Sunday, March 20, 2011

Auction Time.

For those who don't know I work in the self-storage industry and today we held our auction. It's been awhile since the last auction we held, and the first since the new show Storage Wars began airing TV. The auction was pretty small unit wise and I wasn't sure what affect the show would have for us before we began today.

Well, the show had a massive impact for us. In the six years I've been at this facility I have never seen so many auction buyers at one of our auctions, and I have never seen so many outrageously high bids for such small units! The show had bred a new type of auction buyer, for better or worse it remains to be seen.

A word of advice for those who use storage for sentimental items - don't! A storage facility is not the place you want to keep your pictures or anything of sentimental value, make room at your home because you never know what can happen to them. It always breaks my heart when an auction buyer brings me a box or container filled with pictures of someones kid.

I've never seen the show Storage Wars, but I can guarantee you they are only showing the good stuff for the viewing audience. But I'm sure it makes for great TV!

4 comments:

mbp said...

I assume you auction off contents after a period if someone doesn't pay the rent.

Does the original owner get an opportunity to reclaim their goods beforehand?

Jayedub said...

Here in the state of California there are laws that must be followed, so yes to both questions. It's better if a customer at Lien pays their bill because in most cases we lose money from an auction.

Yeebo said...

That's really interesting. I guess if someone has something really valuable is storage (gold bullion, stolen diamonds, body parts of their victims, ect.) they would most likely keep up with the rent.

How often is it from folks that do odd things like put a bunch of stuff in storage and then move across the country? I've seen friends do it, several times (though I presume they pay their storage fees). You have to really want that old couch back to invest in a plane ticket and a U-haul.

Jayedub said...

We have quite a few customers that have storage here but live in other parts of the world.