Storage unit buyer educates and entertains

Thomas Kline shows a storage unit he bought to resell its contents via his online store. Photos submitted

By Tom Victoria

Thomas Kline hunts for hidden treasures. He can turn $20 into thousands sifting through abandoned lockers, working through a challenging health issue all the while.

Although Thomas doesn’t yell “Yuuup!” like Dave Hester bids, say “Cha-ching” like Darrell Sheets upon finding a valuable item or wear silly costumes like Barry Weiss as shown on the television show “Storage Wars,” he does his own version on YouTube.

Thomas, 21, of Florida tallies the increasing worth of the unit as each item is shown while educating and entertaining the viewer.

“We try to replicate ‘Storage Wars,’ and then whenever we're talking to people, trying to get them to subscribe to the channel, say have you seen ‘Storage Wars?’ We try to make it just like that,” he said. “And they’ll be like, ‘Oh, I like Storage Wars.’ And then they'll come and check out the videos.”

Thomas periodically finds exotic items such as this staff simulating a skull.

Thomas, whose TDK Collectibles is a six-figure business, never ceases to be surprised by what he finds.

“Every time I buy a storage unit or I go out to try to find things to resell, I always see things that I've never seen before,” he said. “It's just really crazy and shocking how much stuff there really is. And a lot of this stuff has value. Someone will pay something for it.” 

Unlike the “Storage Wars” cast, Thomas doesn’t have to attend auctions in person.

“Surprisingly, it's all done online now,” he said. “So you would go to storagetreasures.com. That's the main website, and it would just show everything. There's tons and tons in my area. There's 50 to 100 storage units every day. And that's part of the reason why I can get such good units for a little price. But there is a lot of picking and calculations that come into it because there is deception involved in this business, and I had to learn that the hard way.”

At a time when many people with no health conditions don’t even attempt to work, Thomas insists on doing so despite having a life-altering issue.

“Part of the reason of how I got into doing what I'm doing was due to Covid, because I'm a type 1 diabetic,” he said. “I came to my dad and I was like, ‘Hey, dad, I want to get a job so I can make some money.’ And he wanted to figure out some kind of thing that I could do so that I wouldn't be out in the workforce. I could make some decent money. And what you're seeing with the YouTube videos and all this other stuff is the product of three or four years now of diligently working on this resale kind of avenue.”

Thomas explained there is occasional misrepresentation of storage units up for bid.

“There are people that will say that the unit has not been gone through, but the unit has been gone through,” he said. “There's also people that will stage a unit where they'll put one item that is valuable in a spot which is easy to see and try to give the idea that the storage unit is full of valuable stuff like that.”

Thomas hasn’t identified repeat offenders.

“It's really completely random,” he said. “Most of them are good. But every once in a while, you'll find something where it kind of feels a little fishy.”

Thomas said he’s in the best area of the country for buying units.

“Probably the best state for resale is Florida is what I’ve learned,” he said.

Even when Thomas submits a winning bid, there’s no guarantee he’ll get the unit’s contents.

“There is one catch to it, and that is if the owner of the unit pays their bill before you paid for the unit,” he said. “So you could win the unit on the computer, be driving there, they pay their bill, you lost it. So it is a stressful little factor. The unit owner actually has a three-month little window where they're constantly being told that their unit needs to be paid for. And after that three-month window, then it goes up for auction. So they have all the notice in the world that they could ever receive. It's just usually something happens to them and that's why their stuff is going up.”

Thomas often finds jewelry of varying value.

Thomas occasionally finds people’s personal items in storage.

“Every storage unit, or specifically the better storage units, usually have the personal items in the unit because they put everything in there,” he said. “So what we do when that happens is we put all the personal items in a box and we leave it with the facility. Sometimes, they'll have us bring it to the front desk. Other times, they'll have us keep it in the unit, and they may try to contact the unit owner to get those personal items back to them. We found people's ashes in storage units, and I definitely don't want to sell that. That needs to go back to the family. It's sad that happens. Sometimes you feel bad about buying units, but at the same time, you're bidding against other people. So it's either you get it or this other person gets it. It's not like there's a scenario where it can go back to the unit owner unless they pay their bill.”

Thomas periodically finds rather odd items.

“I found some really strange things,” he said. “One unit had a lot of African ritual stuff, like black magic kind of things, a lot of Egyptology. And one unit, which is not really strange, but it's kind of nasty. We bought this unit for $20 through an offer, and it was a packed unit. We made pretty good money off of it. But as we got to the back, there were tons and tons of palmetto bugs (Florida woods cockroaches). Over thousands. And it was to the point where you realize, okay, well the stuff that I picked out, I don't want to bring this to the house.”

Thomas holds swords he found in a storage unit.

Thomas is cautious about what he buys.

“There's all these little different factors that make it a hit or miss, or lose money or make it big,” he said. “So you got to be really careful when you're picking out your units to buy. For example, we try to buy units that are climate-controlled because the ones that are not climate-controlled, if they've been there for over a year, the dust will build up and the heat will hit the dust. And then it'll just turn into this greasy little residue that sticks on every item unless it's in a tote or in a bag. You have to clean it to sell it, or you probably won't even want to bother.”

Thomas also attempts to ascertain the type of belongings stored in the unit.

“When we look at storage units to buy, we try to kind of put a story together,” he said. “Sometimes, there'll be someone's business in there. Other times, it will just be everything somebody owns. Usually, we base what we're thinking about buying on furniture and collectible items that we've seen. We just bought a storage unit this weekend and we actually got a pretty solid deal on it. We have about $800 invested in it. It's full of taxidermy and other collectible things like that. It's a large unit.”

Not everything is suited for resale.

“I do not sell taxidermy as there are laws regulating that,” Thomas said.

His most valuable find was jewelry.

“One unit, we found over $10,000 in gold and silver jewelry,” Thomas said. “The first unit that got us kind of started, we found $6,000 in Lego Star Wars. And we only had $400 invested in the unit. I found a $3,000 set of swords. I mean, every unit pretty much has something very desirable in it as long as you pick the good ones.”

Along with Thomas’ home base, the states where “Storage Wars” auctions are recorded — or re-recorded as some claim happens on the reality show — are the best to seek units to buy.

“I think the best three states would be Florida, Texas and California,” he said. “Based on what I've seen online, it feels like these are kind of melting pots where people go once they are getting later in their life and they've got all their valuables that they kind of bring around with them. Something leads to another, and sometimes it'll end up in a storage unit. I think part of the reason why we're able to be where we are as resellers, and eBay selling specifically, is because of our location in Florida.”

Thomas resides in the Daytona area, so going north is an option.

“We're thinking about eventually going up to Jacksonville and Georgia,” he said. “The farthest we've gone is about an hour-and-a-half away. We've been to Jacksonville once. We're in Orlando very often, which is like an hour-and-a-half away. But when you got a ton of stuff that you need to clean out and it's an hour-and-a-half away, you start to get problems.”

Thomas and his dad use trucks and trailers to transport their hauls.

“We have two Chevys,” he said. “We're actually upgrading right now, putting in a really nice motor and lift kit and all the things that you could pull a larger trailer. Right now, we have one open trailer, which is a 10-foot, and one closed trailer, which is a 12-foot. But we are trying to expand.”

The open trailer Thomas uses is filled with totes from a unit.

Thomas spends much of his time online.

“Usually, I'm at home posting things online to sell,” he said.

Thomas and his dad began TDK Collectibles from scratch.

“We started out with nothing,” he said. “We both picked it up. He had a family member who sold things on eBay casually. And she was really good. It's my aunt I believe. He kind of just copied what she started and we just turned it into this really huge thing. We were able to turn it into a full-time job for me and a part-time job for my dad. All we had before is just an eBay store. And we built it. If you were to buy storage units, you would need to set up an eBay store just because it's necessary to be able to sell the things. If you're a new seller, it's harder to sell things. You kind of got to know what you have to do. Take the pictures and post things and learn how to do it the right way over time. So if you were to become a storage unit buyer, there's a lot of things that are very important that you need to learn or have accomplished in my opinion. Some people just jump into it and it works for them, but do it the best way possible.”

The eBay store was the first step in creating a job for Thomas, whose condition requires insulin shots and exercise to lower blood glucose levels.

“I didn't even know what eBay was at the time,” he said.

Thomas discovered taxidermy in one unit.

Thomas relies on technology to get the job done.

“Without this tool, I would not be able to be where I am today,” he said. “It's free to use. It's called Google Lens, so you can use Google to do picture checks and show similar items based on anything you see. You just take a picture of it and it'll try to tell you what it is. Without that tool, I would not be able to be where I am today at all. It doesn't work all the time, but for the most part, it does the job. So I use that and online research videos. The very first year when we started getting into this — buying and reselling — every day I'd watch a new YouTube video, trying to learn something so that when I would go to an estate sale or a yard sale, I would be able to recognize things that were valuable and purchase them at a discounted price.”

Thomas wasn’t sold on the idea at first.

“In the beginning, I thought it was a bad idea because I'm not really a collector myself,” he said. “So the idea of having a bunch of things that are random and I don't really want, it wasn't intriguing in the beginning. But once we started going to yard sales and you're picking up these items for a dollar a piece. And you post it online. You sell it for 15, you sell it for 20, and sometimes you'll pay a dollar and sell something for $50. And then you just kind of get hooked.”

Thomas didn’t have to fret about storage space.

“Luckily, we have a large area where we could keep items because we have a bigger house that was originally rented out to friends and family to live with us,” he said. “But they kind of went their own separate ways when Covid happened. So we have multiple rooms that we were able to convert into storage. A lot of things kind of just fell right together.”

Lego Star Wars was another find.

Thomas still didn’t envision what was to come.

“I didn't see eBay as a full-time job until one thing that happened that made me have a light switch flipped in my head,” he said. “And that was pulling a lamp out of the garbage after an estate sale we didn't buy anything from. They put everything on the curb and we drove right by them again because it was in our neighborhood and they had a lamp in the garbage. And my dad was like, ‘Oh, that lamp is cool.’ And we grabbed it, brought it home, didn't think anything of it. And then I Google Lensed it and found out it was an $800 lamp. I posted it, sold it to Japan the first day for $800, and we didn't pay a single dollar for it. And then after that experience, it kind of clicked in my head I can do this full-time. I could make a living from doing this.”

After a few years of online selling, Thomas started buying storage units a year ago. Now, the six-figure revenue is making all of the effort worth it.

“And it all started going to yard sales, paying $1, $2 here, then eventually started going to thrift stores,” Thomas said. “We would buy something for cheap, post it online and sell it for a higher markup. We would ship it. Everyone would be happy. We get paid. And we just kept repeating this process. But we were realizing we're not getting enough stuff. We want to expand this. So I was doing research, trying to learn things, and then we realized that the place to go is to estate sales. But 70 percent of estate sales are overpriced. So when you're going to estate sales, you have to really know what you're doing. Because most of the things they're trying to price what they think it's worth. So we would go to these estate sales and look for mistakes that they made. And you'd be surprised. These people, the companies that are paid to sell people's belongings, often make mistakes on valuable things to the point where I can make a full-time job out of it.”

Buying storage units was the next step.

“My dad had seen a YouTube video,” Thomas said. “And he was like, ‘I want to do that.’ I told him ‘Right now, I can look at the stuff that I buy. It's clean. I don't have to clean it as much. Everything is just set. Why would I want to do it differently?’ And he's like, ‘Let's just do it. It'll be fun.’ And one of the first ones we got, we bought two of them. The first one wasn't too crazy, but the second one we got was the Lego Star Wars one. And after that, I was hooked because my video got 20,000 views and we turned $400 into $6,000. And now I'm kind of just chasing those storage unit highs.”

Thomas also has a closed trailer for use.

He said a common error is confusing originals and replicas.

“That is a very big part when dealing with selling things online,” Thomas said.

Another factor is condition.

“Every different type of item has different things that could make it worth less money,” Thomas said. “For example, porcelain and glass. You're looking at chips, you're looking at repairs, scratching, all that kind of comes into play. And if you're in this hectic environment where a lot of people are trying to purchase things for a great deal to make money to support their income, sometimes you can miss those very intricate little details when buying something to resell. That's just one more complication that you have to take on when trying to really expand on a reselling business. But for the most part, when I make mistakes, the buyers let me know and then I either refund the item or give them a discount, depending on how big of a mistake I made. And so far I've been pretty much fine. If someone leaves negative feedback, I reach out to them, I fix the problem.”

Thomas has customers across the globe.

“I've shipped pretty much every country and I've got almost 6,000 sales on record,” he said.

Thomas relies on the popularity of eBay.

“So eBay is a very large platform,” he said. “So if someone were to look up I want to buy a vintage hat, usually the first thing that comes up is eBay in the search bar. And there's things you can do on eBay to make your items look more desirable. When you become a seller for a longer time, sometimes they'll show your items more often. There's a lot of different things. You can just pick it up and just start from anywhere and you could start selling things on eBay. I've coached a few people to create their own eBay businesses, but usually they don't keep up with it. But for the most part, they do sell things.”

Auctions are held by storage unit facilities when renters stop paying for their space.

Thomas credited his dad’s support for being where he’s at now.

“My dad really pushed everything to where I am today because I was not going to go down this path at all,” he said. “He actually works with me even though he has a full-time job. He'll pack with me every night and he'll try to think of ways that we could do this better and make more money.”

Thomas had seen “Storage Wars” long before buying units himself.

“I watched it when I was younger, but I didn't think anything of it,” Thomas said. “I just thought it was cool.”

Although Thomas presents a realistic storage unit buying process without resorting to the antics of the show’s cast, he keeps his videos interesting with a chipper personality and exuberance.

“I say I'm pretty friendly, but I'm normally very quiet,” he said. “When my family members were watching the videos, they're like, ‘Oh my God, you can talk that much?’ I'm not really much of a talker unless I'm in a situation where it's better for me to talk. Let me just chill. Sometimes, I freak out a little too much in the video, but people like it.”

Unlike many people, Thomas seems comfortable in front of the camera, which he says takes time to get right.

“It takes me 30 minutes to get five or two minutes worth of talking in front of the camera,” he said. “I have to be in a certain mindset. Right now, I'm comfortable when I'm talking because it's related to business stuff, but if I had to say words in a certain way or through YouTube specifically, I can start to stutter and mess things up a little bit.”

Thomas stands in a unit he bought and emptied.

Thomas keeps notes on what he wants to include in the commentary.

“I won't write everything word for word, but I'll write down ideas,” he said. “Then sometimes, I'll have a little notepad. I'll just put it next to me, and I'll just go down the list. But for the most part, it's kind of just off the top of the head.”

Thomas recalled it took time to become comfortable in front of the lens.

“It's one of the things that got me in the beginning,” he said. “Because you can see my earlier videos. I don't have the personality or the comfort talking in front of the camera that I do now. And I kind of just look like a bland ghost who zones out, talks slower and in monotone.

Many of his YouTube counterparts who buy units can be too dry or display odd behavior. One less than enthusiastic YouTuber incessantly uses the wrong word while speaking to the camera. Thomas said there may be a method to being wrong.

“I think that's actually a tactic,” he said. “They'll mispronounce things or call things the wrong things because people go to the comments. And the more comments you get, the more YouTube is going to push out your video. So you want people to engage with the video even if they're trying to correct you. Just this big manipulating technique. There's a certain computer program that takes in a bunch of different information and decides how to promote your video: comments, likes and view time, click-through rate. Those are all important things that will help YouTube decide whether or not to show your video to more people.”

Thomas seeks products from brands such as Pierre Cardin.

Some storage unit buyers become auctioneers.

“I think that would be more of a hobby thing because I don't think I would make as much money doing that,” Thomas said about the possibility. “It's more this person bought storage units. Now, they're selling storage units. They're just still staying in the business.”

He relates to the concept of stretching further in business as he did by adding storage unit buying.

“Even though I was making really good money working with my dad, going to estate sales and flea markets and stuff, everybody wants to expand,” Thomas said. “You don't want to sit still.”

He doesn’t regret adding YouTube, but stressed there is a significant amount of work involved.

“I've put 1,000 hours into my YouTube before I got paid,” Thomas said. “So that's probably one of the reasons why not a lot of people can do it because it’s a lot more work than it looks like.”

Much of that work is editing.

“It's hard,” Thomas said. “I use a free program called DaVinci Resolve. It's as best as it gets. I do all my videos on that and they come out pretty decent. There's a lot of different tools they offer for free that you could use. When I first started, it would take me 15 hours to edit one video. Now I'm down to six to eight. And when you spend 15 hours editing a video for it to get 150 views, it's like, man. Especially when you're not making anything off of it and you got a job that pays you very well. Then you're doing this and syncing up 15 hours into something that's not giving you anything. But I think it's going to be worth it.”

He doesn’t foresee doing something else down the road.

“For me, it's one of the most enjoyable things to do to the point where Christmas is just like a little side thing for me, because every storage unit feels like I'm opening presents,” Thomas said. “When I was a kid, it was, ‘Oh, Christmas, yay.’ Now, it's storage units. As long as I can do it, I will be doing it. I feel like it's the best fit category for me.”

Research plays a large role in his work.

“I enjoy the researching part when I find out that something is more valuable than I expected,” Thomas said. “There's a lot of times where I'll be at an estate sale or a yard sale, and there'll be something for maybe $5, and I think this might be $25. And then I'll get home, do 20 minutes of research and realize I've got something worth $200. That's a really satisfying part of the business. But you got to be able to know where to go and how to look and who you can reach out to that might be able to help you. And that's another thing that is not easily picked up. I'm friends with a lot of the local antique stores, and then if I ever get stumped, I just butter up to them and say, hey, you know anything about this?”

He explained one of the biggest hurdles is shipping.

“Shipping the right way can be difficult,” Thomas said. “When you first start out trying to figure out how to ship things properly, what to word things when shipping. So eBay's shipping method, how they have a system set up, is a little intimidating at first. There's a lot of different pieces that when you look at it, don't really make sense, but all have their own little moving functions. And when you learn it completely, you can do really well and actually make money. But if you don't know what you're doing, you could lose money and you could have issues with the post office.”

Distinguishing what’s authentic and identifying damage are also tricky.

“Another thing was dealing with learning fakes and learning about damaged pieces, like what’s considered to be damaged on different items,” Thomas said. “Because if you sell something to someone, before I even knew about damage, I didn't even think much about it. I was like, well, this might have a chip on it, but does that really matter? I mean, it's still the item, but it does matter. And sometimes the damage is easily hidden. They might repair it in a way that you can't tell it's been repaired unless you know what to look for. And I had to learn that. And when you learn it, you lose money. But once you know it, as long as you just don't forget it and pay attention to what you're doing, then you can just kind of coast.”

His schedule is pretty tight.

“Since it's busy season right now, I've been selling seven, eight things a day, and that'll take up an hour-and-a-half, two hours of my night,” Thomas said. “So I work during the day, get a small break and then pack. And then we somehow fit storage units and estate sales into that entire mix.”

Fitting in exercise isn’t optional, it’s mandatory.

“I exercise a lot for my own health because I'm diabetic,” Thomas explained. “I have to run twice a day, and weight exercises are important. Healthy eating. I have not a set routine, but guidelines that I have to follow. But it's good that I have this job because very often I'll have to drop what I'm doing and go spend 30 minutes, 40 minutes exercising. And if I was working a retail job, I wouldn't be able to just pick up and say oh well, I have to do this, I'll be back in 40 minutes. I think it's mainly because I'm an extreme case. My pancreas doesn't produce any insulin, so not only does food spike my blood sugar, but also my emotions will as well. So if I'm going to a storage unit and I'm really excited, or if I'm going to an estate sale they're about to open, my sugar will shoot over 200. I will need to either exercise or do a shot. And having higher blood sugar affects my judgment and cognitive abilities. I couldn't just do the shot because if I don't exercise, then my insulin doesn't work.”

He doesn’t struggle to stay motivated.

“For me it's kind of like an addiction because I'll hop on the storage treasures website and I'll just be chasing that high of buying a storage unit,” Thomas said. “Very often when I buy a storage unit, I'll make my money back on what I spend on the unit on just one item. And the rest is just fun and pure profit. I get a video. It's just this very positive experience. So it's kind of hard not to do it. Generally, you associate work and making money with a task, something that you do because you have to. But it's not the case for me. For me, it's this completely different structure. For example, this week how I stayed motivated is all I can think about is getting into the storage unit. I'm just so excited to get through that storage unit that I want to make the room and I want to get stuff posted, so that I can actually go through that unit and do it. And then before we were doing storage units, my incentive was mainly putting nice items in my store. So I would buy something that's desirable, that's valuable and posting it and making it look pretty. Adding the value to my store was my original motivation.”

He dispensed advice to aspiring eBay sellers and storage unit buyers.

“I would say in the beginning to stay away from storage units because it's a lot of work and most people don't have the time, the energy or the way to sell the stuff they get from the storage units,” Thomas said. “eBay selling in general is probably one of the best jobs that I would recommend because you don't need to do it full-time. It can be a part-time thing and you can do just one weekend. Start at yard sales. That's where you start or actually even before that. If you wanted to sell things around your house, you could do that, too. You don't even have to spend a dollar to start a side hustle. Clothes, collectible stuff. You'd be surprised. Just use Google Lens or look up the brands on things and you could start an eBay store without spending a dollar.”

Thomas’ YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tdkcollects

Thomas’ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tdk_collectibles/

Thomas’ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tdkcollects

Thomas’ eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/sbeadz