Buying A Warehouse That Others Don’t Want To Hunt For Treasure

“In a broken warehouse, can you still produce good things? Isn’t this picking up garbage in disguise?”

When I see more and more “warehouse treasure hunt” videos, I am very curious.

In a sound of “fuck”, the warehouse treasure hunter showed off the treasure he just dug out of the warehouse in front of the camera:

A framed photo of Michael Jordan’s autograph, if true, would have sold for at least tens of thousands of dollars.

Several large boxes of collectible serial car models have also been found, and the previous owner is estimated to be an enthusiast.

In addition to some normal items, you can even pull out a few antique guns.

Relying on the sharp contrast between these treasures and the broken warehouse, the videos in the mere 8 collections have won 280 million views, and there are even many videos outside the collection that have not been counted. This wave of “Warehouse Gold Rush” is gradually spreading. , sparked widespread attention on social media about the warehouse treasure hunt.

So someone asked, why are these people who open waste warehouses in the United States?

That’s right, just like the San Francisco gold rush a hundred years ago, the “gold rush” activity of abandoned warehouses also originated in the United States and has a long history, but it is still a modern “exotic” on the Chinese Internet.

In order to understand this tough job like gambling stones, we have to start with “private warehouses” all over the United States.

This kind of private warehouse is often called “mini warehouse”, which was born in Texas in the 1960s and is mainly used for daily storage hong kong of individuals or families.

Compared with large-scale material warehouses, this model is more in line with the storage needs of ordinary residents, and it has been very popular once it is launched.

After all, according to the fact that Americans like to get a “super-sized cup” of urine for everything, no matter how large a single-family house can’t be built, a lot of sundries need to be regularly stored in a mini-storage.

If you are a city resident, under the constraints of apartment space, this kind of warehouse is very likely to be just needed.

If you are an “enthusiast”, the mini storage is a life-saving straw, because your various collections can finally escape the questioning of your partner and the intrusion of bear children, and finally be safely kept in the warehouse area under special supervision.

After taking care of the warehousing pain points of the American people, the industry has even cultivated a number of chain listed companies, such as the two giants Public Storage and Extra Space.

The market value of the industry leader, Public Storage, reached $62.2 billion, nearly twice that of Baidu, and the market value of the second child, Extra Space, was as high as $28 billion.

Driven by the continuous demand for warehousing, the market penetration rate of such mini- storage hong kong companies is extremely high, and the density of store openings is comparable to that of convenience stores. Even in addition to leading chain brands, there are many private “mom and pop” private warehouses operated by the private sector.

Then the question arises. With so many storage points, can they really be properly managed in terms of user issues?

The answer is of course “NO”.

U.S. mini-warehouses are not as strictly inspected as domestic warehouses. As long as you pay a deposit, it doesn’t matter what kind of three religions you are.

Therefore, some customers often keep deposits and put themselves in prison. Another situation is that they disappear on the road. What’s more, they are too lazy to clean up their groceries and just pretend to be out of contact. Let the warehouse handle it for him.

These “missing” customers often owe the warehouse a large amount of rent and late payment fees. In order to prevent themselves from losing money, the warehouse has to auction the items in the warehouse.

And this naturally gave birth to a special group of “warehouse treasure hunters”.

According to the relevant laws and regulations on lien rights in the United States, the warehouse cannot be auctioned off if the customer has not renewed the fee due to the expiration date. It is necessary to try to contact the customer within a few months. Advertise it to the greatest extent possible to inform the original customer.

This time is also a prime time for treasure hunters to look for prey through warehouse informants and online information.

If it still doesn’t work, then the warehouses will successfully flow to the market, and the treasure hunters who have their eyes on them will swarm.

Don’t think that only small private warehouses will hold auctions, and big companies like Public Storage will not let you buy their storage space for free.

There are two main ways for treasure hunters to win the warehouse, one is offline direct auction, and the other is online bidding to pick up the goods.

In offline auctions, as long as you come at the appointed time, you will be eligible to bid. The process is very simple and rude. Whoever bids the highest in a group of people will give you the items in the warehouse on the spot.

Although the principle of the game is simple, the experience is very dramatic. The bidders are all scheming, and some people are even maliciously raising prices to make you mentally ill.

Of course, there are also people who endure the humiliation and bear the burden. After winning the warehouse at a high premium, they open up more valuable treasures and directly slap the face and raise the price. Isn’t this more burning than “the three-year period of the son-in-law has come”?

Therefore, the old beauty, who is not too big to watch the fun, also specially filmed a reality show called “Storage Wars” (Warehouse Wars), which is devoted to the daily gold rush of these treasure hunters.

This show can be regarded as an enlightening teaching material for Douyin treasure hunt videos. It not only makes many people itch to open the warehouse in person, but also supports countless commentary video accounts.

Of course, after all, it is purely a matter of interest, and offline auctions cannot escape some martial arts.

Compared with offline intimate contact, online auctions return to the essence of “technology”, which mainly tests the eyesight and experience accumulation of treasure hunters.

Before the offline auction, the warehouse will be opened for inspection, and everyone can stand in front of the warehouse door to visually inspect whether there is a head start, while the online auction can only be judged by the photos taken by the warehouse manager.

This kind of warehouse with few items and large items is the top grade of “true at first glance”, and a washing machine can make a return. The disadvantage is that the number of such warehouses is small, the competition is large, and the high transaction price will reduce part of the profit.

Under normal circumstances, treasure hunters are likely to face this kind of debris warehouse. It is estimated that only X-rays can be used to fully count them.

After all, the warehouse doesn’t care whether you can make money or not. I just hope that you will empty the warehouse as soon as possible, so many photos are taken casually and the angle is very limited. In this case of extreme card vision, if you don’t have enough experience in opening positions, it’s easy to buy a bunch of junk at a high price.

But precisely because such grocery warehouses have certain risks, there are not many people participating in the auction. Under the guidance of the idea of “high risk and high reward”, after a “pixel-level” analysis, many professional treasure hunters will choose to gamble.

So after the fierce operation of this group of treasure hunters, can they really make money in the end?

In most cases, treasure hunts are not as exciting as social platforms or reality shows, but more about the helplessness of finding a bunch of useless debris.

Others, Indiana Jones, in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” are all about finding treasures, but now the cash found in the warehouse has been turned into a “serial story” on the Internet.

Let’s not talk about the domestic warehouse treasure hunt videos for the time being. Laomei is the base camp, and it’s even more exaggerated. The videos with high click-through rate are all such headliners, and there are only a few thousand who are serious about the warehouse auction process. .

These so-called “success videos” confuse the audiovisual to a large extent, and whether they are true or false, they are already considered “survivor deviation”.

What’s worse is that the failed treasure hunters have to clean up the warehouse, and all the sundries have to find a way to deal with them later.

Then some people may ask, even if the probability of direct cash withdrawal is very small, there will always be something valuable, right?

Yes, as long as the luck is not too bad, the situation of encountering good things is not all “program effects”, but the subsequent evaluation and handling of sales are the most tormenting.

However, the above steps and links that are crucial to “realization” have been deliberately avoided or downplayed by many treasure hunt videos.

For example, items that can be priced normally, such as washing machines, game consoles, and computers, are often inflated by the treasure hunters in the videos. Price to calculate, watching the estimated profit jumping on the screen, everyone laughed.

Many netizens are speechless. You said that I am not good to intervene in the valuation of the whole antiques, but these ordinary second-hand objects are set at such a high price. In reality, who would buy them?

The pricing of some unusual items is even more floating above “seemingly reasonable”.

Like some antiques, works of art and other strange things, treasure hunters will go to the industry to identify them after they find them. The appraisal of industry insiders is only a rough look. If you give a very rough quotation, whether you can find a buyer in the follow-up is a big problem.

For example, a gallery expert will assert that this is a genuine work by Picasso after a little look, and the value is about 500W. Is this a bit too hasty?

The original intention of the appraisal link is to prove the fairness of the pricing, but the actual effect is greatly reduced, and this proves that the treasure hunt in the warehouse is too deep.

Every time a strange thing appeared, it was necessary to find someone to appraise and estimate it, and even an oyster saucer had to be consulted on an oyster fishing boat.

It’s okay to shoot a show, after all, it’s the effect that needs to be done. If you do this business yourself, the time cost of running the appraisal and the consultation fee will be a large amount of money.

But if you don’t run the appraisal, you don’t know who to sell many “rare and rare treasures”, because such niche items have high unit prices and narrow sales, and if you don’t understand the audience circle, most of these items will have to be sold to yourself.

This situation is like a quilt when you invest in stocks. The capital is only “rich on paper” on the brokerage app, and the money is not put into the pocket after all.

How to realize the ultimate jump from “value” to “price”? The final deal with the sale is the real highlight.

Opening a warehouse and inspecting the goods feels like a money detector is counting money on the side, and only after the goods arrive, do you know how low the “turnover rate” of this line is. In addition to popular products such as cash, jewelry, and home appliances, the return period of funds for many items is almost indefinite.

Veteran professional treasure hunters run second-hand processing stores themselves, while most other treasure hunters can only store the items they find in their own warehouses, or even rent mini-warehouses.

If there are too many goods piled up, it may also usher in a physical “destruction”. If unfortunately go bankrupt, the treasure hunter’s warehouse will also flow into the auction market, which is somewhat ironic that the feng shui turns.

By the way, this kind of abandoned asset auctions are all legal auctions in China. Direct auctions by companies like Laomei are actually a gray area in China.

In any case, most practitioners at home and abroad mainly pursue “viewing” rather than “practicality”. If you don’t have the consciousness of becoming a professional treasure hunter, you might as well go to the second-hand market to scour for used goods.

To say who is sure of this wave of storage hong kong dividends, it must first be the group of video treasure hunters.

They are much smarter than those who only care about digging through the warehouse. If opening a warehouse blind box depends on the weather, then filming videos and appearing on reality shows can guarantee income.

For example, “Storage Wars” has been launched for fourteen seasons so far. Even though many people on IMDB and Youtube feel that the show team is treating the audience as fools, the ratings and clicks are still popular.

Treasure hunters in reality shows have long become TV celebrities. Some people use the show traffic to increase the turnover rate of the items they find; Become the “Godfather of Treasure Hunt” to teach success.

Treasure-hunting bloggers on domestic video platforms are even halfway through. Most of them are “talking car bloggers” in the United States and Canada. Relying on this wave of cultural information gaps, their fans have risen sharply in a short period of time.

They can even turn a video of opening a position into N short videos, and then pinch the head to the end to boost the desire to watch. It can only be said that it is a win.

Compared with these exposed treasure hunters, the global warehousing industry hiding behind is making a fortune in silence.

Compared with the asset-heavy model of traditional warehousing, the mini-storage company’s model is more asset-light. In many large cities, it even only rents office basement space to carry out business.

In addition, this model has more windfall advantages:

First, the investment cost is low and the payback period is short.

Under the asset-light mode operation, the transformation of mini warehouses is less difficult, and it can be put into use very quickly after site selection. The charge per unit area will be much higher than the rent. For example, the gross profit margin of Pubilc Storage is basically maintained at more than 50%, which can be quickly recovered. Funds start to profit.

Second, the income is stable.

According to a survey by the American Self Storage Association, more than half of the current customers have a lease term of more than one year, which can create extremely stable cash flow for the company, which is simply to make money lying down.

Third, the daily operating costs are low.

Because it is a self-storage model, each storage point has a small demand for employees, and only consumes electricity every day. Even the regular auction of abandoned warehouses at the storage point can increase a large amount of non-operating income.

Taking the leading company Public Storage as an example, the company’s total revenue in fiscal year 2021 is US$3.416 billion, and the net profit is as high as US$1.885 billion. You can calculate how much you earn.

Therefore, in the past 10 years, the stock prices of mini warehouse companies have generally risen gratifyingly. Isn’t it better to buy their stocks in the early years than to run around the warehouse?

What is even more outrageous is that the warehouse blind boxes have also undergone variants in recent years, resulting in the category of container blind boxes. Although they all belong to the global warehousing industry, the containers are not waste, but are properly international commodities.

Therefore, the starting unit price of the container is almost thousands of dollars, and the sought-after goods can be tens of thousands. It is even more exciting to open, and the rewards are naturally rich.

In addition to “Storage Wars”, Laomei also specially filmed “Container Wars” (Container Wars), the main competition object of this reality show is damaged or unclaimed containers.

In ports around the world, unclaimed containers have occurred from time to time. In the whole year of 2021, due to the epidemic, the port operation time has been reduced, and the problem of container backlog has been exacerbated, which has directly led to the prosperity of the container auction market.

The port customs face the same problem as the abandoned mini-storage, because the containers are much more laborious to handle than the mini-storage, and they are all auctioned together.

In 2021, the customs of the Philippines alone will auction nearly 2,000 stranded containers, and the Nigerian port of Lagos is preparing to auction nearly 4,000 containers of goods.

After reading this, everyone must have felt that whether it is a warehouse or a container, it is essentially no different from a casino.

In a casino, the casino owner is always making money, and he is not afraid of you making money, but he is afraid that you will not come. Warehousing auctions may bring money-making opportunities to lucky treasure hunters, but not every time, let alone everyone.

However, warehousing companies have already achieved steady profits when everyone is greedy and vying for auctions.

After all, auction money + saved processing costs > lost late fees.

Warehousing companies make money, celebrity treasure hunters gain fame and fortune, curious audiences gain happiness, and you face the warehouse and fall into contemplation.