PUBLIC STORAGE SOLD MY BELONGINGS ON AUCTION AFTER BILLING ME INCORRECTLY. Poor communication, bad…read moremanagement, rent increases.
Protect your goods, Delco Friends, and go elsewhere for your storage needs.
MY STORY:
I was a customer of Public Storage, Newtown Square for about 2 years when they increased my rent beyond my budget to $600/month. I compared the price with a similar unit at their nearby competitor Storage King Newtown Square, which offered about $300/month. I called PS NS to see if I could get the rent reduced to a competitive rate. I was told by Property Manager, Timothy, that I needed to pay the full bill first. I called Customer Service, which was off site, and paid the bill. After a lot of "phone tag" and another high bill without a rent reduction, I tried to transfer to a smaller unit via Customer Service by phone. When I arrived to transfer my goods, there was an additional lock on my unit, and the cart was nowhere to be found. Additionally, PS requires that you leave by a certain time at night. Because I work, I arrived after 5pm; between the cart, the lock and the limited time, I was unable to make the transfer. I called the manager. On my next bill, I was billed for two units instead of one though I occupied only the original unit and the manager had been informed of the situation. With an even higher out-of-budget bill, I played phone tag again. The manager didn't leave messages with solutions, instead I got messages resembling "robocalls": "Hello, this is so-and-so calling from Public Storage regarding an important matter..." I told the Property Manager, that if he didn't have authority to rectify the situation, he could put me in touch with the person who could. He did not. In June, the situation remained unresolved and they sold my goods on auction (Probably Storage Treasures website on 6/23/26). My bill was paid at the end of March 2026, so this happened after about 2 months of phone tag over being wrongly billed for 2 units instead of one.
MY OPINION:
As a customer, I have never been treated WORSE than by Public Storage Newtown Square under the current management: Property Manager, Timothy & District Manager, Brendan.
After approximately two years and thousands of dollars spent to protect my goods, my rent was incrementally raised and almost doubled. Ironically, the now empty unit was advertised at a lower price that I would have been happy to pay, making this entire fiasco even more nonsensical. Public Storage LOST money on this transaction; the auction buyer paid less than I was willing to pay and Public Storage is renting the unit for less! This makes it look like they are catering to a predatory auction industry! They would have been better off trying to keep me as a tenant.
As a worker, I have never treated a customer like this. Regardless of what is permissible by storage industry standards, whatever laws protect this animalistic process are unjust and should be changed to protect the consumer.
The dehumanizing, remote processes and unethical policies at Public Storage ensure that there will be miscommunication and neglect. I would have been willing to pay even a wrong bill to prevent this from happening. Minimally, a payment plan could have mitigated the situation while I removed my goods from this self-interested business that puts the privacy of auction buyers ahead of the privacy of customers. Not only was Public Storage comfortable with auctioning the goods of a long-time, local customer regardless of the impact on their business or reputation, they had no compunction about the fact that there were items included that had no market-value such as family photos that can never be replaced and personal documents that put my identity at risk. This is not the kind of business DELCO RESIDENTS want in their neighborhood.
*IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION THAT COULD LEAD TO THE RECOVERY OF MY BELONGINGS AUCTIONED ON STORAGE TREASURES www.storagetreasures.com ON JUNE 23RD 2026 from Public Storage Newtown Square, PLEASE CONTACT ME IMMEDIATELY AT: DelcoNeighbor@proton.me
