Storage Unit Auction List is founded on New Year's Day
A national directory of self-storage lien auctions is founded, and becomes the company’s defining information business.
Storage Unit Auction List was founded on January 1, 2011. The company’s own account places its origin in a New Year’s Day brainstorming session in a mother-in-law apartment, and the business it produced ran for most of the following decade.
The product was a national directory of self-storage lien auctions, sold by subscription to the buyers who attend them. Its defensibility came not from the listings themselves, which were public events, but from the verification behind them: the company committed to re-confirming each listing by telephone within forty-eight hours of the auction, on the reasoning that a buyer who drives to a cancelled sale has been failed just as badly as one sent to an auction that never existed. Competitors scraped once and published. This operation called back.
That distinction, between a check performed once and a check performed close enough to the event to be relied upon, is the foundation of every business the company has run since.