A New Jersey high schooler banked $135,000 in a single year flipping abandoned storage lockers

Michael Haskell's first storage unit cost $10. Inside, he found a carbon dioxide canister he sold for $40. That $30 profit — made while he was still in high school — was enough to convince him to keep going.

Two years later, the 18-year-old from Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, had turned that curiosity into a business in the New York tri-state area, generating around $220,000 from 2025 through July of this year, according to financial documents reviewed by CNBC.

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His model is simple: Haskell finds and bids on abandoned storage units — usually for $500 or less — through auction websites, then sorts, researches and resells the contents on eBay. He stores inventory in his mother's home, where shelving units in the garage are stocked with everything from Cold War-era artifacts to Nike sneakers to crates of books and vinyl records.

Haskell's turning point came early. After spotting that a unit had belonged to Andrew Crispo — a scandal-riddled former Manhattan art dealer — he paid $450 for it. Inside, he found a painting by Man Ray and sketches by modernist painter Walt Kuhn that together sold for $36,000.

"Every single time I'm driving to a locker, I'm thinking, is this going to be the next Crispo?" he told CNBC.

That windfall convinced his parents he was onto something real. It also crystallized his approach: success in storage unit flipping isn't about luck, but about reading the clues.

"The way you make money is not by looking at stuff that's directly in front of you," but about piecing together clues, Haskell said. "It's connecting the dots with various small items that may not be obvious." A college pennant might not be worth much on its own, but it signals an educated owner — and possibly more valuable items elsewhere in the unit.

Haskell uses Google Lens, ChatGPT and cross-referenced eBay listings to estimate values. He and some friends also built an AI tool that scans for notable names attached to units up for auction.

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Haskell's trajectory reflects a broader shift in who's starting businesses and why.

According to the Bank of America Institute's report on business formation, Gen Z is contributing "disproportionately" to recent growth in new business applications, with this cohort's application growth in June more than double that of Millennials and Gen X.

The report notes that founders are "getting significantly younger," and that for many young workers experiencing a difficult labor market, starting a business has become a viable alternative for income and career advancement.

But for Haskell, the business also served a more personal purpose. Watching classmates with 4.0 GPAs, he felt he needed a different way to stand out. The storage unit business became his college essay — literally. He wrote about tracking down a Purple Heart he found in one unit, tracing an address on a package and showing up to return it. He didn't get a response and still has the medal. He believes the essay helped him get into Atlanta's Emory University.

The business is not without its costs. Haskell estimates he spends 20 to 25 hours a week on it. He sometimes hires help to clear units. Items have sat in his mother's home for as long as two years before being sold. And scaling the model in Atlanta, where population density is lower than the New York area, will be a real challenge.

He's already thinking about adjacent opportunities: building or operating storage unit facilities, or pivoting to house flipping. "Maybe the start of college will be the worst time for my storage unit business, or maybe the best time," Haskell told CNBC. Either way, he says, it's been worth it.

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This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: A New Jersey high schooler banked $135,000 in a single year flipping abandoned storage lockers

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