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"INSURED"
You'd think that if a company says they are "fully insured" or that "your property is covered by insurance" this would mean what it sounds like, that if they break or damage something of yours they'd owe you the cost to repair or replace it. NOPE. Far from it. What the law says "insured" means is that they only owe you 60 cents per pound of the damaged or missing item, unless you opt before the job starts to pay for additional insurance, with the coverage amount being dependent on how much extra you want to pay. This is why a moving company is supposed to hand you a sheet of paper prior to the job starting explaining your insurance options. The "60 cents" is in the fine print.
An exception is if a moving company has already agreed beforehand with you to give you full repair replacement value without charging extra for it, then this option has already been settled. So the dollar amounts of bids, quotes, and estimates are worth a lot more if they include "repair/replacement" coverage by default at the regular rates instead of the "60 cents per pound" coverage. Would you want to agree to accept $30 for you broken flat screen $1,200 TV? That's what most moving customers are doing without fully realizing it.
"ESTIMATE"
Oregon Law says that if a moving company uses the term "estimate" when giving you a price, the end resulting price of an estimate is not supposed to be over by more than ten percent above the given "estimate" figure, unless the volume or description of the job changes from the time of the quote. There's a little more to it, but that's the basic idea. The law also requires an estimator to see the items they are giving an estimate on before giving you an "estimate" or "bid", although the visual can be in pictures, video call or in person, so if a company skips this step be wary, they might not be indenting on being restrained by their given estimate.
Keep in mind that there is a big legal and moral distinguishment between a moving company using the term "bid" and "estimate" compared to telling you their company's previous costs averages for different general types of moves; i.e. "It's common for one bedroom apartments to run between X and X". There is no commitment for any particular price on your move when only "move-type average costs" are described.
If some company gives you a bid or estimate (uses those specific terms) without an onsite inspection or a review of a picture or video call, beware, it may be that either they are not intending to be restrained by their bid number, or their estimate is so over priced that it doesn't matter how hard your stuff would be to move. One person's apartment might have five times the amount of "stuff" that someone else's one bedroom apartment has, so the person giving you a quote, bid, or estimate should be finding out from you the details before giving you numbers that are supposed to be binding. "Past averages for move types" are fine to quote off the cuff, as long as it's understood that these are not making any kind of promise about YOUR job.
Too often some of the less scrupulous moving companies either ignore the "within 10%" rule for estimates, try to bluff you, or use the legal loop hole of claiming that your volume of items was higher than you originally claimed, and so use the excuse of "a dozen extra boxes" to justify an abandoning of the bid price agreement, and a end resulting charged price far more than the bid or estimate price.
BID
A "Bid" is more restricting than an "estimate", meaning a "Bid" price is supposed to be a fixed set price without the 10% over range of an "estimate". But a company can still try to use the excuse of your items being more than a certain "weight" they had quoted to try to get out of being restricted by their bid price. I hear about companies doing this all the time as a regular practice. How are you really supposed to know how much your stuff weighs, and how would you really know what they weighed it at in their truck when they say your weight went over the weight they quoted? You can't. If you do a bid price, I'd recommend only accepting a bid that is not dependent on weight, but rather only dependent on your items being the items they saw when they did the bid. This is a HUGE distinction.
Your best protection from encountering problems like this is to shop well for a moving company with a long customer review history of being fair and moral with customers over many years, and a company that will agree to do the job with no payment until the job is fully completed and you are satisfied. Once they have your money it can be a whole lot harder for you to try to rectify things if they're going to try to cheat you. If you haven't paid them anything until the job is done, then YOU deduct any compensation you're owed you before you pay them, and YOU don't pay them anything above the agreed quote, and let them do the "hoop jumping" to try to get the disputed money instead of the other way around. That's why there's a HUGE difference between a moving company that will demand payment before job completion vs. a company that has a Satisfaction Guarantee AND will stand behind it by agreeing to not require payment until you are satisfied with the completed job. What kind of company is going to make an agreement with you that you can take what you feel is fair off the bill if you see any wasted time or damages? Only companies that know they do great work, know they do the right thing, and know they aren't going to overcharge you are going to make this kind of deal with you. There are very few companies that could survive offering a Guarantee like this. Just ask a prospective company if they would offer this deal. You'll get "Heck no".
Also, if you're getting an estimate or bid price (instead of hiring hourly), then make sure to get your estimate and bid price in writing, and check it out before you hire your moving company (they are supposed to provide that automatically for bids and estimates). Don't wait until your truck is being loaded.
To be able to properly shop for options, for really big moves or for out of town moves, you should start shopping at least a month or more in advance of your move, two months is better (especially in the summer) or else the better moving companies might be already booked up and not available on the particular date you need to move. For smaller in-town jobs it's usually OK to book two or three weeks in advance, but farther in advance is always a more sure way to go.
If you have a moving company come out and do a bid or estimate on a job, the estimator needs to guess high on the estimated hours and expenses, to make sure the low end of the window of their guess will come out with some leeway above what an hourly rate could add up to, and so estimate cost numbers need to be aimed well above the estimator's guess of what the real world hourly rates would add up to.
This is why paying hourly rates should add up to a good bit less than Bids and Estimates numbers. That means hiring by an hourly rate should save you money if, and that's a big IF, the movers work hard, skillfully and efficiently. But if they don't work hard, and if they aren't skilled and efficient, hiring hourly can cost you twice as much as a bid would have been.
So I say, if the moving company offers a "Happiness Guarantee" or a satisfaction guarantee of some kind on their service, meaning a deal that you can take as much money as you think is fair off the bill if you see wasted time and inefficient work, then and only then should you hire by an hourly rate, unless they have a "spectacular" customer review history record, or unless you're desperate and there's no other better choices of movers. If you're paying for hourly rates, regardless of any Guarantees, if that company tries to charge you for significant time they spend on their cell phones or in the bathroom (or any other incorrect billing) refuse to pay the full bill, and instead offer to pay for what you feel are the corrected hours and ask them if they'd rather agree to settle on the corrected billing or take you to court. Don't let them pressure you into paying an incorrectly calculated bill.
But in general, really big cross country moves should be done only with a fixed bid price agreed upon, even with a company that has a great review history. There are so many ways that movers can do you wrong and try to get around the rules that, regardless of agreements in contracts, I highly recommend you don't do business with any company that doesn't have a long many-year history of great customer reviews with only very rare and minor complaint reviews.
WEBSITES & ADVERTISEMENTS
The above picture is of the crew of a long distance moving company called "Navy Seals Moving". If you've ever seen a real Navy Seal you may notice that the look, age, physique, & stance of these movers makes it look highly unlikely that these are all real Navy Seals as some people might guess from the company name. Not that these might not be good movers, I have no idea, but it does seem to be a general trend in the moving industry that the sales department and website claims of many companies do not necessarily represent accurately what service details are actually delivered onsite.
When I hired a website company to help with my SEO factors to make my site rank higher on Google, they added pre-packaged stock material about moving companies that sounded like many of the other moving companies out there, that I had to have them correct to get back to quoting my exact original material. What you are seeing on a lot of websites contains a lot of pre-packaged stock material claims. There are even companies that sell "stock" great reviewers. They showed me samples of these great fake reviews they would leave from tons of their "employees". That's their business. I declined their service. So even google reviews can't all be trusted these days. What's the answer? Look for the bad reviews. Not all of those are necessarily real either, but see if there's a trend. Also, when looking at reviews, look for clues as to idiosyncrasies, and personalities, personal details about the moving company, and less than picture-perfect reviews that would be less likely to be left by a business being paid to leave stock fake reviews. I recommend not going with any company that has not been around for at least a few years, that you can see lots of reviews about.
Yea, it's a jungle out there. That's partly why I'm doing this listing and booking-help site, to do the investigating for you, and to put my money where my mouth is with my $1,000 Happiness Guarantee on the companies I've rated with my Gold Star.
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