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The best part of the storage unit really isn't when you're at the unit, but it's when you're driving there before you're kind of, you know, in the nitty gritty, pulling heavy boxes out of a storage unit. Woo. This is kind of the period where you start thinking magical thoughts about, you know, this guy was some millionaire who's never been known. Of course, you never know until you get there and you start pulling boxes out. My name is Michael Haskell. I'm 18 years old and I sell items I find in abandoned storage units. My side hustle, Mike's Unique Treasures, brought in about $135,000 in 2025.
I think what inspired me to buy storage units was kind of looking around and having nothing to differentiate myself from my peers, being a little self conscious about not having a 4.0 GPA and me thinking I need something cool to be kind of my thing. I realized kind of early on, you know, if I can't, you know, be the best with my grades, I have to be the best at somewhere else. Maybe. Entrepreneurship kind of runs in my immediate family. My dad actually owns a cattle farm in a different country. And, you know, my mom is kind of doing her own thing. I was just watching YouTube one day when a rerun of Storage Wars came along, and I watched
it, and I was kind of hooked from there. I think I bought my first abandoned storage unit right at the start of 2024 for roughly $10. What basically was the best thing inside was this $40 CO2 canister that I sold on Facebook Marketplace. I primarily kind of run my business out of two areas, my mother's garage and my mother's house's basement. I find the storage units that I purchased primarily online through a website called storagetreasures.com. I also look at storageauctions.com and very rarely lockerfox.com for my units. So I just bid $470 on this unit. We're gonna go check it out. Hopefully we
get some cool stuff. Now I spend roughly 20 to 25 hours per week doing the business. I think during the school year, it was kind of a little bit more varied. In 2025, my business' gross revenue was roughly $135,000. By far, the biggest expense is eBay fees and the cost of actually shipping and paying the post office to ship the item out. In 2025, my business' EBIT was roughly $82,000. After I started doing storage units, I kind of lost the need to buy stuff. Most of the stuff behind me and around me is from a storage unit. Well, here it is. What I primarily do with the money that I get from them is I put them into my Fidelity account, and then I put them into various ETFs that track the American stock market.
I put $46,000 into my brokerage and gave my mom $36,000 to invest. My business has brought in $85,000 from January to July 15th of 2026. Most of the time, these storage units are abandoned for two reasons. The first, well, obviously someone can't pay for the storage bill and kind of just leaves the stuff in there or the second, which if someone passes away and the storage unit really isn't specified in their will. You can see it's copper because it's starting to turn blue in places. Copper is like $6 a pound. So this is actually very expensive too, if you like, sell it to a scrap yard. So the auction process is kind of the most complicated
and scariest part, arguably of the whole thing. Because if you find a bad unit, you're not going to have a good day. In that, you know, 20 or 30 minutes when you're bidding on the unit, you really have to do your research. The way you make a lot of money with the units is you kind of see clues that other people don't see that allow you to kind of predict the life of who has the unit. That's it. Another way is, of course, to look at not only what's inside of the unit, but the area around it. Typically, maybe high cost of living areas are going to have better units, but of course, low cost of living areas are not automatically going to have bad units.
All right. Good. The third way to find a good unit is do your own research outside of the unit contents, outside of the area which the unit is in. And actually to try to find the name of the person. One way I developed was to use an AI program, which I developed alongside some of my friends from school, to scan for unit auction and lienholder names in the New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut areas to hopefully scan for units I otherwise would not have seen. Every yellow dot here is someone that the program says is famous and who is kind of worth checking. Usually when I open a storage unit, I try not to make any assumptions.
Right now we're in a garage, which is where I store all of my stuff. Most of the time when you're clearing a unit, you're not going to find good stuff on top of the box. You kind of have to go home, route through everything for a couple of days or a week, and only then will you really know how good a unit is. Most of the time, when you're maybe getting into this, you don't know the value of stuff. But I think kind of seeing my mom negotiate over the years to fill the house with stuff gave me a good understanding and a good backstop for what I need to be looking at the prices. This is a Cold War era laser. When you get stuff in a storage unit, it's not going to sell the next day. Most of the time you're going to be storing stuff for maybe
at worst, worst a year. At best case, maybe two weeks. So sometimes you think you're going to get a good storage unit and it kind of ends up with trash. When that happens to me, less the process of trying to make money on the unit, but also kind of trying to stay optimistic, right? Maybe if a unit isn't good, I'm going to start looking at more units for the next couple of days. And, you know, try to stay optimistic from the unit.
Most of the storage units are in the New York City metro area. I typically try not to bid more than $500 per storage unit. I've definitely sold stuff like this before. Even though it may not look like it, there's like $150 bucks because of all the work that's been put in. I think the moment when I realized that the storage units were kind of a big deal was in the summer from my 10th to 11th grade year. So that was the year when I was buying the Crispo locker, so to speak, which was Andrew Crispo's locker. So Andrew Crispo was this big New York art dealer in the 80s and 90s, and he kind of had like this
big trial. He passed away in 2024. And roughly three months after he passed, you know, his storage unit went up for auction. From the Crispo unit, I ended up getting a Man Ray painting. Man Ray's a very famous American abstraction painter. And a lot of six sketches that Walt Kuhn made. Every single time I'm driving to a locker, I'm thinking, you know, is this going to be the next Crispo? I think that's kind of maybe my guiding star in the sky a little bit, because that was my best locker up until this day.
So my parents have kind of been asking me if I'm going to be using some of my money from the business to pay for college, and I think I will be. I don't know how going to college in Georgia will affect my unit business. That may require me to broaden what I do. That may require me to, you know, maybe slow it down a bit. Easy. I've kind of been looking at businesses that other people are doing, and I'm kind of getting interested in other stuff. The two businesses I've been looking at is actually building and kind of operating storage unit facilities in maybe a more rural area where they're not as expensive. Or looking at maybe house flipping in Georgia. I don't know if I'll be working full time on
my business after college. We'll see kind of where it is when I'm graduating. So I think kind of doing lockers has actually changed the way I look at stuff. Specifically in America, people buy way too much new stuff and they end up putting it in storage units. I don't think I buy anything new these days, even like clothing. I think at this point, maybe like 30% of the stuff in my house is from storage units. Really take a look at your stuff and see if it's really valuable and think if it's worth storing.
