Storage Auctions Not “As Seen on TV”

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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