In Texas, our storage lien notification laws are dated and do not utilize current technology. The current law is 30 years old and needs to be modernized. Placing an advertisement in a newspaper's legal section is no longer the best way to notify the public, nor a delinquent tenant, of an upcoming storage sale.
If Chapter 59 of the Texas Property Code was amended to allow self storage facilities to publicize their auction via a public website, Texas newspapers would lose millions of dollars in annual revenue. However, collectively, storage facilities would save millions of dollars on their advertising costs. Think about it, why would a storage company pay a newspaper hundreds of dollars every month, per facility, to publish a public notice, when they could advertise their auction on a storage auction related website or their own website for next to nothing?
When companies like Public Storage, U-Haul Storage Centers, Private Mini Storage, Uncle Bob's Self Storage & other storage facility chains realize that they could be saving tens, if not hundreds of thousand of dollars a year by publishing their notices online, they will abandon ship. Every storage facility will benefit from this change, regardless of their size. Legal notices in newspapers will be a thing of the past.
Bottom line, we should consider which method of notification best represents the interest of the delinquent tenant. Allowing legal notices to be placed on a public website would give a delinquent tenant a better chance of finding the information they are searching for.
The current law worked fine 30 years ago when it was written. It worked better for smaller to medium size towns that only had one newspaper, everyone knew where to look. Nowadays, if a tenant were seeking information on the sale of their property, it would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
So, how would a change to Chapter 59 affect the storage auction buyer?
If every storage facility in our area listed public notices on a different website, this would make an already imperfect system all the more confusing. Can you imagine having to visit hundreds of websites to find storage auction information in your area? With no centralized information source, the entire system is flawed & confusing. We all need to get on the same page, literally.
At AuctionsTX.com, our goal is to modernize & unify the storage auction notification process by creating a centralized information source for auctioneers, storage auction buyers and all storage facilities within Texas.