"Plenty of time....." I will follow the growth or decline of the business and the forum during that time. Both have changed over the last two years and will continue to do so.
Here's an idea....how about a new "fourum" ....or at least a thread in this one.... for PICKING ? No, wait, don't do it !
Why ruin yet another trend that is currently working better than the buying of storage lockers.
I agree, the interest in storage auctions (at least in internet search volume) is on a decline. The forum on the other hand is growing and will hopefully see an increase in traffic. As a matter fact, just in the past week, with the minimal SEO & marketing I have done, the forum's Alexa rank has dropped 20,000 points. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Alexa, it's a company/website that tracks the traffic for other websites. The more traffic your website gets, the lower your Alexa rank is.
Anyway, my point is that the more SEO I do, the higher the forum ranks in the search results. The higher we rank in the search results, the more people who visit the site. Not only that, the forum is constantly growing in content. The more content, the more pages that get indexed by the search engines, the more people that are exposed to the forum.
So basically what I'm saying is that despite "storage auctions" being on a decline, the forum will be capturing a larger percentage of the overall search volume keeping it at it's current level or we may even see a gradual increase in visitors.
On the other hand, if the interest in storage auctions increases, well that's even better.
I do however, like your idea for starting a category for picking.