I read every now and then about how people buy a bunch of junk auctioned off by self-storage facilities that went unclaimed. Sometimes, they find something valuable, sometimes they find a cache of heroin. I am sure that 99.9% of the time, you get the equivalent of a ten foot bag of crap from Woot.
But since I have determined that we don’t have enough crap in the house and that sorting through random crap in the garage could be a fun and mindless pastime, I want to know how to find these auctions. Are there laws that dictate that you have to do this on certain dates? Do you just call up random places and ask about auctions?
In my state, abandoned property being sold at auction is listed in the legal ads in the paper. Each week there are listings of the delinquent locker owners and where the auction is being held.
Try calling your local storage joints & see what they do. I’d bet each one has a slightly different procedure.
Their right to sell the contents of unpaid lockers flows from the contract they had the renter sign, not from some centralized law. So they’re also free to run the disposals however they want.
I use to attend storage unit auctions till I realized most of the stuff is garbage. 90% of the stuff is left because it holds no value to the previous owner and it’s easier to abandon it then haul it to the dump. I have brought home boxes of old bills, dirty clothes, stale foodstuffs, and crusty small appliances, all of it garbage.
The one time I thought I bought something that I could make some money on was a big box of nicely made wood cigar boxes, all made in Cuba. Did you know it is illegal to sell stuff in the US that was made in Cuba after 1958? I didn’t know that till eBay cancelled all my auctions.
Another aggravation from an auction purchase came from a crazy woman that live in the Seattle area then moved to California leaving behind a bunch of crap in a locker. One of the boxes I bought contained a bunch of her important papers such as birth certificates, marriage license, college transcripts and such. I took the time to look her up and offered her the stuff for $20 to cover the cost of postage. She in returned sued me for $5000 claiming I stole the stuff from her. She also called repeatedly for a few months and sent a number of nasty letters.
I challenged her lawsuit based on lack of jurisdiction, a judge agreed and threw out her case. The day I received notice of the court’s decision, I burned all the paperwork in my fireplace. I then sent a letter to her stating what I did and to never contact me again. It must have worked, I never heard from her again.