Extra Storage and CubeSmart.

Which approach should YOUR storage facility follow?

Should you be spending more and more each quarter like Extra Space?

Does it make more sense to spend high in the slow months like Public Storage or to direct the bulk of your yearly budget towards the busy season like CubeSmart?

A lot of this has to do with your business and your market.

Keep in mind that not every facility these REITs own and operate follows the above patterns. There are probably Public Storage facilities out there that spend high in the summer and pull back in the winter months. These patterns are only looking at averages.

Knowing your market is what really matters.

Here’s a little bit of a framework to help make your decision:

If you are struggling during busy seasons, increase your marketing budget during these months to capture more demand.
If you fill up without ad campaigns in summer, but you struggle with occupancy in winter, consider directing more of your budget to the slower months to try and compensate.
If you are in a college town, pay attention to when college students are renting storage and adjust your marketing budget to those timeframes to capture those leads.
If your facility is still leasing up, there’s a strong likelihood that you should just be spending as much as your budget allows regardless of the season.

It’s also important to remember that you should pay close attention to how your marketing efforts are paying off.

For example: you may struggle during the summer, increase your ad spend, and then find out it didn’t actually improve your rentals. It’s possible to just shift your rentals from organic and local pack leads to ad clicks without actually increasing your total rentals. In cases like this, you’ll want to pull back on ads during that time and find another way to drive rentals.

Keep track of your returns year-over-year, compare the results to market trends you notice in your area, and use all of that data to inform your self storage marketing budget going forward.

Where we got our data

Because the big national players listed here are publicly traded, they report on these details for their investors.

Here's where we found our data (and where you can check it for yourself):

Here are some of my other favorite posts to check out!

At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.

How Much Do REITs Spend On Self Storage Marketing Each Quarter?