Storage Auctions: Smart Buyers, Vultures, Both?

[NeedleCast]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090407/ap_on_re_us/meltdown_storage_units

Summary: People show up to buy the rights to unpaid for storage units. Sometimes site-unseen, sometimes the units are opened but people are not allowed in them prior to bidding.

So someone can't make the payment on their storage unit. The owner of the unit can (apparently) sell all the contents of it. Are the people who bid on these things vultures, or just looking for a bargain?

[phantom power]

1. I'm going to vote "looking for a bargain."

It's part of the agreement you sign for most storage units: if you can't pay, you either take your stuff or the storage facility will sell it off.

Like a foreclosure.

[haele]

8. If you can't pay, you can't get your stuff.

Depending on the state, after two weeks late, lots of places put their own lock on the unit for non-payment.
Say, you've been in an accident or had to go out of state for a month or two due to an emergency and can't get a reliable payment plan in place, they can lock you out of your unit after two weeks, then sell it off once you're 30 days late with only a half-hearted attempt to get ahold of you. All they have to do is pay for the notice in the paper two weeks before the auction and to file the court documents for the auction, and they've got your stuff.

The cheap places are notorious for that sort of dealing in California - 10 years ago, a former rentmate of mine lost everything - she had just gone through a divorce, put everything she had in in a large storage unit waiting to get into a place of her own (including some valuable inheritance from her grandparents) - after she got into a serious auto accident a week before the payment was due and was in ICU for almost 3 weeks. They had put a lock on her unit by the time she got out of ICU.
She didn't have the ability to get up and send the payment in; she fell one month behind, the late fee was the same amount as her month's rent, and the storage site wouldn't work with her, snowballing the amount owed to over $500 within 45 days after her accident. A week after that, they had their standard quarterly auction, and her storage unit was auctioned off for around $700. She had close to $50K worth of stuff in that unit, three or four generations worth of stuff, that she couldn't save - she couldn't even get someone to remove it for her once she was able to start communicating with people.

Some states are nice enough to force them to wait another 30 days to 60 days after the 30 day lockout and notice before they can sell, so you've got 90 days to come up with a payment or place the unit in a probate estate that will pay it off. And they still don't need to try to work with you; depending on the manager or owner, they can accept partial payments to catch up after a glitch, or they can require you to come up with the entire amount owed plus late fees before they accept the payment and release the unit back to you.

Haele

[phantom power]

9. There should be a grace period. >= 30 days would be reasonable.

I guess I still don't fault people who buy the contents. One way or the other, the contents are now orphaned.

I think it's pretty heartless for a storage company to not give a person some time to retrieve their contents if they can't pay.

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. Yes. nt

[Adelante]

3. Some of them are making a living on eBay

Selling the auctioned off stuff they buy.

[NeedleCast]

5. I did some of that with estate sales

and turned a decent profit. Here in northern VA, there are a lot of retired military folks and for open estate sales I'd sometimes show up and buy military memorabilia and re-sell it on E-bay. I still felt a little predatory doing that.

[pansypoo53219]

11. been doing estate sales over 10 years and ebaying most

it's recycling. if the family doesn't want the stuff. also building up heirlooms i never got from MY family. or adding to m collections, TOO MANY OF THOSE. and this is how antique dealers do it. it is way more fun getting there first. and sometimes you 'know' where the thing came from. i like that. sure it's sad to see old family photos. studio shots are always the last or NOT to sell. i like old photo albums. and many rewards on ebay. and my book collection has grown by leaps & bounds. and late-FREE. recycling is AWESOME. but storage units? that is sad. but then, people have too much stuff.

[Vinca]

4. A few years ago there was a story in the local paper about a woman

who bought a packet of letters at a second hand shop. The shop owner had purchased a storage unit and the letters were in it. The buyer discovered the letters were written by Longfellow's daughter and quickly went back to the store and purchased the remaining packets from the bin. They were appraised at a couple of hundred thousand dollars. It pays to check out storage unit sales.

[spinbaby]

6. What are the chances of that happening?

Chances are far greater you'll wind up with someone's lifetime collection of Beanie Babies.

[Vinca]

13. LOL - how true.

[CrispyQ]

7. The best thing we ever did was clean out & get rid of our frickin' storage unit!

A friend once told me, "You'll die with that thing." It was then, I determined that that wouldn't be the case. The next summer we took a week off & got rid of all the stuff in it. It was a glorious week! Very little came back to the house.

We encountered one guy who had three units & they were all stuffed so full he couldn't even walk into them without first unloading some stuff. ~gasp

I wonder if some business' are starting to notice people living in their units? We paid $110 for a single garage sized unit.

[kestrel91316]

10. Wow, that's cheap. I pay $88 for the tiniest unit Public Storage has.

I need to clean it out and ship the few pieces of furniture in it to my niece and nephew, or sell them if they don't want them. I can store the few boxes of stuff there in my apartment if I get off my lazy ass and sell some crap on eBay/CL.

[NeedleCast]

12. Seems to depend a lot on location

My folks pay something like 70 bucks a month for a 10x10 storage in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. I was paying 149$/month for a 5x10 in the DC area.