Pricing data is scraped from a variety of sources including the facility websites and pricing aggregators each day. Each time a price is scraped, it’s sorted as either a “street rate” (non-discounted price) or a “web rate” (discounted price). If there is only one price, it’s used as both the street and web rate, since there is no discounting. All rates are converted to dollars per square foot per month.
The prices are then analyzed to determine the size of the unit. Though we collect rates for every unit size, only standard unit sizes are available in the application while the API and AI Connector provide access to all unit sizes.
Standard unit sizes
- 5x5
- 5x10
- 10x10
- 10x15
- 10x20
- 10x30
Further categorization is applied to indicate whether or not the unit includes the following amenities:
- Climate control
- Ground/first floor
- Elevator access
- Drive up access
Aggregation and insertion into the application
When a facility has more than one source:
Sometimes pricing data for the same facility comes from more than one source on the same day. For example, a facility might be listed on an aggregator and also have prices on its own website.
To illustrate, we’ll follow one example throughout this section: Facility A’s 10x10 climate-controlled units over a 30-day month. This facility is publishing prices on an aggregator and their website “FacilityA.com.” However, they list their 10x10 Climate Control Ground Floor units individually on the aggregator but combine them on their website. They also offer the units at a lower price on their website.
Merging sources into a single daily price
Each day, we combine everything we collected into one price per unit type:
- Multiple instances of one unit on one source: If a single scrape shows the same unit type more than once per day, we average those prices to get a single daily price for that unit type. In our example above, on days 1-5, rentstorage.com shows two instances of the 10x10 climate-controlled ground floor unit at $1.20 and $1.40, so rentstorage.com’s price for that facility’s 10x10 climate-controlled ground floor unit those days is $1.30.
- Across sources: we average the prices from each source, with each source counting once no matter how many of a unit it shows. In our example above, rentstorage.com counts the same for days 1-5 where it has two of the 10x10 CC ground floor unit as it does on days 6-10 where it has one. This also ensures that rentstorage.com and FacilityA.com both count equally to overall pricing for the day.
Calculating the monthly price
The monthly price shown in TractIQ is the average of the daily prices for every day that month the unit was priced. Each day counts equally.
Because the monthly price is built directly from the daily prices, you can always reproduce it from the daily data in TractIQ.
Full daily breakdowns from the example above
What changed:
Previously, monthly prices averaged every individual price scraped during the month. Under that method, if multiple websites listed units for a single facility, there was a chance that one website could contribute more “weight” to a facilities monthly average if it had more instances of the same unit type as described above. This has been updated and backfilled so that monthly prices from July 2025 onward have been recalculated with the new method above. You may see small differences from figures you’ve seen before. We intend to continue this backfill to cover all pricing data going back to 2018.
For more information on how TractIQ reports gathered rate data, please reference our aggregation article.