Moving is a hassle if you do it on your own. You can’t just bundle everything you have into a truck all anyhow. You need to be careful about every single item, making sure that it is accounted for, packed, loaded carefully and unloaded properly. Following the process over and over again for hundreds of articles can quickly become stressful. This is what makes professional movers the valuable resource that they are.
Unfortunately, the moving market is full of unprofessional businesses. Using a moving company doesn’t always work the way it should, for this reason. If you are to really be confident about handing your moving project to a company, you need to choose wisely. It isn’t easy. Unlike other services, there are few laws looking out for consumer rights in this area. You need to depend mostly on your own smarts finding the right business.
Offline, rather than online, is where you should start
With victims who have been burned by a bad moving experience, the provider is invariably found online. While a few large and well-established services do have websites, most don’t. They still work almost exclusively off-line. When you go online to look for services, you end up finding hundreds of incompetent ones, and just a couple of good ones. It’s easy to get lost. It’s a much better idea to use conventional methods.
Go local
Find a real estate agent that you trust, to ask for local moving company recommendations. You need to make sure that you find recommendations for businesses with physical addresses in your area. Once you have a few names, go online to check for reviews — on BBB and Yelp. When a company seems promising, only then should you set up an appointment to go visit them.
If they seem reasonably professional, ask them if they do their own moving, or if they subcontract to another company. Make sure that they have proper trucks with the company name painted on (and not magnetically attached). Ask for an in-home inspection visit for a proper estimate. Any company that isn’t willing to do a thorough in-person estimate taking visit should go off your list.
Check with the credentialing authorities
According to Reynolds Transfer movers in Madison, WI, before you actually decide on a company, you should check with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Their resources help consumers make sure that the company they hire is authorized to move them. They also offer thorough information on how long a company has been in business, and where exactly it belongs. If the company that you’re considering is only a front, and subcontracts the actual moving to another company, you’ll learn about it here must not.
Compare
You can’t ever work with a mover who simply wants to quote you in cubic feet, rather than in terms of weight. When a company sends out estimates based on cubic-foot measurements alone, it usually only means that they will pack your stuff loosely to use up as much space as possible, so that they may charge you more.
After each moving company’s estimate taker visits and lets you have a quote, take up the cheapest one, and call the other companies to ask if there is a reason for the difference in price. It could be that the expensive companies offer a greater level of service.
If putting in all this work seems a hassle, you should remember that moving is a serious business. You don’t need to do it all that often. Putting in some homework doesn’t need to feel all that bad.
