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There’s a youtube guy in Canada who owns an antique store. Some of you will remember him as the guy who bought a hoarder’s house that ended up belonging to a famous living artist. He has another video out where he purchased the contents of a large warehouse for $8,500 which was the back rent owed to the landlord. The place is filled with higher end collectible toys new in box, including Hot Toys which go for hundreds to thousands of dollars each! The video was really exciting until it dawned on me that all of the merchandise is probably collateral on a line of credit with a bank or with the suppliers. I am very curious to find out what will happen if the bank comes looking for their collateral and this reseller has already made off with it. In the US, inventory such as this would have been secured with a UCC filing I believe. I’m not sure how it works in Canada. He’s already started auctioning lots of the toys on another website. Would be a dream and nightmare to find such a haul (how to process so much stuff!) but I’m pretty sure either he isn’t telling us the full truth or else he’s going to have some bankers on his doorstep soon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA1l38rlF78
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According to this CBC article Mary Borgstrom’s children were going to bulldoze her house with all the contents still inside. I thought that was a bit extreme until I read further down the article about how Archbold had to remove 25 tonnes of trash from the place.
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The video series he did on the hoarder house was why I started watching him. That guy can work! He’d clear out a room in a day sometimes, it was amazing! The warehouse filled with toys is a different episode that he posted this week. It isn’t related to the hoarder house and I’m questioning if he has any legal right to the inventory.
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We don’t know whether this inventory was collateral for a loan or not. I’m not a lawyer, so I would have no idea, but, if the warehouse owners didn’t know about any loans, then they are just looking to get their back rent. Storage places do this all the time. Seems legit to me.
I watched the whole hoarder’s house (then renamed potter’s house), series of videos. I found the whole story to be very fascinating. However, I haven’t been all that interested in continuing with the videos, and I haven’t bought into the “following a family because they are cool” sort of thing. They do seem like nice people, and they do a great job at producing the videos and getting exposure for the people that do work for them.
I’ll watch this video later when I have more time. Julie B may be correct that he is stretching things a bit. I’m sure people (like myself) dropped out once the hoarder/potter series was over. I’m sure he wants to keep his traffic up because he does make money off You Tube advertising.
In his favor, though, since he is well known and liked, people may search him out when they want to get rid of something quickly. He can then pick from the best deals, and he doesn’t have to do as much scavenging like the rest of us. He knows a good deal when he sees it, and, from the notes under the video, he had bought stuff from this seller before (the one that stopped paying the rent). Just like I’m sure he knew that the previous owner of that house was a famous artist, and that he might find some very valuable stuff.
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It will be interesting to see if anything comes out of the woodwork on whether or not the inventory was securing a loan. If it was, the warehouse landlord didn’t have the right to sell it. Items found in storage units are different because they are rarely related to a business and rarely securing lines of credit. In this case, it was most definitely a business and it seems like too much merchandise for the original buyer to have purchased outright. Just like houses often have mortgage liens and cars can have title loans, inventory is often “secured” as a collateral by a bank, meaning if a loan goes sour, the bank then owns that inventory. In the U.S. the bank files a UCC filing, which is a legal notice that they own the inventory in event of a default. The UCC is filed at the time the loan is made. If the borrower up and leaves everything and the inventory disappears, I’m not sure what the bank does. Maybe they have insurance on it as they would require on a house or a car serving as collateral – it protects the bank so they aren’t left holding a worthless asset.
If the inventory isn’t securing a loan from the prior owner, then this guy got the best deal of a lifetime and I am so envious! Although since I do not have the resources nor wherewithal to deal with that much stuff, it would get out of hand for me quickly. He fortunately seems to have a lot of avenues to utilize in order to flip things quick.
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I saw that video the other day and my eyes were like O O the entire time! You’d have to hire a small staff of 5-10 people alone to make headway into that type of inventory. Since a lot of that stuff looks unmovable due to the sheer amount of it, you’d have to also rent that warehouse space for probably thousands a month. Where else could you possibly move it all to? There are already tight aisles several feet high all through the warehouse, so you’d need a warehouse that size or much larger just to handle it all and have office space for processing. I’d think you have to have an additional $10k-15k alone the first month or so to cover the cost of warehouse space and staff to start processing it, so an $8k cost is more like an $18-25k+ cost right off the bat before you’ve sold a single item. I don’t blame him for auctioning the bulk of it off right away, especially since he still has the extreme expenses from the Potter’s House.
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Says “I just got the keys from the locksmith”. Holds the key up so that you can clearly see the bitting, inserts that key into the lock and opens the door. Hmmm… looks like the locksmith removed the original lock and replaced it with a cheap Chinese one (no scratches on the lock, no branding).
I’ve been watching too much LockPickingLawyer 🙂
The rest of it is a horror movie involving hundreds of small rubber dolls and a claustrophobic warehouse where the heating’s still on but the lighting’s off.
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That would be an amazing score, the type of inventory that is super easy to list, all new in box barcoded items. Granted it is YEARS worth of inventory but much of the cheaper stuff could go to amazon fba and let them handle the shipping, keep the higher dollar stuff for his own acct.
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I saw an estimate of what Curiosity Incorporated (the Potter’s House guy) makes on YouTube and it may be as high as $250,000 a year. So if he can find something that’ll get a lot of people to watch his channel (as they did for the Potter’s house series) it’s certainly worth it for him to do so, if only for the views!
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Yes, I believe the adsense $ comes from the number of views rather than the number of subscribers…
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Julie, the video you linked is now private. Think he got hit with legal trouble?
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Last night I meant to copy and paste a post from his Facebook page, but I guess I got lazy. Now I can’t find it. I checked his Facebook feed, and the post appears to have been taken down. If you want to find his feed yourself, it is under Curiosity Inc Edmonton, or something like that.
It was a cryptic message that really didn’t make sense, but he said that he took down the videos. There was something about him trying to help an estranged relative that he hadn’t spoken to in two years, and he didn’t know what he was getting into when he bought the warehouse storage contents. There was something about the auction proceeds to pay for the money that he put down and then it won’t be for him? I can’t exactly remember the whole message, but it didn’t completely make sense.
Other posts from the past two weeks or so mentioned a relative in trouble and that he wished he could do something.
Maybe he will be more clear once he has time to clear his head.
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How odd. In the original video he said he wanted to give the proceeds to his mom and other relatives that had money stolen from them. I guess if he’s not going to give the money to them, it would be sort of fraudulent for people to bid with the intention of helping out his family members?
If you look at comments on his Facebook page, there are people stating that they are going to bid to help out his family. Hmmm…
Oh, also according to the suggested pages, Crazy Lamp Lady is also “Relic Recoverist” on Youtube. Spike TV just needs to give her her own reality show at this point.
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I can’t remember the exact wording of his post. It just seemed like he was saying that he was trying to help someone out and that the profits weren’t going to him. The grammar wasn’t exact and the message wasn’t clear.
I never got around to watching the original video.
People do seem to care about him and his family. It’s a thing where a YouTuber makes all these videos, includes the spouse and the kids, and viewers get attached. Just the way that the Crazy Lamp Lady gets prices way above market for simple things that might hardly sell for a regular eBay seller.
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Yep, the original story was completely misleading and clickbaity. He reposted the video with context at the beginning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbACKTCQ8aY
I don’t know why he just didn’t post that originally. I’m sure his intentions are “good,” but how am I supposed to know what “good” is as a viewer as I only see one side of a person as portrayed by that person in the videos they post? I still don’t like how the original video was misleading, so I’m going to still feel sort of shady about this whole thing no matter what.
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Members of his family lent a local business money. Business went bust, foreclosure, he offers property management company the back rent owed in return for access to the warehouse and permission to clear out anything there.
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Understood. Seems pretty cut and dry as far as deals can go. Most property management companies or banks would be glad just to get an empty space to sell quickly.
So the real story is:
–How much did he pay in back rent for access to all that property
–Like Julie said, did the bankrupt company buy all that inventory on credit, so some company will want their property back
–if not, how long does he have to clean out the space?
–If he’s selling for his family, what cut does he get?The video link is still dead.
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I’ll qualify that. He paid the rent owing to the property management company. He got a locksmith to change the lock. Whether the company gave him permission to remove the stock, or whether he has started paying rent on the warehouse I don’t know.
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You guys have got my interest piqued. I hope he republishes that video.
–if that business paid for all that inventory, they’re insane just to walk away from it just because they couldnt pay rent. They should haul it away to sell it, or do a big quction…even if sold at a loss.
–or that failed business bought all that inventory on credit and someone is going to come back for it to recoup their losses. Not sure what the legal implications are of this guy taking over the lease and selling off then goods without making the creditor whole.
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It’s probably not relevant in this case, but long firm fraud was a thing back in the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s. Start a business, buy stock in, build up your credit rating with the suppliers, put a massive order in, abscond with the stock. Repeat in another town.
I’ve no idea why it’s called that, also there’s short firm fraud which I’m just about to google.
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Oh, it’s just… on a shorter timescale. No attempt to build up a credit history.
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In the U.S., if a business takes out a bank loan to purchase large amounts of inventory or to open a line of credit, the bank will often secure the inventory as collateral by filing a UCC. The UCC serves as a claim against that inventory to show all other lenders that should the loan default, the lender has dibs on the inventory. I’ve googled around and learned that if someone buys up the original borrower’s inventory and that borrower did not pay down the loan with that payment, then the bank can still go after the inventory (because technically now it’s theirs) and sue both the original borrower and the person who purchased the inventory & resold it.
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I was thinking about this situation last night, and the more I think about it I totally don’t believe any of it. I get the feeling He’s doing someone a favor by pretending to “buy” the inventory. Then he conveniently already has an auction set up to happen within 2 weeks before he’s even seen everything.
Best case, the auction gets a ton of free viral advertising, Curiosity Inc gets a ton of page views. Win/Win. This is an independently produced “reality” TV show, after all, and we know how “real” most of them are.
I saw a video of this guy over a year ago and the sleaze just oozed off of him. I changed my mind after this video and the first few potters house video…but then the sleaze started creeping back in.
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Yeah, I was thinking about this video again last night too. I was trying to figure out what made me feel weird about him, and I realized it’s the constant asking for hand-outs. Hand-outs for the Potter’s House Lady, hand-outs for Hans, hand-outs for the homeless guy he gave money to a year ago. If you’re actually a good guy, just donate money to people and are quiet about it. Real decent people don’t post public youtube videos in order to elicit sympathy. Real decent people don’t constantly show off how good of people they are; they are just good people.
If he’s making $250,000 a year off youtube alone, without including his shop, why does he need to constantly ask for money from his viewers to help people? All in the persona of a nice guy with a friendly smile, family, etc,. It actually sort of creeps me out.
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Also, have you noticed how vicious the people in the comments of his videos are? They call anyone who questions what he has to say “haters” or “jealous.” They say “you have no right to ask for more information about what he’s going through. He’s obviously going through a difficult time. He shows what he wants to show, his personal life is none of your business.” He has made his personal life everyone’s entertainment! Also, if someone is constantly asking the viewers for money for idea or effort of another, you have EVERY RIGHT to question WHY. Ugh.
I’ve never posted comments on his videos (or any Youtube video) because I don’t want to fight the onslaught of insanity over this guy lol.
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Good rule of thumb: If someone needs to constantly remind you how good of a person they are, it’s time to start digging for dirt.
There are approx. 10,000 reselling channels on YT and maybe a small handful of them are actually good/interesting. The rest are painful to watch and give off scammer vibes. It’s just a weird move in general to broadcast your entire life to anyone willing to click a link, but I guess it’s no surprise that people will do anything for some $$$.
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I haven’t really watched this guy’s videos, so won’t comment. But on the larger subject of the YouTube Reseller Videos in general: I still watch some here and there, but for the most part, I think the sheer number of resellers vying for my attention has numbed me….that and the fact that so much of what they tell me could be condensed into a few paragraphs rather than an hour long video.
Than too, I’m increasingly uneasy…maybe just cause I’m old… about the general blurring that is going on between real life and the online world.
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An update video was posted yesterday on a homeless guy he helped a year ago. The comments are full of Bible proverbs, the true meaning of Christmas, the viewers saying they are better people just by their viewing. It’s starting to sound like a cult.
I agree on the proliferation of reseller videos. I’ve seen some resellers say that it is a vital part of their income stream and are encouraging others to do it, so that’s part of it. I don’t get how they are all attracting their own audiences to make it worth it. Are they all just making or watching reseller videos for 10 hours a day to support each other? Do they not have actual hobbies or interests outside of this bubble?
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almasty, One thing I’ve noticed is that they’ll give “shout outs” to other YouTubers, and often have them as Guests on their shows….all of this cross-pollination, so to speak, helps them build their audience. It can start to get a little cliquish/cultish; I’ve seen some videos that are basically nothing but drama about a competing YouTuber being mean or whatever.
I think with many people, you don’t have to scratch too deep to get to their inner insecure, cliquish High Schooler, and I think the Internet brings this out in some people more than others.
One reason this is my “safe space” LOL…..reasonable people having reasonable discussions, offering useful information. A lot of YouTube channels do have some good information, but it sometimes feeling like I’m panning for gold to find it
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Is drama still that popular amongst the youtube crowd? Thought it quieted down after the whole NS/SP fiasco a year or two ago? Interesting.
Makes sense about the “guest” spots. I guess they are not really “resellers” per se, more like talk show hosts or internet personalities that intersperse reselling amongst the random talk. Like panning for gold, as you say. This format was sort of perfected with the original “Serial” podcast a few years ago. People like hearing people talk about their lives in the middle of whatever thrifting or listing or shipping they’re doing.
I do agree with what IndySales said above about the youtubers being good or interesting. Even with hundreds of reselling channels to choose from, there’s less quality content out there worth watching. Similar to hundreds of cable channels, or streaming options. It’s just a lot of unnecessary talk.
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A lot of YouTube channels do have some good information, but it sometimes feeling like I’m panning for gold to find it
Yes! It’s been a challenge to ferret out the ones who are actually sharing useful new-to-me identification / valuation about things I like to source or talking about what’s no longer fetching good prices. I’m down to three or four channels. On a couple of those, I have to watch 15 minutes of other footage with a gem thrown in here and there. Those are ones that have morphed into QVC-style selling to their own subscribers and have incorporated their less talented significant others – pet peeve. I don’t really watch tv any more so Youtube is kind of down time. I miss Sheldon and Mad Maine.
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“They call anyone who questions what he has to say “haters” or “jealous.”
“It’s starting to sound like a cult.”
A lot of these comments in recent replies resonate with me wrt my experience with the Crazy Lamp Lady youtube videos. While I do not at all think she is scamming anyone nor is she trying to start a cult, I had to quit watching her channel cold turkey b/c there was way too much drama. One example:
Whenever she saw more “dislikes” of videos of her children in them (this is like 100 dislikes compared to thousands of likes) compared to videos that didn’t have her children in them, she would complain about it in her video. Then in the comments, her “followers” would repeatedly call all the people clicking on the thumbs downs “haters” and “sad people”, and CLL even joins in with that sometimes. This was really annoying to me b/c a) I happen to despise the videos with her children in them although I think the children are wonderful adorable children and b) I like scrolling through the comments b/c knowledgeable people would comment with identification information on items when CLL didn’t know what they were – I wanted to learn. But it just wasn’t worth it to have to read through comments that were basically insulting me.
Another negative was that the more I watched her videos, the more I was drawn to buy the things she buys, and large percentage of these things are not worth anything on ebay unless you have a cult following like she does. So I stopped in order to get all that cheap stuff out of my head.
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Wow, I didn’t realize she was cheering her fans on to cause drama in the comments. I guess that also helps to keep them engaged, if they feel they must constantly defend her against her “haters.”
Her videos are incredibly boring to me because I don’t like antiques or the sort of collectibles she picks up, and she doesn’t seem that interesting of a person, at least to me.
What does crack me up is the impression she gives off that f/t resellers are constantly trawling through thrifts, antique shops, flea markets and spending $100-500 a day on whatever catches their fancy to just post online for sale seemingly like magic. Nah. I guess fans wouldn’t be as excited by videos of the process it takes getting all that stock listed & shipped. I can only imagine how many hours it takes to pack all those fragile items. No thanks!
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