Teen Paid $10 for First Storage Locker, His Business Now Generates $135,000 Annually

Michael Haskell paid roughly $10 (£7) for his first abandoned storage locker at the start of 2024, at a New Jersey facility his mother drove him to. The most valuable thing inside was a $40 (£30) CO2 canister, which he sold on Facebook Marketplace.

Two years on, the business grossed about $135,000 (£100,000) in 2025 and returned roughly $82,000 (£61,000) in earnings before interest and tax, he told CNBC Make It. It has taken a further $85,000 (£63,000) between January and 15 July this year.

Haskell, 18, buys abandoned units across the New York metropolitan area, clears them, and resells the contents through his business, Mike's Unique Treasures. He works out of his mother's garage and basement in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

Finding a Man Ray Painting in a $450 Storage Unit

His largest single return came from a Brooklyn unit he bought for $450 (£333). It had belonged to Andrew Crispo, the Manhattan gallery owner jailed for tax evasion in 1986. Crispo died in February 2024, and the locker went to auction about three months later.

Inside were a painting by Man Ray, a leading figure of the Dada and surrealist movements, and six sketches by the modernist painter Walt Kuhn. They sold for a combined $36,000 (£26,700).

He bids through listings sites including storagetreasures.com and tries not to go beyond $500 (£370) a unit. With school friends, he built an AI program that scans auction and lienholder names across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

The rest is inference. Memorabilia from a university, he said, will not fetch much on its own, but it marks the former renter as a graduate, which raises the odds of something valuable further back in the unit.

What the Storage Unit Business Costs to Run

Haskell spends 20 to 25 hours a week on it. eBay fees and the cost of posting items are his largest expenses, and they account for most of the gap between the $135,000 of revenue and the $82,000 left after costs.

What is left goes into a Fidelity account and into ETFs tracking the US market, including $46,000 (£34,000) he moved into his own brokerage. His parents have asked whether he will put some of it towards college, and he expects to.

The work has also changed how he spends. He said he buys almost nothing new, clothes included, and reckons about 30% of what sits in his house came out of a locker. 'I kind of lost the need to buy stuff,' he said.

The Storage Units That Nobody Bids On

Lockers reach auction when a renter stops paying, or when a renter dies and the unit is not named in the will. Some draw no bid at all, and Haskell told Points of Light that the facility then pays a removal firm to take the contents to the tip.

He founded a non-profit, Storage Angels, in his second year of high school to take on those units instead. It has cleared more than 20 lockers using volunteer teams, donating an estimated $20,000 (£14,800) of furniture and household goods, plus 700lb of clothing, to organisations including Goodwill and Habitat for Humanity.

Smaller finds are listed on eBay and the cash passed on. One silver necklace fetched $100 (£74). 'Seeing all that stuff go to waste upset me a little bit,' he said. Points of Light named him a Daily Point of Light on 26 February, the 8,270th since the award was created in 1990.

One find is not for sale. He kept a Purple Heart pulled from a locker after tracing an address from a package in the same unit. He knocked, then wrote a letter, and neither drew a reply. The attempt became his college admissions essay.

Haskell believes the business helped get him into Emory University in Atlanta, where he starts this year, and he expects it to change once he is there. He is weighing building and running storage facilities in cheaper rural areas, or flipping houses in Georgia.