Originally Posted by kane

Sounds like you are on the right path and it sounds like (based on your other post) you are in a good position to deal with the inventory. Having a truck, some space and someone to deal with all of the stuff you get is vital.

I bought a lot of units. I would guess on average I would buy between 2-5 per week. Some weeks more, some less. One of the big auctions is going to be for the company Public Storage (or any large chain that has multiple locations). Where I live the Public Storage Company auction is two full days. Day one they did all the locations on the west side of the city and day two was the east side. You start at one location early in the morning and just travel from location to location auctioning off any units they have at each spot until you hit every location they have. They have about 20 locations in my city so you could easily see 75-150 or even more units sold over those two days. They held this auction once per month. Sometimes I would buy as many as 4 or 5 units just in those two days.

I had some great successes and some miserable failures. Best unit I ever bought was full of boxes and boxes of sports memorabilia. Cards, collectibles, autographs ect. I made thousands of dollars from that unit. The worst, literally, was a bunch of garbage. I think I paid about $75 for the unit. Sold maybe $50 worth of stuff out of it and spent about $150 total in dump fees and gas taking the rest to the dump. I told a buddy of mine that I would have been better of just taking $200 out of my pocket and lighting it on fire. At least that way I wouldn't have spent 3 hours sweating my ass off loading everything up.

I got to where I was good enough that I would do a pre-sort at the storage company. I would know right away what was obviously garbage and set it aside. I would then take a truck load of everything I want to keep home then come back and take the rest tot he dump. Dealing with the trash is half the battle.