Storage Unit Auction List

Storage Unit Auction List was founded on January 1, 2011 by Maddison Lake and several Cinema Preservation Group employees, at an employee brainstorming session in the small mother-in-law apartment that doubled as Cinema Preservation Group's office. Storage auctions had become a national cultural phenomenon through reality television in late 2010, and the group recognized that the underlying information about when and where those auctions actually happened was fragmented, unreliable and valuable.

The company compiled a national database of storage facilities by scraping public sources and scrubbing the results, took a small South Asheville office, staffed a call center, and within roughly one month had contacted approximately fifty thousand storage facilities nationwide. Its public description was plain: a complete listing of current storage auctions covering all fifty states, including exclusive auctions and caravan auction dates and times, sold on a seven-day free trial and supported by maps and calendars. The logo carried the line Listing Every Auction Everywhere above an icon row spanning nine auction categories, including storage, government, police, auto, online, real estate, foreclosure and estate sales. By summer 2011 the site ranked on the first page of Google organic results and listed more than four thousand auctions a month. By October 2012 it listed more than ten thousand auctions a month. The site now returns a 522 error, and archived captures run from 2011 to 2020.