How Do I Research a Moving Company?

How do I research a moving company?

 The hunt begins! Finding a moving company that you can trust and afford is a difficult process. How do you know that your stuff won’t end up on the ocean floor? You research. We’re here today to teach you how to do just that.

Online Reviews

The internet is a wild and wonderful place. Filled with reviews for everything under the sun, you can certainly use it to research your moving company far in advance. From Yelp to Google, there are tons of reviews filled with in-depth experiences. While this can help you decide on a moving company, we do encourage some caution regarding published reviews. Some poor-quality companies will hire online writers to falsify reviews for them – boosting their ratings and gaining your trust.

We recommend that you take those online reviews with a grain of salt. There are a number of other sites you can use. The Better Business Bureau maintains a website with authenticated reviews. Rip-off Report may show you instances of the company failing to maintain a good business-client relationship. Whatever site you choose to work with, look for inconsistencies in the reviews or many reviews (usually high-ranking) posted in a short period. These are usually fake.

Local Reviews

You’ve exhausted the internet or decided it’s simply not for you. What other ways can you research your local moving companies? Sometimes, local community boards will post reviews for certain companies. Your city hall or recreation center will have these boards available. Check your grocery stores and your department stores, too. Rural shops often have places to pin reviews or to advertise small businesses.

Or you may decide to check with businesses or residents that have recently moved into the area. Though they may be from a long distance away, it’s likely that a local company finished the moving process for them. If you don’t have new neighbors or you can’t find new businesses, look for homes that have recently sold or business areas that have rental properties available.

If you are moving your personal belongings, most newcomers are more than happy to discuss any failings or bright parts of their moving company experience. If you are attempting a business move, many business districts use the same movers throughout the area. Most of them will be happy to point you in the right direction or tell you which companies to avoid.

Calling

This is the last thing that we recommend, though only because businesses are usually quite busy. If you want to research a moving company, one of the best things you can do is just ask. Yes, there are companies of ill repute that will falsify information, but they can do that in either of the above instances as well. Asking a poor company directly for feedback will often cause them to stutter or scramble for reviews that represent them in a good light. Essentially, this will help you pick out the poor companies just by the way they react to your inquiry for business feedback.

If you are moving a residential household, ask for recent clients that would be willing to give a review. Though this has fallen out of fashion in some areas, it is still quite common for well-treated clients to offer positive references. This remains the same when moving the office as well. If the business cannot supply any references whatsoever, we encourage hesitation before hiring them.