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Removers rise in estimation

ALONG with such milestones as marriage and divorce, moving house is one of the more stressful times in life.

Does this deter us from moving? The average British family packs up and moves on once every 10 years. The growth of self-drive van hire has in turn led to the growth of the do-it-yourself move and this has been felt by the removal industry.

But there are many people who cannot or do not want to edge their way down the stairs with the wardrobe. So they call in a professional removal company. Which one?

A look at the Yellow Pages will probably leave the customer spoilt for choice and most of the removal companies advertising there specifically offer free estimates. Obtaining several estimates not only helps the customer decide on the basis of price. It also gives a clue about other aspects of the companies. With so many removal companies chasing the work, an estimator's visit is likely to be the most important contact with the customer. If it is not right, it will be the only contact with the customer.

Removals estimating made news last year when the BBC

Television Nationwide programme "exposed" coverquoting. This was a practice carried out by a few less scrupulous removers quoting for Royal Navy personnel moves in Plymouth and Portsmouth. With the naval personnel needing to get three quotes, it was alleged that some removers co-operated or even set-up spoof companies to produce one real quote and two false quotes, thereby manipulating the prices and allocation of the work.

The same system could be applied to company-paid relocation moves, but it is believed that coverquoting has virtually if not completely faded out since the BBC programme. The Ministry of Defence is reviewing its Navy removal policy.

According to the cliche, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Despite their advertisements, removal men know that there is no such thing as a free estimate. Estimating is a time-consuming, speculative procedure that may not be converted into business. A debate at the British Association of Removers (BAR) autumn conference in 1983 floated the idea that a charge should be made for estimates. Although there were supporters for the idea, nobody to our knowledge has grasped the nettle and levied a charge.

Alternatives to the estimating system are advertised fixed prices, so that customers can get a guide to the rough price of a move without calling in an estimator, or a removal price based on an hourly rate.

Most established removers are not in favour of advertising prices. In 1983 East Midlands area BAR members asked the BAR head office to discipline a fellow member who was advertising removals at a fixed price of £49 for half a day. The BAR's membership committee agreed that this was "undesirable," but said that it was unable to do anything as the wording of the advertisement was not misleading.

Using an hourly charge as a pricing method has the advantage that if there is a problem at the delivery address (restricted access or a difficult carry, for example) the remover is compensated because the hours build up. Under the conventional estimating system the delivery address is not normally inspected and losses can be incurred if there is a problem there. The use of hourly rates is a northern trend, focused on Manchester.

For the rest of the country, despite the debate, the traditional practice continues with the estimating costs being absorbed into the remover's overall costs.

According to the BAR, estimating is a skill. The association runs an 1 1-week correspondence course and a four-day intensive course teaching it, using the Road Transport Industry Training Board's estimator's training pack combined with actual estimating practice.

The RTITB pack teaches the technique of assessing the volume of furniture, called "cubing", by the unit method. The unit chosen is 0.25 cubic metre which equals 8.8cuft and so is reckoned to be sufficiently close to 10cuft for easy conversion into cubic feet. The estimator has to visualise furniture in volumetric terms and it is a skill learned only by experience. The RTITB pack gives examples of the cubes for primary items of furniture; a 4f1 6in divan bed is five units, a cooker is one unit. The average two/three-bedroom house has around 1,000cuft of furniture.

In addition to assessing the amount of furniture to be moved the estimator has to look for potential difficulties in the move and should ask all the right questions to learn about the customer's wishes and about the delivery address. He also has to sell his company's service.

The RTITB pack covers these aspects of the job and there is an extremely interesting book on salesmanship for estimators. It has all the do's and don'ts about the estimator's visit and the subsequent written estimate.

Armed with this, CM put the removers' estimating techniques to the test. Naturally, we were interested in the prices that would be quoted, but we also wanted to see how they would handle the whole estimating procedure — the initial phoned request, the visit to the house and the subsequent written quote. This involved a mild deception in the furtherance of consumer research; we naturally could not say it was CM wanting the estimates. So, with an assumed name but a real private address, we set out to get estimates for a proposed move from London to Heswall on the Wirral, Merseyside.

The house we used as our guinea pig is a turn-of-the-century terraced property in South West London. It has two bedrooms, two reception rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. There is no garage, it is reasonably lightly furnished and there are no awkward points such as a piano to move or fitted carpets to lift. We kept it simple deliberately; with no intention of accepting any of the quotes we wanted to take up as little of the estimators' time as possible.

We chose Merseyside as our destination area because it involves a 200-mile each-way trip and so added a significant journey element to the castings.

There are no fewer than 20 pages of removal companies in the South West London edition of the Yellow Pages. We phoned six companies and asked them to come to estimate. A seventh company gave us a quote over the phone and for comparison we found out the cost of hiring a 7.5 tonne gvw boxvan and carrying out a d-i-y move.

All seven companies are based or operational within a five-mile radius of the house. Only one of them professed in its advert to be a member of the BAR.

Each of the removers was phoned on the same day at the beginning of February and was told that the envisaged moving day would be in early March.

The same two questions were asked over the phone by all the companies: Where do I live now? to what area am I moving?

ACR of New Malden took these details politely enough but was rather insistant that the estimator could call only on the following evening. When I said that would be inconvenient and suggested alternative days and times, the lady replied: "I'm sorry but it looks as though we can't help you, then." I relented.

Bentalls is a large, decidedly up-market department store in Kingston-upon-Thames and it also has a removal division. A decidedly up-market lady dealt very efficiently and briskly with my inquiry.

Pickfords has a branch just a mile or so from the house and when I phoned I spoke directly to one of the estimators who again sounded businesslike.

Martells is a fairly large Surrey-based remover with three branches in Croydon, Sutton and East-Grinstead. The lady who answered the phone had a superb phone manner; she was both friendly and knowledgeable, thinking to ask me where I had heard of Martells.

A friendly service is something promised in Greyhound's advertisement. The company is in Kingston Vale, London SW15, and I subsequently learned that it incorporates two others — Ace of Surbiton and Seven Days a Week of Molesey — which are advertised separately in Yellow Pages. It was a friendly lady who spoke to me and she too asked me where I had heard about the company.

Normans Removals specifically mentions Wimbledon, Kingston and Chertsey in its advert but the phone number is in Wanstead, East London. The gentleman at Normans explained that I would get a better price if I asked a remover in North West England to do my removal as a northbound backload. He gave me the phone number of a Manchester-based company called Meld rums.

My final call was to a company in Kingston called Rearden-Cord. It does general haulage as well as removal work.

All six companies that agreed to visit the house were able to come to estimate within four working days, which must be considered a good response time. I was also pleasantly surprised and impressed by the way in which five of them handled the inquiry; only ACR seemed just a little too content to pass up the job because we could not immediately agree on a time. And Normans — for whatever reason — preferred to treat the job as a backload for someone else.

"Dor't handicap yourself. Make a point of arriving at the inspection address at the time you agreed with the customer."

That is the advice in the RTITB's salesmanship manual and it was pleasing to find that only one of our removers did not heed it. And the exception, Pickfords' estimator, had a valid reason: there was a heavy snowfall that morning and traffic was chaotic.

First to come was ACR. The estimator asked who would be doing the packing and after some discussion he agreed that he would quote for a self-pack move. If we decided that ACR should do the packing it would cost another £20 or so. Either way, ACR would supply teachests at a cost of £1.50 each which would be deducted from the final bill when we returned them.

"A lot of people can't be bothered unpacking them," he explained. "This way you can keep them but they will cost you E1.50 each."

He checked if we would be taking the fitted carpets (no) and asked what was in the loft and if we had "any pianos" to move.

After a quick tour of the house he asked a few details about the destination. "Where's Heswall?" "How far is that?" "You do realise that it's a twoday job?" He also checked if there would be any problems in delivering to the new address. "Does it have a long drive?"

In all, the man from .ACR was at the house for 10 minutes. He seemed rather hurried and commented that he had done six estimates in the past two hours. Martells was our second remover and its estimator readily agreed to provide two quotes — one self-pack, and one with packing. Martells, he declared, does not use tea-chests any more: "Too many people cut themselves on them or get splinters. We use cardboard cases now." If we opted for self-pack, he suggested that we went down to the supermarket for some boxes.

Working round the house the Martells man "cubed" the furniture as he went, adding the number of cases needed for the loose items. When it came to the wardrobes upstairs he explained that lay-flat cardboard cases would be used for the hanging clothes. The company had experimented with hanging-rail cases, he said, but found that "everything comes off the rails."

He took a note of the exact delivery address but did not ask for any details about access there or parking. He also broached the idea of Martells employing a Liverpool-based company to do the job as a back-load with Martells first doing the packing.

The Martells' estimator spent 20 minutes at the house and told me that the cube to be moved was 780cuft. I was impressed with his friendly and competent manner although he did indulge in "knocking" a well-known competitor in the removals business — something that should never be done, says the RTITB manual.

The estimator from Bentalls was much more formal. Checking if everything was going, he specifically told me that Bentalls would not take down fittings such as lights or curtains. Like the other estimators he asked about the contents of the loft and if we were taking anything from the garden, and he was one of only two to ask if we had a cellar. He also wondered if we had a safe to move!

He made an inventory of the furniture and said he would cube it when he got back to the office. Looking in all the cupboards and wardrobes, he commented that cardboard hanging-rail cases would be used for the hanging clothes. Other loose items would be packed in tea-chests ("we pre