Thanks in large part to the A&E show Storage Wars, I started to dabble in storage auctions around 2011. Getting started was the hardest part because there was not much info on these kinds of auctions. With a few sprinkled exceptions, they do not happen on a regular basis. You need to scour classified ads and search engines to find when and where these happen locally. A few classified ads will even tell you what the units contain.
The Storage Auction Question
What are Storage Auctions and why do they happen? Storage Auctions occur due to storage customers not paying their bills on time. When the payment gets too late, the storage company puts their own locker on the unit and sells the contents to the public. The proceeds from this sale is then used to either pay or help pay the overdue bill. In the event the proceeds from the sale are above bill, the rest of the money is supossed to go to the owner of the storage locker. Of course, the auctioneer gets a cut as well.
Auction Day
Storage auctions work a little different than any other auction or even sale. The first thing that you have to do when you arrive is to sign up for a number. Once the auction starts, you need to look at the room from outside the door. You can not walk in the room or touch anything inside of it. Doing so can get you removed from the bids on that locker if not the entire auction. Once everybody takes a look inside, the auctioneer will start with the bids. Most start high and then inch lower until somebody starts the bidding. Not surprisingly, the highest bidder wins the unit.
After Winning a Unit
You also have to know what to do if you happen to win a unit. The first thing you need to do is to pay for the unit in the office of the storage facility. Nearly all of the time this means that you will have to pay cash on hand. You can not use a credit card or make a quick dash to the ATM machine. This is stated when they first start the auction and they will enforce it. You may also have to pay something called a sweep clean deposit. This can range from $25 to as high as $100 per unit. After paying, you will have a set time to remove everything from the locker and that includes any garbage. Once everything is loaded out of the unit, you sweep the unit to get your deposit back. If you don’t remove everything, you will not only not get your deposit, but they will not let you bid on a locker in that facility again.
Thus, those are the basics of what goes on at storage auctions. Hope this helps anybody on the fence on deciding whether they want to start storage auctions or not.