Occupancy tells you how full you are. It does not tell you what your units are earning.
RevPAU, revenue per available unit, does. It is the rent you collect in a month divided by every unit you could rent, whether it is occupied or not.
How to work out RevPAU
Take one month of rent collected. Leave out late fees, admin fees, insurance and merchandise, because those move with delinquency and move-ins rather than with how well your units are priced. Divide by your total number of rentable units, including the vacant ones.
Say you have 200 units, 180 of them are rented, and you collected $19,800 in rent last month. Your RevPAU is $19,800 divided by 200, which is $99 per unit per month. Some operators work it per square foot instead. The method is the same, with square feet in place of units.
Why it tells you more than occupancy
RevPAU is your occupancy multiplied by your average rent per occupied unit. That is why it is more honest than either number on its own.
Take two facilities of 200 units each. Facility A is 90% occupied, 180 units, at an average of $110 a month. Its RevPAU is $99. Facility B is 82% occupied, 164 units, at an average of $135 a month. Its RevPAU is $110.70.
Facility B is eight points emptier and earns $11.70 more on every unit, every month. Across 200 units that is $28,080 a year. Watch occupancy alone and you would call A the better-run facility. On the number that pays the bills, B is.
What a good number looks like
There is no single good RevPAU. It depends on your market, so the comparison that matters is with the facilities around you. Start with your own trend: is it rising month on month, and is it rising as fast as theirs?
Four ways to raise it
Price by unit size, not by facility. When your 10x20s are nearly full, the last few should sell for more than the first. Price the unit types you are about to run out of higher, and keep the ones sitting empty competitive.
Check what the street is charging every week, not at renewal. If a competitor drops their 10x10 by $15, that changes what you can ask for, and you want to know that week rather than when a tenant tells you.
Raise rent on the tenants you already have. Existing tenants are most of your revenue, and it is the line most independent operators touch least. Regular increases, announced in advance, are usually the biggest lever, because they apply to every occupied unit rather than only the next move-in.
Look hard at units that sit vacant for months. Often that is not a demand problem. It is a unit priced above what the market will pay, and an empty unit earns exactly nothing.
None of this needs a new system to start. A spreadsheet and an hour a week will show you where your RevPAU is leaking: start with how to check your competitors' rates, then look at whether you are too full and when to raise rent on existing tenants. The calculator below does the first sum for you.
I operate self-storage facilities across the Midwest. The figures here are illustrative, not taken from my own facilities, so check them against your own numbers.