McGrath RentCorp Brand Guidelines: Livermore’s 1979 Mobile Modular Rental Business

Mobile Modular first, McGrath RentCorp five years later.

McGrath RentCorp began as a single modular-building business. Mobile Modular, its largest brand, says that Mobile Modular Management Corporation was founded in 1979 by Bob McGrath, and that it was the original business that led to the creation of McGrath RentCorp in 1984. The company dates its own founding to 1979 in its press releases. Mobile Modular says it started on two acres in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area and expanded across Southern California and Texas before growing nationwide.

The headquarters is still in Livermore, California, and the company is listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker MGRC. In its October 2026 results release, McGrath describes itself as a leading business-to-business rental company in North America, with operations centred on modular solutions through Mobile Modular and Mobile Modular Portable Storage, and an electronic test equipment rental business called TRS-RenTelco. The same release says the company has raised its annual dividend for more than 35 consecutive years, a record it presents as rare among listed companies.

McGrath’s corporate site sets out three values in short, plain lines: “Better together”, “Pride in service” and “Continuous improvement”. Under the last, the company says it has a “flywheel mentality” and values getting it right over being right. The tone is that of a business-to-business firm talking to its own staff as much as to customers, with no consumer gloss.

Classrooms, offices, storage and test equipment.

Most of what the public sees of McGrath carries the Mobile Modular name. Mobile Modular says it rents, leases and sells relocatable and permanent modular buildings, and its website groups them by use. For schools there are single and double classrooms, multi-class complexes, modular restrooms and kitchen buildings; for business and job sites there are single-wide and double-wide offices, office complexes, sales offices, and ground-level storage and office containers. A stackable range is sold as Xpand, and the site offers a Building Visualizer for planning a layout online. Used offices, complexes and classrooms are sold through a live inventory page, which Mobile Modular says lists units available for immediate purchase and delivery in each area.

The company also builds. Enviroplex, which describes itself as a wholly owned subsidiary of McGrath, says it was founded in 1991 and runs a 125,000 square foot design and manufacturing plant in Stockton, California, where it makes modular classrooms. McGrath’s corporate site lists it as McGrath Enviroplex, alongside a foodservice business, Kitchens To Go, which offers modular, mobile and containerized kitchens for lease or purchase.

The portfolio has been reshaped around modular buildings. On 1 February 2023 McGrath announced that it had acquired Vesta Modular, a modular space company founded in 2014 and based in Southfield, Michigan, and on the same day sold its Adler Tank Rentals business to Ironclad Environmental Solutions; both transactions were completed that day, the company said. In March and April 2023 it also announced that it had bought the assets of Brekke Storage in Colorado and Dixie Temporary Storage in South Carolina, two regional portable storage providers, each adding a branch to its portable storage operations.

Design and documentation.

Modular and portable-building firms sell something people mostly see from the roadside: a cabin at the edge of a building site, a stack of steel modules beside a school, a row of storage containers in a depot yard. Their websites lean on that picture. Product pages show single units and stacked blocks photographed outside and in, often with the furniture and fittings that turn a box into an office or a classroom, and case studies show finished complexes from the air.

The units themselves carry much of the identity. A company name on the side of a cabin is seen by everyone who passes a site, and colour can become a signature: Algeco says the dark grey finish it introduced with its Progress range in 2005 is now emblematic of the market. Some names have become so familiar that the companies ask for them not to be used as generic words; Algeco’s French website has a page making exactly that request.

Much of the selling now happens online. WillScot’s website, rebuilt in 2024 when it folded the Mobile Mini site into its own, offers configurable packages for furniture, entrances and fencing, a fencing estimator and a search for units on sale. Configurators of this kind let a buyer assemble a building from named parts before anyone visits the site.

Behind the cabins sit corporate pages written for investors. Firms in this sector publish fleet sizes, country counts and the names of their owners: Modulaire Group, for example, gives its fleet as more than 330,000 modular space and storage units across 24 countries. This guide uses such figures only as dated, attributed statements, and notes where a claim rests on a company’s own word.

A merger agreed, then called off.

In January 2024 McGrath agreed to be acquired by WillScot Mobile Mini, the Phoenix-based portable space company. The Motley Fool reported on 29 January 2024 that McGrath shares rose after the agreement was announced, and described McGrath as a temporary space solutions company; the boards of both firms had approved the deal. It never closed. On 18 September 2024 McGrath confirmed that WillScot and the company had mutually agreed to terminate the merger agreement, and said it would pursue a standalone strategy focused on its modular and portable storage businesses, including services sold as Mobile Modular Plus and site-related work.

The modular business works across a wide map. Mobile Modular says it serves industries including education, commercial, construction, foodservice, health care, industrial, hospitality, petrochemical and retail, and its location list runs from Anchorage and Fairbanks in Alaska to Florida, with eight Californian locations, among them Livermore, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego and Selma. The Vesta purchase of 2023, McGrath said at the time, was meant to widen that coverage and increase the share of long-term contracts in its modular business. TRS-RenTelco, the one line outside buildings and storage, rents electronic test equipment, according to McGrath’s results releases.

McGrath therefore remains an independent listed company, with Mobile Modular as its main public face. The brand family is built in a consistent way: the parent name for investors and the corporate site, and a short descriptive name for each line of business, whether modular buildings, portable storage, test equipment or school classrooms. The corporate site’s footer lists Mobile Modular, Portable Storage, TRS-RenTelco, McGrath Enviroplex and Kitchens To Go side by side, each with its own website.

For a design guide, McGrath RentCorp shows how a founder’s surname and a plain descriptive brand can sit together: the family name carries the company to investors, while Mobile Modular says exactly what is on the truck to the people who rent it. Compare it with the WillScot brand guide, the company that agreed to buy McGrath in 2024, and the Mobile Mini brand guide, the portable storage name within WillScot. For this guide we use deep teal, light concrete and oak tan with a plain grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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