Chicago Tribune:
Forget garage sales - Leanore Ransom’s best finds are the contents of storage units bought at auction.
That’s where she bought her Victorian living-room furniture and oak dining set for her Belmont home.
These days, her storage-unit finds - from CDs to tables - also make up the inventory at her new store, Blickety Block Resale Shop.
Ransom is one of the regulars at the Blair Auction & Appraisal sales, where people have just seconds to bid on merchandise in storage units they usually can’t see or examine.
Georgetown Township-based Blair Auction, owned by Wayne G. Blair, has carved out a niche as one of the largest storage-unit auctioneers in the Midwest.
Storage units and default on them are another barometer of a stressed national economy, Blair said. As the economy has soured, more people are losing their homes and storing their possessions in the units. Eventually, they have trouble paying those bills, too, he said.
The stress on the economy is apparent in another way: More units are going to auction, but bid prices are lower. “They are bringing less money. People just don’t have the extra money to spend,” Blair said.
Nationally, the same phenomenon is being seen. “They’ll still come to the auction, they just won’t buy as high as they normally would,” said Chris Longly, spokesman for the National Auctioneers Association, the Overland, Kan.-based professional trade association.
The storage-unit auctions, held right outside the storage sites, draw up to 70 people, said Eva Blair, Wayne’s wife and the company’s office manager.
But they differ from traditional auctions in one important way - bidders can’t see, touch or examine much of what they are buying. They can only briefly stand at the door of the unit and peer inside before bidding begins - no one, even the auctioneer, can step inside. That is considered trespassing until contents are auctioned. Read full story.
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