Bob - when for the welcome! If you recognize me from my blog photo, feel free to introduce yourself. I'll be in Hudson on Friday morning and going to a number of auctions (bankroll permitting) on Monday.

Thanks for the compliment on my blogs.

Greetings, all. I live about 20 miles west of Boston. Have been going to auctions since February or March. Have purchased 16 units so far. I work this business with my brother and a friend of his helps with the heavy lifting.

Sometimes I love furniture since it's a quick transaction to make a good dollar. Then, we'll have too much furniture and I'll start looking out for boxes, especially collectibles. No crazy good finds yet,

I really enjoy the digging and research that's required to learn about the items we find to maximize our returns. For instance, I now know more about pre-prohibition beer bottles than I ever thought I would. The more we learn, the better we'll be able to evaluate storage units at auction.

I started a blog to write about my experiences. It's called storageunitspelunking.blogspot.com.

Greetings, all! Just found this forum.

The last auction I went to was on 8/5 in Massachusetts. It was at a moving company warehouse and the auctioneer's calendar noted 40 units up for auction. When we got there, there were actually 61 available. On a Friday morning, there were about 70 folks there. Before even going in, we knew this would be unusual: you could leave mattresses behind, if you found really junky stuff, you could break it up and add it to their dumpster and we'd have a month to get everything out.

We all trooped up the stairs to the 5th floor, where the first 20 units were. It was unbelievable. Every square inch of the place was jammed with furniture and boxes and pianos and mattresses. And it was junky looking. The "units" were marked off with yellow caution tape. I'd say a typical unit measured 15' x 30'. The only space to move around in was a tiny corridor with piles of furniture on either side.

The units were so crappy on that first floor and the setup was so creepy that it drove a lot of potential bidder away (yay!). Fortunately, on the lower floors, the quality of the stuff you could see improved quite a bit and we picked up a couple of units for decent money.

Because the warehouse only has one loading dock and freight elevator, we had to schedule a date and time to remove our goods. We have to wait until the 15th to actually get in there and take out all that stuff. I can't wait!