No, it pretty much says that they have to wait 14 days before they mail you the letter. Then 14 days after mailing the letter, they can sell your stuff.
The letter is a legal notification that you owe them money, and that in 14 days from the mailing of the letter that they plan to sell your stuff.
So under that contract, at a minimum, you have 28 days from when you fail to pay your rent before they can sell your stuff. That time frame could be longer, if there’s a delay between the initial 14 day period and the mailing of the notification letter.
They have to wait 14 days before putting a lien on the belongings or before putting a lock on the belongings. I don’t see why they have to wait the 14 days before sending the letter.
Self-store places are often used by people moving.
I’m guessing the “self-storage place” is one of the last to be notified of “our new address!”.
So the storage manager is faced with a dis-connected phone (if given a land-line) and an obsolete mailing address.
So, the clock starts ticking when the letter is SENT, not when it is received.
If you have your US Mail set to forward, it can take a few days for the letter to get to you (esp. if Cert., signature required).
IOW: set the storage place up to do auto-bill - if you screw up one payment, you’ll likely find your stuff gone by the time you remember the bill.
She did receive a notice in the mail but it was regular mail, not a certified letter as the contract states it should have been. It was postmarked November 18th but it didn’t actually make it to her until December 10th… I know this is true because I was with her when she collected her mail and she stroked out when she read it!!!
Also, despite her receiving all statements and various other communications by email from them for so long… she received several emails dated November around that date but nothing about an auction notice.
I feel so bad for her because it she seems to be one of those people that if things can go bad, it will…
Forgot to add to the above comment … The auction was December 5th. She received the notice December 10th, too late!
I also wanted to add that she’d had her things in storage there for 10 long years. She’d been paying all this time to keep her things. Her story is a long and sad one which I won’t get into here.
She said she contacted the owner and manager again about possibly getting her family photos, personal papers and various sentimental items of zero monetary value back from the buyer of her unit. They were very rude and completely uncaring… Relayed to her by the manager, the buyer of her unit said he didn’t want any contact with her since it would inconvenience him. He also said he didn’t really care …
I wish I could help her in some way but I don’t know what to do… I guess because she’s been screwed as someone else put it…
Sounds like her only recourse is to sue them to recover the value of her stuff and quibble about whether or not the letter was certified. Which I’m suspecting is a seriously weak-sauce legal argument when confronted with not paying one’s rent. Is the crap in the storage unit worth the cost of a court case in the first place?
Everything else stems from the fact that she didn’t pay her rent, and the storage place seems to have been within the letter of the law, with the possible (minor) exception of the certified/not-certified bit.
My point was that if she never got the letter, it’s possible they didn’t actually correctly send it to the last known address. She says “You never sent the letter”;
they say “Yes we did”
“Prove it!”
“Here’s the certified receipt”
"Well, it looks like you got confused about state abbreviations and sent this to Anchorage, Alabama. Which is not actually the address I gave you. "
Or, in the actual case, they may not even have a certified mail receipt since it sounds like they may have been to cheap to spring for what their contract requires.
Can’t hurt to write them a letter, quoting the relevant section of the contract, noting that she never got any certified mail, and noting that the easiest way to resolve the dispute quickly and at least cost to everyone is to send a photocopy of the certified mail receipt. Sound as legal and lawyerly as possible without saying or implying that you’re a lawyer or threatening any specific legal action.