Author - Tiana Bodine

The key to making a profit from storage auctions is to never pay more for a unit than you can get out of it in sales. Of course, this isn’t always possible.

Sometimes you get burned with a bad unit, and sometimes the sales market shifts so rapidly that something you thought would make a good profit turns out to be impossible to sell.

All the same, the key to smoothing over these occasional upsets is to ensure that you stick with a conservative budget and a safe bidding strategy that will help you stay in the positive.

When it comes to bidding, there are a few simple rules to follow: Only bid on what you can see, only bid on items you know how to sell, and avoid the temptation to get into a bidding war. As long as you do those three things, you should come out ahead more often than not.

The other crucial part of keeping your auction purchases reasonable is to set a budget and stick to it. Decide how much money you realistically have to spend for a week’s worth of auctions, and determine how much of that you’re comfortable setting down on a single unit. Here are a few things to consider when creating a budget:

• How much disposable income do you have? Don’t gamble with your rent money. You need to be able to possibly lose everything you bid if things go badly without putting yourself in a bind. Don’t bid with money you don’t really have, whether it’s credit or cash you need to spend on other things.

• What overhead costs do you need to account for? Remember that you’ll need to factor in gas prices, time, and storage space for any items you win. You might also need to pay for space at a flea market, buy licenses or have other similar expenses. Don’t cut your profit margin so close that you end up losing money on these expenses.

• What is the unit worth? You may need to adjust your budget to meet an individual unit’s needs. If the unit is filled with valuable, easy-to-sell items, you can afford to spend a bit more on it. If you can’t get much money out of it, you shouldn’t put much money into it.

Once you calculate a budget, stay with it. If someone outbids you, let the unit go. Another one will come along. One way to help keep your budget in line, especially while bidding online where you have instant access to your bank account, is to use a separate account for your auction buying.

People who run official resale businesses need to keep business accounts anyway, but even hobbyist buyers can benefit from having dedicated auction accounts.

This way, you can keep track of your expenses and put a cap on your spending.

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The storage auction business is often one of trial and error. There are no guarantees that you’ll make a profit reselling every unit that you buy, or even that you’ll always break even.

As you start buying units and selling their contents, you’re bound to make a few mistakes, and learning from these mistakes is how you become a pro in this business.

All the same, you can give yourself the best chances of success by a voiding a few common newbie errors:

• Buying more units than you can handle. If you’re just starting out, it’s a good idea to start small. You don’t want to end up with more items than you can store, and you definitely don’t want to be stuck with more units than you can clean in a 24-hour period. Start off with one or two units a week and move up from there if you’re comfortable with the amount of work required.

• Buying units full of items you can’t resell. It pays to do research on the items in a storage unit before you buy it. This is one place where virtual storage auctions offer a clear advantage over traditional in-person auctions: You can look up the resale value of items in the unit before placing your bid.

• Getting caught in a bidding war. Don’t let your excitement and eagerness to win a unit overshadow your common sense. Set a budget and stick to it. If bidding goes past your limits, let that unit go and focus on the next one instead of letting your pride get in the way. In online auctions, bidding wars can quickly escalate out of hand. It’s much smarter to wait until the auction is winding down to place the winning bid rather than bidding up the competition early on.

• Buying units full of junk. Some storage units are filled with garbage of little to no value, and the hassle of packing it up and hauling it away can be a real pain. Even if there are a couple of decent items in the unit, cleaning out all the trash might make it not worthwhile. Remember that you’ll need to pay fees for the dump and other related expenses; factor these into the cost of any unit you buy and avoid the ones that become too pricy.

• Acting like an amateur. Even if you don’t make any obvious mistakes in the buying of a unit, you can still come off as an obvious newbie at an auction, and this can make other auction-goers hostile toward you. Newbie behaviors include bringing your kids to an auction, being overly chatty with other attendees, asking a lot of obvious questions, and wearing inappropriate clothing such as dress clothes. If you’re attending a live auction, you’ll want to make yourself seem as inconspicuous as possible as some veterans like to bid up newbies to scare them off. Of course, if you’re bidding online, you don’t have to worry so much about keeping up appearances.

Because storage auctions are such a competitive business, it pays to appear as professional as possible. Putting your best foot forward and avoiding these common pitfalls is a good way to give yourself a head start toward success when attending storage auctions.

The fewer newbie mistakes you make, the better your chances of sticking with the business and getting along with your fellow auction-goers.

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Reality television rarely paints a particularly realistic picture of anything it depicts, and that’s certainly true of storage auctions.

Despite the popularity of auction shows like Storage Wars and Auction Hunters, these shows bear little resemblance to real-life events. Of course, if you’re looking at these shows simply for entertainment, that doesn’t make any difference.

If you want to learn more about storage auctions, however, there are a few things you need to know before your first sale.

First and foremost, the items found in real storage auctions are rarely as nice as those seen on the shows. Even the reality shows put up a disclaimer that these auctions are representing only the “best finds” for the auction hunters, and even that is generous.

The fact of the matter is, in a lifetime of storage hunting, you’d be lucky to come across just one or two truly valuable items, much less priceless collector’s items and antiques.

Instead, the majority of the items found in a storage unit will be the kinds of things found inside most homes: furniture, appliances, clothes, old toys, tax records and photo albums. Many of the things you find inside will hold only sentimental value for the original owner, not monetary value for you. Quite often, storage units are also filled up with worthless trash items.

In order to make the storage shows more exciting, the units are often staged. The film crew will shoot the auction, then take a pause after the unit has been opened to fill it with a few rare items. When filming resumes, the “buyers” will pretend that no time had passed. Long-time auction hunters had long suspected that this was going on, and Dave Hester’s attempted lawsuit against A&E confirmed the activity.

Aside from the items found inside the storage unit, there’s another important difference between real storage auctions and those seen on TV: Real auctions are nowhere near as dramatic.

The shows try to amp up the excitement of the program by adding arguments, personal vendettas, bidding wars and other bits of high drama. In reality, these things rarely ever happen, and they’re usually not a big deal even when they do.

The truth of the matter is that most storage auctions are frequented by a mixture of newbies and veterans. The veterans all know each other and will usually have a mutual respect, if not friendship. The newbies usually get ignored. If any fighting breaks out, the offending bidders will usually be escorted out quickly for disrupting the auction.

All of which is not to say that real storage auctions can’t be exciting. There’s something absolutely exhilarating about bidding on a unit and searching through it for the first time.

It’s a kind of excitement that a television show simply can’t replicate, so the shows rely on cheap tricks to get the idea across. To know for yourself what a storage auction is really like, you’ll simply have to attend a few.

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One of the reasons that shows like Auction Hunters and Pawn Stars are so popular is that they connect viewers to periods in history.

Antiques build a bridge between the past and modern times, which is one reason why they have so much value as collectors items.

Although you probably won’t find rare antiques in every unit the way Haff and Ton do, you will probably come across a few here and there as you work through storage unit auctions.

Knowing what you’re looking at and how to value them can ensure that you get the most money you possibly can from these goods.

The first step to valuing antiques is to learn as much about them as you can. A good place to start is with some of the higher-quality TV shows.

Ignore the unlikeliness of Auction Hunters, Pawn Stars and American Pickers and focus on the items themselves, whose history tends to be accurate. One of the very best shows for this sort of education is Antique’s Roadshow, which comes on PBS.

This show is much more educational and less commercialized since it’s on Public Broadcasting, and it can help you get a general idea about a lot of different kinds of antiques.

In addition to television, try to soak up information about antiques through other forms of media. The Internet is full of valuable information if you know what you’re looking for.

Books are also available on a range of general and specialized topics. Don’t overlook the library as a free source for information! Even if your local library doesn’t carry the book you need, you can request it through an inter-library loan to save yourself from needing to buy it.

Once you’ve gotten a general feel for antiques, you need to start acquiring more detailed knowledge about them. Start with a narrow focus and something you’re likely to come across frequently, like furniture or jewelry.

You can expand from there once you get a decent understanding of what you might be dealing with. Here are a few things you should make a priority to learn about:

• Learn a few of the biggest or most collectible makers of items and how to recognize their maker’s marks or signatures.

• Learn how to identify materials to make research go by more quickly

• Familiarize yourself with the general trends of specific decades and styles so you can help pinpoint an item’s age

• Find a reputable antique’s dealer in your area who can offer you a valid appraisal

This last point is particularly important. No matter how good you are at identifying antiques in storage units, you’ll still want to confirm your findings and get a good appraisal.

Start asking around early to figure out who the best option in your community might be. This kind of network of experts is one thing that every reseller needs to start developing early.

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