Start here.
Here are three numbers worth more than a hundred market headlines:
- Class A: 5.00-5.50% caps, values around $175-215/SF
- Class B: 5.75-6.50% caps, values around $145-175/SF
- Class C: 6.75-8.00% caps, values around $110-145/SF
That is Integra Realty Resources’ national benchmark for self-storage in 2026 — the IRR Self Storage Report. It puts the year’s reset in writing: values declined roughly 10-15% in 2025, and cap rates widened as the capital-market reset repriced the asset class.
This piece is the current data book. Here is what the bands mean for the deals most of you are actually looking at.
Where the Invisible Empire lives
Notice what those bands are not. They are not the 4-5% range institutional money pays for stabilized, top-50-MSA, class A product.
The bands above describe where the rest of the market trades. The B and C bands — 5.75% up to 8.00% — are the pond the institutions can’t touch and the gurus never taught. That is the $400K-$2M range, the mom-and-pop facilities, the 70% of America’s 50,000 facilities that still trade off-market or through three phone calls.
If you are reading this blog, your deal lives in the B or C band more often than not. So the question the IRR report answers is not “what is the cap rate in self-storage” — it is “which class am I actually buying, and does my underwriting agree with what that class trades for?”
What the widened spread tells you
The 10-15% value reset is the story. When values fall 10-15% while stabilized income holds, cap rates mechanically widen. That is arithmetic, not pessimism — and it is exactly the setup a disciplined buyer exploits.
A widened cap-rate spread means the same dollar of stabilized NOI now buys more facility than it did at the peak. It means the seller’s asking price, measured against the rent roll, is further from the top than it was in 2024. It means the investor entering today does so at a higher going-in yield than the buyer who entered two years ago.
How to use the bands in underwriting
Three uses, in order of value:
1. Sanity check, not target. When a broker hands you a pro forma with a 4.75% exit cap on a C-class drive-up facility in a tertiary market, the class band above is your reality check. That asset does not trade in that band.
2. Class definition weapon.Every seller calls their facility “class A.” The far more useful move: ask what their last appraisal or recent local closed comps implied per square foot, and see which band that lands in. Where the value-per-SF falls is how you classify the asset — not the sign out front.
3. The climate-controlled warning.The IRR report puts climate-controlled units at 63.3% of total national inventory. In a tertiary market, being the first to introduce CC on your block is the classic way to overbuild the cost side. A CC-heavy market can justify CC rents. A tertiary market that hasn’t proven it wants them cannot.
Run the numbers.Bands are context. The rent roll, the T12, the county tax call, the insurance quote, the expense ratio at 35-40% — those decide the deal. Cap rate is an output, not an input: you underwrite the NOI and the price, and the cap rate is what falls out of the division. If the output lands inside your asset’s class band AND the deal works at today’s financing costs, you have a deal worth pursuing. If the output is outside the band, find out why — or walk. Run the numbers. Then run them again.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Figures in these posts are historical results for those specific deals or the cited industry data, not projections, and nothing here constitutes investment advice. The math that decides a deal is the math you do before you sign — underwrite it yourself, or have someone you trust walk it with you.