Selling the contents of a defaulted unit
You have a unit whose tenant has stopped paying, and a room you cannot rent out. Bid Budi turns that into a sale to a verified buyer, with a record of every step — which is what you produce when the former tenant asks what happened to their belongings.
The commission is agreed with you when we verify your facility, and it is confirmed in writing in the email that says you may start listing. Most facilities are on the standard rate above.
You are paid 0 days after the buyer’s payment clears, not on collection. The payment includes the buyer’s cleaning deposit.
Photograph it without opening it. From the doorway and each corner — at least 2 photographs. Nothing is moved, nothing is listed as an inventory, and the capture time, device and distance from your branch are recorded with each one.
Seal it with your own lock. You keep the code. Nobody opens the unit again until the buyer is standing there — including us.
We review before release. Every set of photographs is checked against the standard. This is what buyers are actually paying for, so a set that does not meet it comes back to you.
Verified buyers bid. Nobody bids without an identity check on record, and every bid carries the IP it came from.
The winner pays within 2 hours. If they do not, it passes to the next bidder automatically, and if nobody pays it comes back to us for review and goes up again. Either way the unit does not go quiet, and you do nothing.
You open it together. Your named representative and the buyer, comparing each photograph against the unit before anything is removed. Anything that does not match is logged there and then, with a photograph.
They clear and sweep it within 5 days. You sign it off, they sign it off.
You decide about the deposit. You set the cleaning deposit on your listing, or none, and Bid Budi passes it on to you with your payment. Bid Budi refunds no deposit: whether the buyer gets it back, in full or in part, is your call on the state of the unit. You refund them directly and record your decision on the clearance screen, and the buyer is emailed. Anything that did not match the photographs is settled between you and the buyer.
South African law does not give a storage facility an automatic power to sell a defaulting tenant's goods. The US model these auctions are patterned on rests on self-storage lien statutes that do not exist here.
Most facilities rely on a clause in their storage agreement. Whether such a clause is enforceable against a consumer is genuinely unsettled, and it is a question for an attorney rather than for us. What we can do — and do — is hold the evidence that this sale was authorised: which agreement you relied on, the arrears, the notice you sent and proof it arrived, and the redemption window.
So registering does not put you live. Bid Budi checks that you are the company you say you are first. You can list auctions and submit them while that happens; they simply do not reach buyers until the check is done. That check is who you are, and nothing more: compliance with the law that governs the sale itself stays with you.