Before you attend your first storage auction, you’ll want to be prepared. By understanding how and why the auction occurs, you can prepare yourself for the type of items you’re most likely to find.
This in turn can help you budget for auctions and begin making plans for your budding resale business.
Storage auctions occur as a way for storage facilities to recover the costs associated with a delinquent storage unit. When a tenant abandons the unit, the storage facility has the right to auction off its contents as a way to earn back the unpaid rent.
The facility must give the tenant advanced notice and publicize the auction, all of which can lead to several months of missed rent for the facility; as long as a unit sells for more than the delinquent rent, the auction is a success from the storage unit’s point of view.
In addition to recovering the cost of lost rent, storage facilities use these auctions as a way to empty out the storage units in preparation for new renters. Even if the facility doesn’t earn back its money on every unit, having someone empty the units for them speeds up the process of moving in new customers. This is why storage facilities require units to be emptied and swept clean within a day or two of the auction, and why failing to do so will get you blacklisted from the facility.
Now that you understand why storage auctions happen from the storage facility’s point of view, it’s important to know why they occur from a renter’s point of view. There are multiple reasons a unit may be abandoned, and the reason for the abandonment will affect what type of items you find inside:
The renter may have decided the items inside were no longer worth storing and simply abandoned the unit. These units often do not have much worth bidding on inside.
The renter suffered financial hardship and was unable to pay off the lien on the unit. Depending on the situation, this may mean that good items can be found inside; in other cases, the renter may have been able to recover some of the best valuables before the unit went into default.
The renter went into prison or the hospital and is unable to pay the rent. Depending on the circumstances, this may mean that the unit is filled with valuable items, or it could simply have household goods or trash. It really depends on the original owner.
- The renter passed away and his or her relatives were unaware of the storage unit or didn’t want to bother with it. In many cases, these are the most valuable units, especially if the tenant was elderly. These units are often the ones with antiques and rare collectibles.
In most cases, you won’t know the history of a storage unit before you bid on it.
Knowing the most likely causes of unit abandonment, however, will help prepare you for the items you’ll find inside. The vast majority of storage units will be filled with regular household items and memorabilia; a handful, though, will have valuable items that make the search worthwhile.
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