Fifty thousand storage facilities contacted by telephone
The directory’s coverage is built by telephoning roughly fifty thousand storage facilities across the United States.
Building a national auction directory in 2011 meant establishing contact with the facilities holding the auctions, and the company did it by telephone. Roughly fifty thousand self-storage facilities were contacted to establish coverage, and a dedicated verification office was staffed to maintain it.
Internal records describe that office as a four-stage process rather than a call room, with listings moving through defined states before publication. It was the operation’s real asset. The directory’s competitors could copy a website in an afternoon; none of them could reproduce fifty thousand relationships and a standing process for keeping them current. The company was not selling a list of auctions. It was selling the labour of having checked them, which is a considerably harder thing to duplicate and a considerably easier thing to charge for.