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TractIQ and ARCO/Murray release self-storage construction data. September 24, 2026 TractIQ, a data and market-intelligence platform serving the self-storage industry, has partnered with national design/build construction firm and general contractor ARCO/Murray to release data on self-storage construction benchmarks. Their study covers more than 100 projects completed by ARCO/Murray across 27 states between 2016 and 2026. It compares gross and net rentable area, building form, above- and below-grade floors, site acreage, construction start and completion dates, and total hard costs, split into vertical construction and sitework, according to a press release. The data shows: * Median hard costs for a three-story self-storage building rose about 47% between 2021 and 2024, due to an increase in material and labor. * Vertical-construction costs rose about 28% between 2021 and 2025. * Over the same four years, sitework surged 93%, escalating more than three times as fast as the building it supports. It was 10% of total hard cost in 2021 and 17.1% in 2025. * Median construction duration is 11.6 months from start to completion, with half of builds finishing between 10 and 12.8 months. "Construction cost has been unavailable at scale for self-storage underwriting. We owe Eric [Fleps] and the ARCO/Murray team real credit. They have completed hundreds of projects representing billions in hard costs, and instead of keeping that as a competitive edge, they are opening it to the industry," said Noah Starr, CEO of TractIQ. "It means a developer can budget against what building actually costs and an investor can finally check replacement cost against something real." "We're thrilled to be partnering with Noah's team at TractIQ to give something back to the industry that has been so good to us. We hope the data is useful and helps owners, brokers, capital providers and developers with quick gut-check underwriting," said Fleps, president of ARCO/Murray. "I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we have never built the same building twice, and building type and size can vary costs wildly, so, only rely on the data for an initial smell check, then get your builder involved right away as you move a development forward." The full construction report is available for free download at the TractIQ website. Interested parties must submit their first and last name, company name and role, email address, and how many self-storage properties they have invested in, managed, sold or supported. TractIQ tracks more than 70,000 self-storage facilities nationwide, providing access to data including market demographics, rental-rate history, supply-and-demand dynamics and more. Founded in 1992 and headquartered in Chicago, ARCO/Murray is a design-build general contractor and construction firm that specializes in turnkey commercial and industrial projects across North America. It has completed 6,000 projects nationwide. Stay on top of what's happening in the industry and get links to the latest news, feature stories, videos and more on the ISS website. It's fast, free and easy. Just enter your details below and watch for the hottest self-storage news every Wednesday! Google Preferred Source Set Inside Self-Storage as a "preferred source" to get quicker access to the news you value.

ARCO/Murray construction data release. TractIQ and ARCO/Murray have partnered to release 18M SF of self-storage construction data that covers 100+ self-storage projects built by ARCO/Murray across 27 states, including gross and net rentable area, building form, schedule, and hard cost from 2016 through 2026. The typical three story build. Self-storage has never had a construction cost benchmark it could check. Developers price projects against a broker's number, a contractor's estimate, or whatever their last build happened to come in at. None of it is verifiable, none of it is comparable, and all of it is someone's recollection. Today that changes: ARCO/Murray is contributing more than a decade of its own completed project data to the industry totaling 18M SF, and TractIQ is publishing it as a reference point the industry can check its early numbers against. The number nobody could actually check. Every other input to a storage pro forma has a market source. Rents, occupancy, cap rates and supply pipelines are all tracked, published, and argued over. Construction cost, the single largest line in a ground-up deal, has not been. It lives in the files of the firms that do the building, and those firms have had every commercial reason to keep it there. So the industry improvised. A developer asks three contractors and averages them. An investor takes replacement cost on faith because there is nothing to check it against. A lender hears a number and has no independent basis to test whether it is conservative or optimistic. Everyone has been working from anecdote and calling it a benchmark. What that has cost developers. Three things go wrong when cost data is anecdotal. The first is the sanity check: without a distribution you cannot tell whether a number you have been handed sits in the normal range or well outside it, and a project that prices 20% above the market looks identical to one that prices at it. The second is escalation. Costs moved hard between 2021 and 2024, and almost nobody could separate real escalation from a change in what they happened to be building. The third is the one that does the most damage. A single blended median across every building type is close to useless. A five-story climate-controlled build with a basement and a low-rise drive-up project are different products with different costs, and averaging them produces a headline number that describes neither. Quoted without that context, it makes ordinary projects look expensive and expensive projects look ordinary. What arco/murray is contributing. The release covers 100+ completed self-storage projects delivered by ARCO/Murray across 27 states between 2016 and 2026. For each one it carries gross and net rentable area, building form, above-grade stories and below-grade floors, site acreage, construction start and completion dates, and total hard cost split into vertical construction and sitework. What that supports is the first pass. These are market reference points rather than estimates, built for sizing a pro forma before there are drawings, sanity checking a cost a broker or a seller has quoted, and testing replacement cost on an acquisition. For that work, a median drawn from 100+ completed builds beats a number somebody half remembers. What it will not do is price your deal. Soils, topography, utilities, jurisdiction, unit mix, finish level and labor all move hard cost more than any median can capture, and no two sites price the same way. What the data shows. Three story median hard cost rose about 47% between the 2021 and 2024 delivery years, tracking the material and labor shock the whole construction sector absorbed. Splitting hard cost into its components changes the picture entirely. Across the full data set, vertical construction cost rose about 28% between 2021 and 2025. Over the same four years sitework rose about 93%. Sitework escalated more than three times as fast as the building it supports. As a share of the budget that shift is plain: sitework ran 10.0% of total hard cost in 2021 and 17.1% in 2025. On a $10 million build, roughly $700,000 moved out of the building and into the ground underneath it. Schedules tell the third story. Median construction duration is 11.6 months start to completion, with half of builds finishing between 10.0 and 12.8 months. Builds completing from 2018 through 2021 ran a median of 10.6 months; those completing since run 12.2. About a month and a half has been added to the typical build, and unlike cost it has not come back. Read all of it as direction rather than as a quote for your own project. It is enough to tell you whether you are in the right neighborhood on cost and schedule, which is what an early pro forma needs. Once a deal is real, get a builder involved as soon as possible. The only number worth underwriting to is one built for your site, your drawings and today's prices. "Construction cost has been unavailable at scale for self-storage underwriting. We owe Eric and the ARCO/Murray team real credit. They have completed hundreds of projects representing billions in hard costs, and instead of keeping that as a competitive edge, they are opening it to the industry. It means a developer can budget against what building actually costs, and an investor can finally check replacement cost against something real." - Noah Starr, Chief Executive Officer, TractIQ "We're thrilled to be partnering with Noah's team at TractIQ to give something back to the industry that has been so good to us. We hope the data is useful and helps owners, brokers, capital providers and developers with quick gut check underwriting. I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we have never built the same building twice, and building type and size can vary costs wildly, so only rely on the data for an initial smell check, then get your builder (hopefully ARCO!) involved right away as you move a development forward." - Eric Fleps, President, ARCO/Murray Get the data. TractIQ customers The full data set is live in the TractIQ Interactive Data Hub, filterable by state, delivery type, project status, building form, and cost basis, alongside the rest of the TractIQ storage data. In the coming months the ARCO/Murray data will be fully integrated into TractIQ's facility data, accessible directly within the platform. Open the Interactive Data Hub | Not A Customer Yet? A four-page benchmark handout carrying the national figures, covering cost per square foot, building form, schedule and land efficiency, is free to download with no account required. Download Above Frequently asked questions. How much does it cost to build a self-storage facility per square foot? Can I use this data to budget a specific project? Are self-storage construction costs still rising? How long does it take to build a self-storage facility? How much of a self-storage construction budget is sitework? What percentage of a self-storage building is rentable?