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Schmidt died two years ago, her body found on the lawn of a Thousand Oaks home after she had fled on foot from a self-storage facility she and two men were attempting to burglarize.

Many companies that make up the $56 billion self-storage industry have introduced similar price-hiking strategies in an effort to offset losses and rising costs related to the pandemic and the inflated economy.

“They try to get you in the door with a too-good-to-be-true offer, but it’s not unheard of for them to then turn around and increase the rate by 200 percent or 300 percent,” explains Burke Bradshaw, the president and co-owner of Towne Storage—a self-storage company with about three dozen locations across Nevada, Utah, and Arizona.

There are more than 50,000 storage facilities across the U.S., but more than half of the country’s rentable self-storage space is owned by only 100 companies.

In Austin, a 10-by-10 self-storage unit has an average standard rate of $130 a month, but an ExtraSpace Storage facility has that size of unit posted for just $72 on its website—an amount not advertised as a promotion or sale.