How to choose a moving company in Des Moines
Most people hire a mover roughly once every seven years, which means almost nobody is good at it. You get three quotes, they arrive in three different formats, one is noticeably cheaper, and there is no obvious way to tell whether that is efficiency or a warning.
There is a way, and it does not require knowing anything about the moving industry. It requires knowing which four or five things can be independently verified, and then actually verifying them. What follows is that list, in the order worth doing it.
Start with whether they are a mover at all
The first fork is not price. It is whether the company you are talking to owns trucks and employs the people who will carry your sofa, or whether it is a broker that will sell your job on to somebody you have never spoken to.
Brokers are legal and some are fine. The problem is that the company that quoted you is not the company that shows up, so every promise made on the call was made by someone with no ability to keep it. Ask directly: will your own employees and your own truck be doing this move, or are you subcontracting it? A straight answer either way tells you more than the quote does.
The second question is where they are. A real local mover has an address in the metro that resolves to a yard or a warehouse rather than a mailbox. Type it into a map and look at it.
Check the operating authority yourself
Every interstate mover has a USDOT number and most have an MC number. Both are public. The federal SAFER Company Snapshot at safer.fmcsa.dot.gov takes a USDOT number, an MC number or a company name, needs no login, and returns the legal name, the address on file, the fleet size and whether the authority is active or out of service.
Iowa adds a layer that most states do not, and it is worth understanding because it changes what you should expect. Intrastate for-hire carriers are regulated under Iowa Code chapter 325A. A household goods mover cannot move personal effects between two points inside Iowa until its tariff of rates and charges has been filed, posted and approved by the Iowa DOT, and once approved it may not charge more or less than that tariff. Changing it takes thirty days' notice.
That is why a serious Iowa mover talks about an estimate built on your job rather than a rate card on a website, and it is why you can ask any mover in the state to tell you their permit status. The Iowa DOT Office of Motor Carrier Services will confirm it: 515-237-3268, or omcs@iowadot.us.
Read the estimate, not the number on it
Two quotes are only comparable if they describe the same job. Most of the time they do not, and the difference is buried in what each one assumes.
Look for the basis first. Local moves in the metro are usually hourly with the rate set by crew size, so an hourly quote with no estimated hours attached is not a quote, it is a rate. Then look for what is included, because packing materials, disassembly, stair or long-carry handling and travel time are the four line items that most often appear on one estimate and not another.
- Whether the figure is binding, not to exceed, or an hourly estimate
- How many movers it assumes, and for how many hours
- Whether travel time to and from the yard is billed
- What packing materials cost and whether they are included
- How stairs, elevators and long carries are handled
- What happens if the job runs over the estimate
- The cancellation and rescheduling terms
Test them on the hard part of your move
Every move has one thing that will go wrong. A basement sofa that came in before the wall went up. A third-floor walk-up with a turn on the landing. A closing that has already moved once. A gun safe.
Describe that thing on the call and listen to what comes back. A company that has done it before will ask you a question you were not expecting: how wide is the stairwell at the turn, is the safe empty, what floor is the elevator on and does the building require it to be booked. A company that says it will be fine has told you nothing.
This is also the fastest way to find out whether the person quoting has looked at your job or has looked at a form. The forms all ask about bedrooms. Nobody's move goes badly because of the number of bedrooms.
What reviews are good for, and what they are not
Star ratings across a whole company tell you very little. The useful part of a review is the specific: which crew, what went wrong, what the company did about it. A run of reviews describing the same failure is a signal. A five-star average built from a hundred one-line reviews is not.
Weight the recent ones heavily. Moving companies change hands, lose crews and add trucks, and a rating from three years ago is describing a different business. Sort by date rather than by relevance and read the last few months.