Storage Lockers

[apush]

I know this is the forum for Garage sale finds, but has anyone had the experience of bidding on storage lockers?

Just curious how this really, really works. Sure the TV show is fixed.

apush

 

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[iceman0xh]

I posted a couple months ago on my storage locker experience...I did fairly well but since then I've been to a few more that have nothing but junk. If you listen to what the auction hunters guys say they tell you some truthful facts about it. 90% of lockers are junk, bid on what you see not the mystery factor, and dont go over what you are originally thinking to spend on a unit. I spent $200 on the unit I bought and made $500 profit so it was a good haul.

 

[47thelement]

Way to late the party on this one...

Because of the shows, lockers are going for 3-4 times what they went for 2 years ago. You could go to an auction and see maybe 3-4 people bidding on lockers. Now if your not on site an hour ahead of time, your not getting a parking spot.

Thank you television, I'm not going to another auction til things calm down.

 

[centfladigger]

my uncle got filthy rich off of buying those units back inthe late 70`s through the 80`s, opened a store front to sell it all and with that money he now has over 400 rental properties. I asked him about that and he said he wouldnt waste his time or a dime on it nowadays. these shows always seem to kill a good thing if your doing it and its working for you

 

[Philmont_709n2]

bought 3 units together with a friend one day last winter. one sold for $4 one for $5 and one for $25. they all had LOTS of junk in them but also lots of cool nick nacks and small treasures. got some sterling silver jewelry, a sega saturn console, books, movies, lots of nasty clothing, a spare tire and other crap haha. but us only paying $17 each, it definitely was worth our money. and it was fun! of course we were shooting for the units we knew nobody wanted

 

[clovis97]

I have been to many storage unit auctions.

I could probably write a book on the topic. Okay, maybe not a book, but I could write a really long dissertation.

One word of caution, be careful of the set up, or pigs in a poke.

One auctioneer that I know of is renting units, filling them with trash and empty boxes, and selling them off as if they were foreclosed. I could tell immediately that something wasn't right in River City...and it took me about 10 minutes to figure out the scam that the auctioneer was pulling. In the meanwhile, the crowd was, and still is, blissfully bidding away, paying $1500+ for trash units. Some of those people have watched too much TV.

OTOH, there are good units out there that can be had for a song. A friend just bought a 8 x 10 for $450, and he cleared well over $900 on the unit. He could have made much, much more money had he not resold it the way he did, dumping the majority of it at an auction barn.

 

[jeff of pa]

Question, is it Illegal for storage locker
Owners to just Keep the lockers
that are in Default ?

If you own a Storage Buisness, There is very Little
Cost when someone Defaults.
Just the fact you could have rented the space to somone else

why not Keep them & sell off the Goodies

& Just auction the ones that have nothing worthwhile in ?

Or at least, Scrounge through them first.

 

[mrs.oroblanco]

No - the owners cannot just keep the contents.

There is a legal procedure in each state, for non-payment of storage rental fees.

It'd be a good deal for them if they could - for sure - but, I did know of one group who went through the units before they were "officially locked", and then had friends bid on them.

Of course, the three of them are in jail now, so, maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Since a couple of the units had over $2500 worth of stuff (at the time), it was a barrage of charges, from grand theft to fraud and a few other things (don't remember exactly). They threw the book at them, and then the IRS stepped in.

Beth

 

[diggummup]

Here is a list of lien laws in each state as well as general info. regarding storage auctions. I don't do them because it would require too much effort, time and space getting rid of the big items (furn. & appl.) which many units are full of. I have thought about doing it in the future.
http://www.storagetreasures.com/general-information#state-lien-laws

 

[mrs.oroblanco]

Great link, diggummup!


Beth

 

[Goldmanford]

There is a storage facility that I use myself and the owner once had a yard sale with junk from lockers that were abandoned. Again, there was a ton of junk items but my mother-in-law picked up a plastic food store bag full of jewelry for $1. After she went through it and pulled a few necklaces that she would wear, she gave the rest to me. It was full of sterling and some 14k items. It appears the owner of the units just dumped all the jewelry items into that one bag and then sold them for a buck.

 

[whoknows52]

If anybody is interested in checking out the auctions in their area try auctionzip.com, type in storage for keyword

 

[diggummup]

I might add that auctionzip.com does not list all the auctions going on in your area, only those auction companies which use their site.
By law all public storage auctions must be publically advertised in the newspaper after written notice has been given to the person renting the unit and the alotted time with which he has to respond has expired (2 weeks in my state). The advertisement shall include:
1. A brief and general description of what is believed to constitute the personal property contained in the storage unit, as provided on rental application.
2. The address of the self-service storage facility or the address where the self-contained storage unit is located and the name of the tenant.
3. The time, place, and manner of the sale or other disposition. The sale or other disposition shall take place not sooner than 15 days after the first publication.
(b) If there is no newspaper of general circulation in the area where the self-service storage facility or self-contained storage unit is located, the advertisement shall be posted at least 10 days before the date of the sale or other disposition in not fewer than three conspicuous places in the neighborhood where the self-service storage facility or self-contained storage unit is located. The more you know about the person who was renting the unit, the more you know whether you may want to bid on it, after just an initial look inside the unit. Here is a typical ad that would be posted in the paper-

12/28/2011
Miscellaneous Notices

Warehouse Sales
Notice is hereby given that on 01/06/2012 at 10:30AM
at U-STORE-IT #497 10755 Pembroke Road, in the city
of Pembroke Pines, state of FL the
undersigned, U-STORE-IT #497 will sell at Public
Sale by competitive bidding, the personal property
heretofore stored with the undersigned by:



All items in storage units contain household items
unless otherwise mentioned



Lourdes C. Denize Loiseau -

Unit 0499D

Melody Gay - Unit A0024

Trevor R Reid - Unit A0066

Shastri W Deosaran - Unit A0141

Lashanda Renee Shaw -

Unit A0268

Ivy Kendall - Unit A0315

Miriam Criado - Unit A0320

Maureen Fidler - Unit B0577

12/21-28 11-S-107/1803184B



If your any good at research, you can find out all kinds of information about the person named as the rentor of the unit up for sale. Where they live/d, how much there house is/was worth, what they do for a living, any civil or criminal proceedings, etc.,etc. This can give you clues sometimes as to what kind of items may be "hidden" in the storage unit. Later when I have a chance, i'll see what I can come up with on one of these people.

Update- I just ran a records check in the county courthouse online info. and property tax appraisers office, as well as sunbiz.com, and found out that everyone of these people are pretty much low lifes with at least one "removal of tenant" eviction case against them in the past (several with multiples). None of them own a business, none of them own a house, one of them has owned a house in the past but it was foreclosed on in 2007. Most have prior traffic offenses, one has a felony conviction for workers comp fraud and grand theft, one has a prior domestic violence against a woman whom he married several years later, then divorced shortly thereafter (go figure). This tells me that I probably wouldn't put much stock in anything they may have in their units, other than what I can actually see to bid on. They've all been evicted recently in the past year, they put their household goods in storage and are shacking up with whomever and still couldn't pay their storage fees. Anything valuable other than some furn. and maybe a tv or stereo has probably already been removed by them. The "treasures" will be few and far between at this auction (IMHO). This took about 25 minutes for these 8 people, so it's not too time consuming if you know where to look.

 

[Twisted One]

I have been to only a couple over the last year, and I am really interested in taking this on, probably using Craigslist as my main source of unloading anything along the lines of furniture and such.

But in my very little experience, a huge factor is the way the auction is held, at least three of the local storage units in my area use a sealed bid method which can get you units at a much lower price then the oral bidding type. A guy I was with at one bought a storage unit for $50 bucks it was a 12 by 14 storage unit with a massive collection of Phone books! yes, like yellow pages type phone books.
I asked him why he would bid on it, he asked if I wanted to help him clear it out and see why he bid on it.

His theory I found out is that the person was a collector, and while he had to take almost an entire full size truck load of phone books to the dump, plus a love seat, and mattress that ended up costing him like $100 to dump total.
His theory panned out when we got to the back and found a small collection of 15 phones, none were extremely old looking, but I know one sold for over $500 bucks that looked like a Train, was kind of cool but I guess really collectible.
If I remember right over all the phone collection other than the train only sold for like $200 bucks, and the headboard and footboard of the bed made him another $150.

So he made out really good. He said that using the theory doesn't always work out because you make money off a collection, you run up bills with a hoarder and they are hard to tell apart sometimes.

I have several storage auctions in my area I am signed up for, so they call me every couple of month's to let me know they are getting ready for another, and a local auctioneer has a website listing the storage units he is hired to go auction, he has one on Jan. 20th I really want to attend but trying to get my wife to agree to let me take a few hundred bucks over there to gamble is really difficult, so unless I can get her to agree to it I won't be going.

 

[mrs.oroblanco]

We are going to one on Saturday. It is being done in conjunction with 3 other auctions. (an auction house that owns storage units is moving their business location, so they are having an estate sale, a household sale, a personal sale and the storage sale.)

THAT should be interesting. I've never been to anything like it - at least how its being described.

Beth

 

[clovis97]

One side note to add to diggumup's post:

In Indiana, the unit holder/tenant has the right to pay up on their past due bill up until the very minute that the auctioneer says "sold".

I've been to SU auctions where 27 units were advertised, but only 6 of them were actually sold, meaning that the tenant paid their storage bill before the auction day.

For the people new to SU auctions, finding that the amount of units available for sale on auction day is far fewer than advertised is very common and should be expected.

 

[mrs.oroblanco]

Clovis97,

You make a very good point.

In fact, in most types of those kinds of auctions (storage, repossessions, sheriff sales, marshall's sales, etc.), they can pay up until just before the auction.

More than once, I have seen that happen - PITA, especially when you've done lots of homework before the sale - sometimes it is for naught.


Beth

 

[SFBayArea]

my uncle got filthy rich off of buying those units back inthe late 70`s through the 80`s, opened a store front to sell it all and with that money he now has over 400 rental properties. I asked him about that and he said he wouldnt waste his time or a dime on it nowadays. these shows always seem to kill a good thing if your doing it and its working for you

Wow, I bet. When people find a deal that no one else knows about, they can really get rich off of it. I haven't tried since I expect lots of people going to them due to the shows. Long ago, I always wondered where people at the flea market get their stuff from.

 

[cyberdan]

Long ago, I always wondered where people at the flea market get their stuff from.

YARD SALES!!!!!!!

I see pickup trucks and vans loaded to capacity with YS krap. I asked a few buyers if these go to swapmeets. Most couldn't answer (no english/no greencard) but those that understood me said si.

 

[woodstock]

With today's "reality series" shows there's a lot that's not seen behind the camera's. First, a good majority of what you view has been set up by the directors and producers, to get you to wish and watch. Two good friends of mine have been doing this thing for years and they are not getting rich by any means. Just think about it and put yourself in a storage situation. If you have very valuable items would you really store them in a unguarded in a area where insects and rodents and even moisture can get to them ? Now there are storage area's rented that a heated , climate controlled , and even inside. And most of those are kept by responsible renters who pay there storage rentals by lease 6 months to even two years in advance. Those can have some goodies no doubt, but not every one that's left and open to auction. And the only time they become available to buy in auction is when they pass away without any known relatives, hospitalized or out of state without the means to pay the rent or are in prison. The reality show hype you see on TV is set up more times than it isn't for ratings and not based on the real world of storage, it's good to dream like it is easy money and sometimes you may hit a home run but most of the time you'll be hitting foul balls. IMHO, Woodstock