Once we decided to start going to auctions, and realized that first we had to find out where and when, I settled into the business of putting together lists of sales. I don't know how other people do it, maybe they start by tagging along with a friend, but what we got was a tip that U-haul runs all of theirs on the same day every month. (It turned out to be the wrong day, but at least it gave me a place to start looking.) So I immediately jumped on the Internet and started searching for random notices, and that's how I discovered that we had been told the wrong days.
We keep a storage unit at Public Storage a block from our house, so next I started looking for facilities that I was already familiar with. Don't ask me why. But when that didn't pan out I started making phone calls. The female voice on the phone at the first Public Storage I called told me that they advertise all their auctions in the Nevada Legal News. So I make a regular practice of going to that site and paying my
dollar for a copy of the paper. I have yet to find a single listing there for a Public Storage auction, though I can tell you that I do find a lot of my legal notices there. I usually only check once a week or so, but it seems like that should be often enough to not miss any, or at least not consistently.
Every now and again I get lucky and someone will be able to come up with some useful nugget of information, such as who the auctioneer will be. Many auctioneers post their up-coming schedules on their web-sites. And once you get to your first location of the morning, the auctioneers always make sure to tell you where they're going next. Sometimes they call out the driving directions to make sure everyone knows the way. Later we plan to experiment with the idea of going back and forth between two or three different auction schedules, but to start with it works best for us to just tag along. Usually.
Okay, so right off we had the experience of not listening to the auctioneer, and getting to the next location on our list only to find that we were the only ones there. So we waited. In our truck. In the heat. Guess what? Sometimes the auctioneers have locations from different franchises mingled into their schedules. Oops. I guess it pays to listen.
So far, the only constant truth seems to be that if you miss a unit or location at any point during the day, that is the one that will always be remembered as the really good one that you didn't get, or that somebody else did get, which ever. Either way, those of us who killed our poor GPS (which probably died of heat stroke) are sure to want to take a map book along.
Well, not me. Usually. That's because usually I've got Larry in the driver's seat, and he knows how to get just about anywhere. But when times do arise that I have to drive myself somewhere, it's best if I take along a mapquest printed from my PC. If I decide to be any good at bidding, we'll need a new GPS. Maybe we'll find one in our next storage unit. (I mean, one can hope, right?) So if you happen to find a TomTom in your next storage unit, catch me at an auction and make me a killer deal, okay?
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