Who in their right mind would ever leave something valuable in a storage unit and never return to claim it? It’s nonsensical that items considered important enough to be placed in safe storage, should later be abandoned and sold off at auction at a fraction of their real value. Even so, it happens all the time. No-one knows the story behind how the items got there and what happened to their original owners, which makes it all the more intriguing. They even made a TV show about it – Storage Wars follows real life storage locker bounty hunters in their quest for riches. Blind lots of used items are auctioned off to the highest bidder, who takes a gamble that the contents will be worth more than they paid. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of old junk that’s not worth much at all. But considering the three most valuable things ever found in a storage unit, you can understand why 21st century treasure hunters won’t be deterred from their search for storage gold.
- Aye aye me hearty, there IS gold in some of them lockers! A storage unit lot sold in 2011 for $1,000 turned out to contain a real life pirate haul of Spanish gold coins, some dating as far back as the 16th century. The treasure chest was heavy enough to require three men to lift it, and the lucky buyer chose to remain anonymous, in case Jack Sparrow came looking for him.
- In 2011, a storage auction winner found a near-mint condition copy of Action Comics 1 in the contents of a California storage unit. The comic was later sold for over $2 million through the specialist comic collector site ComicConnect.com. It turned out that the same comic had been purchased by Hollywood Nicholas Cage several years earlier for $150K but it was reported stolen (as regards the logistics of buying stolen goods that have been kept in storage, we aren’t lawyers nor do we play any on TV).
- Drum roll please, for a $10m haul. The contents of a storage locker listed as containing “Documents and Papers” was bought by a Florida radio station for several hundred dollars in the late 2000s at a blind auction. The paperwork inside was discovered to be original lyrics, contracts, musical arrangements and royalty checks belonging to the 1960s superstars, The Beach Boys. A long drawn out court battle ensued, with The Beach Boys trying to stake their claim on ownership of the documents. Eventually, after eight years the archive was sold at sealed bid auction for an amount that was undisclosed but believed to be in the region of $10m.
Related: Do you need to find a self-storage unit?
The moral of the story? If you’re a treasure hunter, you might get lucky and make a lot of money buying from storage unit auctions, but don’t underestimate the competition from well-established professional storage locker buyers. And if you have valuable stuff in storage, don’t forget to pay your storage fees or you could lose all of your loot. Check the small print so that you know exactly what happens in the case of non-payment. If something is worth putting in safe storage, it’s worth paying for, so set up an automatic payment so that you don’t forget. Don’t be the jerk that leaves his stuff to become someone else’s treasure.
