A quote or hourly rates: which way suits your move?

Almost everyone asks the same question in the first phone call: what will it cost? The honest answer is that it depends on which of two kinds of job you are describing, and the way we price them at Moonies Movers reflects that. A quote and an hourly rate are not a choice between a cheap deal and an expensive one — they are two different ways of buying the same work.

What a quote is actually for

A quote puts a fixed price on a defined piece of work. That only works if the work is defined, which usually means three things are known: roughly what is going, roughly how much of it there is, and how far it is going. A three-bedroom house moving across Christchurch is the easy case. So is a defined list of furniture from a specific address to a specific address.

What you get is a number you can plan around, and a crew and a truck committed to doing the job for that number. What it depends on is an honest description when you ring. If the job grows by a garage full on the day, that is a conversation, not a surprise.

What hourly rates are actually for

Hourly pricing pays for the work as it is done. It suits jobs whose size is not settled when you make the call — and with removals, quite a lot of them are like that. A garage that keeps producing furniture once you start. A house being sorted as it is packed. A single wardrobe that has to come apart in a narrow hallway and then be rebuilt. A retirement village room that turns out to be three rooms and a hallway of cupboards.

The trade-off is real and it is worth being straight about it: you give up the certainty of a fixed number. In exchange, you are not paying for a load that never got loaded, and there is no argument at the end about a job that took two hours longer than the estimate.

How to decide in thirty seconds

• Ask for a quote if you know what is going and where it is going — a whole house, a defined furniture list, a two-address move.
• Ask for hourly rates if the volume is a guess, the property is full of surprises, or the job may change once the loading starts.
• Ask about both if you are genuinely undecided. A good mover will tell you which one they would pick, and why.

Questions worth asking on the call

Whatever you choose, four questions get you most of the way to a confident decision. What is included in this number — is packing, unpacking or dismantling extra? What happens if the job turns out to be bigger on the day, and how is that handled? What happens to my things if something is damaged in transit? And who exactly will be turning up — the person quoting, or someone else?

The last one matters more than most people think. Moonies Movers is a family business, led by Mike Moon, who has over 38 years in the furniture and home removal industry, and the team is highly trained by him. The person who prices the job is the person who runs it, which is not true of every removal company in Christchurch.

The part nobody puts in the advert

Pricing is the easy half of this decision. The half that actually decides how the day feels is whether the crew knows how to load a truck — whether the load is built so nothing moves, so nothing gets unpacked to reach something else, and so the first thing off the truck is the thing you need first. You cannot see that in a quote, and it is worth asking about anyway.

There is also the question of whether the mover will tell you no. A job outside their area, a house that needs a different kind of crew, a piece of furniture that should not be moved at all — a company that says no on the phone is a company that will turn up when it says yes.

Making the call

Ring Mike on 027 474 8717 and describe the job. He will give you a free, no-obligation quote, and you can ask for hourly rates instead if the job sounds like it will move. Quotes cost nothing and commit you to nothing, so the cost of asking is a couple of minutes. The quotes and hourly rates service page covers the options in more detail, and we work across Christchurch, the surrounding areas and North Canterbury.

One last note on hours: none are published. Every job is arranged by calling, because the person who answers is the person who will be in your hallway on moving day.