Did you follow every step in your lien process to the letter? Are you sure?
The self storage auction and lien process is complicated, tricky, and varies from state to state. Keeping track of what you’re supposed to do can be difficult, let alone whether or not you’ve actually done it for every sale.
Making mistakes here can also be quite expensive. For example, if you improperly sell a deployed active duty military serviceperson's stuff, you could face fines in the tens of thousands of dollars. Our Auction Checklist can help you avoid these accidents.
The auction checklist is a part of our helpful Self Storage Operator's Toolkit, which holds over a dozen customizable pages that can help you keep track of your self storage operation. These pages have been collected from some of the top independent self storage operators and are meant for this industry alone.
Proper documentation is essential in self storage, whether you keep track in your PMS, by hand, or with custom electronic forms. Not only does proper documentation protect you from liability in liens and auctions, but it also makes running the business side significantly easier. A helpful pre-auction checklist can do both!
Our customizable auction checklist enables self storage operators to follow their progress with each unit under lien before it gets to the auction stage.
You can also look back at this sheet before you finally send the unit to auction to rid yourself of those nagging doubts that you might have missed something.
This checklist contains many of the common steps self storage operators must follow before sending a unit to auction, including tracking how many times the tenant has been contacted, how, and at what number or address.
You can even track declined credit cards and the steps followed after a card was declined. This version has the steps specific to a Michigan self storage operation, but you can easily change those out for the protocols you need to follow in your state. You can make this sheet as in-depth or sparse as you need–the biggest benefit is having a sheet to work on and not having to write the whole thing from scratch.
Lien laws and auctions are complicated legal processes, and mistakes can be costly. For example, if you auction a unit that should be protected by the Servicemember’s Civil Relief Act, you could be held liable for tens of thousands of dollars in punitive fines. Our Active Military Form, another part of the Operator’s Toolkit, can help you keep track of your military tenants to avoid this particular danger, but the Auction Checklist has a spot for it as well.
Not only does the Auction Checklist help you avoid unnecessary legal fees, fines, and headaches, it creates a better customer experience. You don’t want to send tenants to auction if there’s another option available, and they don’t want their stuff sold.
Double-checking before you take this drastic step can save you a lot of trouble, which is why some of our professional self storage friends have created an auction checklist. This is one of the many useful sheets you’ll find in our self storage Operator’s Toolkit!
For more great resources and information, check out the links below!
At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.
With Insights, our self storage marketing platform, operators get the data and digital tools they need to make the get out of their website and their self storage investment.
