Hiring a removal firm - local firm or one from our destination?

Cuilean

It's still early days in our moving process, but with our buyers being FTBs who are pushing for a quick sale, I'm already starting to think about fun stuff like removal companies (Please note heavy use of sarcasm there )

Hubby and I are moving 50 miles to another county. I'm a fairly experienced house-mover, having lived all over the UK, but with extremes of long distance moves (hundreds of miles), or short hops (less than 10 miles) - nothing in this mid-distance range. Historically, I've found long distance moves have been cheaper with the big boys like Pickfords and Bishops' Move, and short hops are cheaper when taken care of by local firms.

I'm now wondering with this mid-range sort of move whether I'm better off hiring a firm local to where we live now, or local to where we will be living. Or do I go back to the big boys who do nationwide coverage? Anyone with experience of this out there?

AdrianC

Get quotes from a few in both categories, and compare.

phoebe1989seb

In December we did a relatively long-distance move and we found there wasn't much* to choose price-wise between the national removers and the local firms. We had quotes from four - but in the end had to choose a fifth as our completion date slipped closer to Christmas and our preferred remover became booked up

*Iirc there was a few hundred quid between highest and lowest, which seems a lot but our moving costs were not average, being in the thousands of £££

The firm we ended up with were a smallish local one, but their price was actually second least expensive.....

G_M

Moving out of London? Hire one from your destination.

Moving into London? Hire one from your departure point!

bris

doesn't make a blind bit of difference does it, who cares where they come from. Hire them for reputation not area.

agrinnall

It should be 6 of one and half a dozen of the other, as both would have to travel the same distance.

G_M makes a good case for hiring one rather than the other, I'll confuse things by making the opposite case.

If the distance is such that the movers will need to stay overnight at the end of the first leg, then if you are in a more expensive part of the country than where you are moving to then a local firm will have lower accommodation costs than one from your destination would, and vice versa. (Assuming they don't just sleep in the cab of course)

The moral is, do what AdrianC suggests and base your decision on their quotes.

tea-bag

What sort of prices are you getting?

PasturesNew

50 miles is nothing, just around the corner really, many people drive further than that every day to work. But, if you think about it from the removals and practicality side, I might assume it'd be better to get one from the destination because:

- if they're a bit late arriving, it's not really that crucial
- if they do turn up a bit late they'll rush to get caught up
- they won't be rushing off, or thinking about it, so soon in the afternoon as they'll be local to their depot/home.
- if they're local to where you are now then they'll turn up on time, but then take it a bit easy, until later on they discover they're running a bit late and will be thinking about the whole journey to the depot/home problems.

eddddy

The firms will need to visit your current house to give you a quote (and obviously you wont pay them for giving a quote, and they may not get your business).

So they may be dubious about travelling 50 miles each way on a speculative basis.

But there is no harm in asking.