Storage unit. Photo: Shutterstock

"Storage Wars" star David Hester will lose out on the contents of a storage unit he purchased for nearly $12,000 when it was mistakenly put up for auction, after a California appeals court ruled against him.

In an opinion Friday, California's Fourth District Court of Appeal found the reality TV personality "finds himself at war with defendant Public Storage," but that Hester lost this most recent breach of contract battle with the global self-storage company.

About half an hour after Hester bought a unit at a Public Storage lien sale, an employee discovered the original occupant of the unit had paid off his past-due balance weeks before the sale, according to the opinion. But it was still listed in the auction due to a "technical glitch."

The appeals court agreed with Public Storage's Keker, Van Nest & Peters counsel and the Superior Court of Orange County that the company properly voided the sale under the null and void clauses.

Public Storage and Keker's Erin Meyer and Christopher Sun did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday morning.

Hester claimed that the null and void clauses are precluded by California Uniform Commercial Code Section 2328, which mandates that a sale is closed once it is announced by an auctioneer, "because [the clauses] improperly add additional grounds for undoing a completed sale," according to the ruling.

Associate Justice Eileen Moore, joined by Associate Justices Richard Aronson and Richard Fybel, found that Hester misread the statute.

"Contrary to plaintiff's assertion, nothing in Section 2328 shows any intent by the Legislature to establish the grounds for voiding a completed sale, let alone the exclusive grounds," Moore wrote. "If the Legislature had intended for this statute to establish the entire means for a buyer and seller to void a completed auction sale, it would have said so."

Hester also said the null and void clauses were precluded by Business and Professions Code Section 21711, which dictates procedures for how self-storage facilities conduct lien sales. The justices said that Hester read too much into the act's language stating a purchaser "takes the goods free of any rights of [the occupants] against whom the lien was claimed, despite noncompliance by the owner of the storage facility."

"The language on which plaintiff relies only clarifies that an occupant has no claim against a good faith buyer even if the owner did not comply with the act," Moore said. "It does not apportion any risk of an erroneous sale between a buyer and an owner. Further, plaintiff's reading of the statute would effectively mean an owner could never void an erroneous sale regardless of how soon the error was discovered."

Hester's attorney, Dale Washington of the Law Offices of Dale Washington in Los Angeles, did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.