kane

It really can vary wildly. I have bought units for $1, $5, $50 and up to as much as $500. I have seen them go as high as a few thousand dollars.

The way it works is the storage company opens the door to the unit and then gives you about 5 minutes to look at it. You can't touch anything, you can't go inside the unit. You just stand at the edge and look in. Once everyone has had a decent amount of time to look the bidding starts. So how much it goes for can really depend on how it looks. If it looks like a pile of garbage, chances are it will not go for that much, but if the until is well organized and there is stuff clearly out in the open that is valuable they can go for a lot.

At the bigger auctions you will find people showing up that are looking for very specific items. For example there was one woman who only bought furniture. She was looking for antique stuff and she knew her shit. If she was bidding you knew it was valuable and you knew she would probably win the auction. There was another woman who would bid mostly on units that had a lot of women's clothes.

The crap shoot are the ones that are just boxes and you can't see what is inside them. sometimes you can see those go up pretty high.

In my experience the average unit went for between $150-$300, but I saw them get much higher. I found the best deals to be at the small mom and pop places where you didn't get a lot of bidders.