You're Spending $300+ Per Move-In and Don't Even Know It

Let me paint you a picture I see constantly.

I'm at a conference. I'm talking to an operator. They tell me they don't spend money on marketing. "We just use storEDGE and Google. Maybe we have a website. We don't need ads."

Then I ask them one question: "What's your cost per move-in?"

Blank stare. Every time.

Because here's the thing — you ARE spending money on marketing. You're just not tracking what it costs you per tenant who actually walks through the door. And when you finally add it up, the number is almost always higher than you'd expect.

Let me walk through the math.

The "Free" Marketing Stack That Isn't Free

Let's take a typical 40,000 square foot facility. Maybe 300 units. Decent market, not the most competitive, not the least. The operator is running what they consider a low-cost marketing setup.

storEDGE Listing

storEDGE is the default for a lot of operators because it comes bundled with your management software or because your management company set it up. It's familiar. It works. But it's not free.

A standard storEDGE listing with online rentals runs roughly $150–$250/month depending on your plan and add-ons. Let's call it $200/month. That's $2,400/year.

Now, how many move-ins is that listing actually generating? Most operators have no idea because they're not tracking attribution. But industry data and what I've seen across my own portfolio suggests a storEDGE listing for a facility this size generates somewhere between 3–8 move-ins per month directly from the platform. Let's be generous and say 6/month.

storEDGE cost per move-in: $200 ÷ 6 = $33

That looks great on paper. But hold that number — we're not done.

Google Business Profile

"Google is free." Sure, you don't pay to have a listing. But you're paying in other ways.

Somebody is managing that profile. Responding to reviews. Uploading photos. Updating hours. Posting updates if you're doing it right. If that's you, the owner, spending 2–3 hours a month on it, that's your time. If it's a manager, that's their hourly rate.

Let's conservatively value that at $75/month in labor. Some operators pay a local SEO company $200–$500/month to manage it. Let's split the difference: $150/month in real cost. That's $1,800/year.

Your Google Business Profile — when it's working well — might drive 8–15 calls/month that turn into actual prospects. Not all of those convert. Typical phone-to-movein conversion in self-storage is around 35–40%. Let's say 10 calls, 4 move-ins per month.

GBP cost per move-in: $150 ÷ 4 = $37.50

Still looks reasonable. Keep going.

The Basic Website

Almost every operator has a website. Maybe it's the storEDGE template site. Maybe it's something a local company built five years ago. Maybe it's a WordPress site your nephew set up.

If you're on a storEDGE website plan, you're paying $100–$200/month on top of your listing fee. If you have a standalone site, you're paying hosting ($20–$50/month), maybe a domain ($15/year), and hopefully someone updates it occasionally. Plus the amortized cost of building it — even a cheap site was $2,000–$5,000 at some point.

Let's call the all-in monthly cost $175/month. That's $2,100/year.

Your website, if it's not running paid traffic, is mostly catching people who found you on Google and clicked through, or people who got your name from a referral and looked you up. These overlap heavily with your GBP traffic. But let's say the site itself directly contributes 3 move-ins per month that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Website cost per move-in: $175 ÷ 3 = $58

Now Add It All Up

Here's the part nobody does.

"Wait, $40 per move-in? That's not bad at all."

Except those numbers are generous. Here's what actually happens when I dig into the data with operators.

The Numbers When You Actually Track

Those 13 move-ins per month? That assumes zero overlap between channels. In reality, a huge chunk of those leads touched multiple channels. The person who found you on storEDGE probably also checked your Google reviews and visited your website. You're triple-counting.

When you deduplicate and actually track unique move-ins attributable to your marketing stack, the real number for most facilities I've worked with is closer to 8–10 unique move-ins per month from all of these channels combined.

So the real math:

$525/month ÷ 9 move-ins = $58 per move-in

But wait. We haven't counted the move-ins you're losing. Not every lead converts, and the biggest leak in most operators' funnels is response time. If someone fills out a form on storEDGE at 8 PM and nobody calls them back until 10 AM, there's a real chance they've already rented from someone else by then. Industry data suggests 30–50% of storage leads rent within 48 hours of starting their search.

Factor in lead leakage and the real number for most operators running this "low-cost" stack is somewhere between $65–$120 per move-in.

And that's before you account for the elephant in the room.

The Cost Nobody Tracks: Manager Time

Your facility manager spends time answering phone calls from prospects. Walking units. Processing move-ins. Following up (if they follow up at all). Every lead that comes in — whether it converts or not — costs you manager labor.

If your manager makes $18/hour and spends 20 minutes on a lead that doesn't convert, that's $6 in labor per dead lead. If you're getting 30 leads a month and 13 convert, that's 17 dead leads costing you $102/month in wasted manager time.

Add that to your marketing cost and your effective cost per move-in climbs another $10–$15.

Real cost per move-in for the "we don't spend money on marketing" operator: $75–$135.

Why This Matters

I'm not telling you this to make you feel bad about storEDGE or Google. Those channels work. They generate tenants.

I'm telling you this because when you don't know your real cost per move-in, you can't make smart decisions about where to spend your next dollar.

If your organic stack is costing you $90 per move-in and someone shows you a paid Meta campaign that delivers move-ins at $110 — but those are incremental tenants you weren't getting before, filling units that were sitting empty at $150/month — that's a no-brainer ROI. But if you think your current marketing is "free," that $110 number looks expensive and you pass on it.

The operators who are growing right now aren't the ones spending the least. They're the ones who know their numbers and can do the math on whether a new channel is profitable.

What to Do With This

Three things. All of them are free.

First, add up what you're actually spending. Every platform fee. Every subscription. Every hour of labor. Get a real monthly number.

Second, count your move-ins by source. Not leads — move-ins. If your PMS can't tell you where a tenant came from, start asking during move-in. "How did you hear about us?" is the cheapest attribution tool in the industry.

Third, divide the first number by the second number. That's your cost per move-in. Now you have a baseline. Every marketing decision you make from here should be measured against that number.

Because you're already paying for marketing. You just might not know how much.