- November 23, 2024
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Auctions of abandoned storage units are held the fourth Tuesday morning of every month, at All Aboard Storage.
BY MATT MENCARINI | STAFF WRITER
There was supposed to be an auction Tuesday morning. All of a woman's possessions inside a 10-foot-by-20-foot storage unit at All Aboard Storage, 509 S. Nova Road, were to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But that didn't happen.
Just 10 minutes before the unit was set to be auctioned, with interested buyers already signed in, employees at the facility were finally able to contact the owner and receive payment for the unpaid rent and late fees.
There was only one auction scheduled for Tuesday. The facility had been trying to contact this particular tenant for months, employees say, following the process preceding putting a unite up for auction.
Denise Brown had been calling the secondary contact listed for the unit since she started working at All Aboard three weeks ago. Finally, the tenant's credit card and contact information was updated, and the auction was canceled.
Payment received is only good through the end of the month, though. So this process is likely to start all over again in seven days, when May's rent is due.
“I think there’s a lot of older people that rent a unit and don’t tell anybody they have a unit,” Terry Place said, a retired psychologist who’s described as the facility’s “jack of all trades."
“They die, and no one knows it’s there," she said. "Other people just move away and forget about it. It’s amazing the number of people who will just walk away from (their units).”
Rent for units is due the first of each month. But after 40 days, the unit enters auction status. During this time, the facility calls, emails and sends letters.
They’ve had tenants call the day of the auction and pay what’s owed, employees say. They’ve even had a tenant show up during an auction.
“Anybody that you talk to in this town, if they tell you that the auction makes them money is either doing something wrong or they’re lying to you,” said Amy Holley, the director of storage operations at All Aboard Storage. “The only thing that an auction can do for a storage facility is recoup the debt that’s lost to them, and to open up the space again.”
By law, any money made at auction, after the debt to the facility is covered, is given to tenant. If the tenant can’t be contacted, the facility must hold onto the money for two years before it can be counted as revenue.
“The last thing we want to do is auction,” Holley said. “It really is the last resort to a process. Nobody likes to sell people’s stuff.”
