Buffett Brain · Research note
Score updated 21 May 2026
IRM· Real Estate
Iron Mountain
Iron Mountain's record-storage moat is real, but 136x earnings and negative book equity put it well outside Buffett-fit boundaries.
Buffett fit
Weak fit
Owner
64
Durability
41
Management
36
Price
22
Score updated 21 May 2026
Buffett's checklist
Each number against Buffett's bar, and where it ranks among Real Estate stocks in our database.
How much profit the business makes on each dollar invested in it. Higher is better.
What is left of each sale after the cost of making the product. A high number often means pricing power.
The cash the business earns for its owners, compared with the price of the whole company.
How fast sales grew each year over the last five years.
How many years of today's profit you pay for at today's price. Lower means cheaper.
How much the company owes compared with what it owns outright. Lower is safer.
The four pillars
How the business measures up on each of Buffett's four tests.
Owning IRM at 136x earnings means trusting that the data-center build-out scales without further dilution.
The full reasoning comes with a free account.
Records storage is genuinely durable, files do not get smaller and regulated retention requirements expand.
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Share count is essentially flat (+0.5%). is -16 because book equity is negative, extensive REIT distributions consumed equity.
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Owner-earnings yield of -2.5% means is currently negative.
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For and against
The strongest points on each side, with the numbers behind them.
In its favor
5- 1Switching costs in physical records storage are exceptional
- 2Global footprint, 1,450 facilities in 50 countries
- 3Revenue growing 11.3% per year as data-center business scales
- 4225,000 customers including regulated industries with long retention rules
Concerns
7- 1 of 136x is essentially uninformative, REIT depreciation distorts it
- 2Owner-earnings yield of -2.5% means negative
- 3Net-debt/EBITDA of 8.38 is high
- 4Interest coverage of 1.47x is thin
Price history
$113+147.8%· 5-year return
Weekly closing prices. Touch or hover the line for a date.
The business
How the business works
Iron Mountain stores physical records and increasingly digital data for 225,000 organizations across 1,450 facilities in 50 countries. The 55% and 18% reflect strong switching-cost economics, once a customer's archives are in your warehouse, the cost of moving them is enormous. Revenue at 11.3% per year over five years confirms the data-center and digital pivot is contributing growth. But of just 4.9% reveals how capital-intensive the build-out has been.
What other investors would say
The same company, judged by three other documented playbooks.
Keep researching
Similar companies in Real Estate
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