Hmm, let's see - mid last summer or so. Bout a year ago or a little less.

I was new to the Hawaii market, and still found the prices crazy, storage auction shows or not, but he was a professional buyer that had lived on the island for 15 years and he was happy with the buy.

When I think back on the biggest scores I've personally seen at our auctions (I spent most of my time as a self storage property manager) I always go back to "Bill" the HVAC specialist that buys and resells storage auctions with his wife in their spare time.

This particular day, Bill came down to the facilities on his own - we always stagger our auctions and run them on the same day so that our motivated bidders can hit our different locations in town.

Anyway, Bill walked the earlier auction with all the rest of the bidders and saw the 5 or so units we had up for sale at that time. Most of them with drive-ups but few of them were even close to being packed to capacity - most had a lot of empty space and junky trashbags full of clothes.

When everyone got to the last unit, I knew there was going to be some bidding action back and forth because when I prepped the unit I saw it was absolutely packed, a 10x10 drive up with barely any remaining space.

In terms of what was visible: there was a medium square safe, several crates of recreational swimming equipment, scuba stuff, pool toys, etc. Two different video game consoles, crate upon crate of dvds and video games. You couldn't see much beyond that but from the looks of the front of the unit you could tell it was going to be valuable.

Luckily for Bill, he was the most experienced buyer there, and no one kept up with him past the $345 mark, which he ultimately claimed the unit for (keep in mind this is in Hawaii where the prices for everything are always higher). Bill paid, then started unloading everything. In about an hour, he popped into the office to say he had found two worm-drive skill saws that were brand new, and that he was confident he had made his money back right there.

Turned out the unit was a family storage - plenty of video games and video game consoles, 3 boxes of dvds and vhs, books, clothes, swimming gear, and then all of Dad's power tools. Yummy. He said he was up about $1200 on that unit after a week of selling everything off.

I always recommend that first time buyers be vigilant in processing everything they can find inside the units they win - not necessarily because they're going to turn a healthy profit from each and every item they find - but because doing so sets the base of self-discipline that you need to turn steady profits with storage auctions.

Before I got into storage auctions I worked with eBay for a long time and saw many small and large businesses whose entire income stream was based off eBay. Some people understood the basic premise of processing your inventory intelligently - doing your research, refurbishing what you could, and then listing absolutely everything up there once.

More people, however, even the ones that had been selling on eBay for years, got stuck in that same old loop of hoarding crap that is simply not worth the time and effort and re-listing fees .They get so fixated and emotionally attached to the stuff that has proven to them, time and again, that it won't move. It still baffles me.

Guess I don't have the hoarding gene. Anyway, to make a long story short - I think it's great to learn how to force yourself to go through everything, especially in the beginning. Eventually you will hit your rhythm in determining what is junk and what can be sold. Even if you have a bunch of small items that only sell for a few bucks a pop, if you are diligent about listing and shipping them, pretty soon they add up.

Agree with movieman -

Being a property manager, we would throw the door open once a unit was safely and securely into auction status and then take pictures along with a general inventory. There are a number of reasons for doing this - one of the major ones is ensuring the bidders that do make the effort to come out on auction day aren't greeted with a big box of nothing.

We want to keep our well behaved bidders happy so they'll keep coming back and help us to get rid of problem tenants and their junk.