“Auction Hunters” now available on the Discovery Channel

Through regular broadcasts on the Discovery Channel, UK viewers can now catch “Auction Hunters”, a hit American TV show which follows a pair of self storage scavengers around as they attempt to make money out of defaulted self storage units.

Unlikely double-act

“Auction Hunters”, which is very much in the same vein as other recent American reality-TV success stories such as “Storage Wars” and “Storage Hunters”, is centred on the unlikely double-act of Allen Haff, a clean-cut antiques expert, and his business partner Tom Jones, a heavily-tattooed sage on all things collectible.

Much like the protagonists of “Storage Wars” and “Storage Hunters”, the duo earn their money by moving around between different self storage lien auctions to buy the contents of defaulted self storage units. Then they go through their purchases and try to resell them for as much as possible.

Self storage scavengers are only allowed very brief access to the defaulted units before they have to make their bids, so each one represents a significant gamble. They have to outbid the other self storage scavengers who come to the auctions, and then often find that the unit they’ve staked their money on contains nothing but worthless junk.

According to an online article, the duo admit that experience has taught them which signs to look out for during their brief tour of the self storage units before bidding. Any unit which contains a locked safe is always likely to have something valuable in it, while they’ve learnt to favour well-organized, neatly packed piles of boxes that have been properly secured over units where everything seems badly organized.

Warning: don’t try this at home

Understandably, “Auction Hunters” concentrates on the lien auctions where the duo manage to uncover particularly interesting or valuable items, although these are in the minority. They admit that most of the units they buy make them little or no money, and their business model is based on the 80/20 rule – they make 80% of their money from just 20% of the units they get their hands on.

In order to make this point clear, each episode starts with a text disclaimer explaining that they don’t normally make as much money as the show suggests, to prevent any members of the audience from thinking that self storage scavenging would make an easy living.

In terms of what the “Auction Hunters” are actually looking for inside their units, rare collectibles are a relatively small part of the total. The duo gravitate towards expensive everyday items such as power tools, musical instruments and household appliances, which have a high resale value, although the show mostly concentrates on the rare occasions when they discover antiques.

Just in the first episode, for example, they chance upon a 19^th-century British pepper-box handgun and a pre-WW2 train set. Apparently the best ever find made by someone in their line of work was a set of handwritten Beatles lyrics penned by John Lennon, which eventually sold for over $2 million each, although the pair haven’t quite come across anything in that league during the episodes which have been broadcast so far.

For British viewers who want to check-out “Auction Hunters”, the Discovery Channel is broadcast on channel 520 for Sky customers and channel 212 on Virgin Media.