LONG distance MOVES
OVERVIEW OF MAIN long distance OPTIONS
U-BOX (8' long x 4.5' wide x 7' high).
We load. They ship to your destination.
Someone else unloads. It's tiny.
PODS (8', 12' or 16' long)
We load, they ship to your destination.
They can store until you want delivery. You have someone else local unload.
Expensive, limited service areas.
U-PACK TRAILER (28'x 8' wide x 9' high)
We load. They ship to your destination. You have someone else local unload. You pay for only the portion used.
U-PACK RELOCUBE (6'3" x 7' x 8'4"). We load. They ship to your destination. They can store until you want delivery.
You have someone else local unload.
U-HAUL 15', 20' or 26'. You rent & drive. We load and/or unload. Often the cheapest way. Can add an 8' or 12' trailer, or tow your car. Has many more locations and good moving blankets to rent cheap. Is easier to drive and load.
PENSKE 22' & 26'. You rent & drive, we load and/or unload. Best maintained trucks. Has worthless moving blankets. A 26' Penske has 100 cbft more space than a 26' U-Haul. Usually more $.
PARK & PACK
A new competitor to PODS & RELOCUBE, basically similar service, but different pricing and location options.
BIG NAME MOVERS
Worst history of problems, sometimes OK sometimes not, usually most expensive. Your stuff is in the hands of many other individual people for weeks. With most companies, "fully insured" means you get 80 cents per pound of your broken or missing item. But you only need to deal with one company to handle it all.
FREE SERVICE OF WARNING YOU OF BAD LOADS
If you are moving to the Eugene/Springfield area, from some other town, where some other NON-AGMC moving company is loading your furniture, we here at AGMC can offer you the free service of evaluating the quality of the work being done by that other company, early in their loading process, and warn you of any developing problems while there's still time for you to do something to prevent and fix the problem; i.e. "Hey, don't put my lamp under that sofa".
Just take a few pictures of your loading company's developing load up in your truck or container, and immediately text those pictures to our phone number (541 636-7386), and we will (for free) immediately call you (or text you) back and tell you if we see any problems with the load. If you do this early enough in the loading job there will still be time for you to do something about a developing problem. If you wait until we open your truck or container door at the unload/delivery-site and see a mess of needless damage, it's too late to prevent the damage, and it's a big hassle to try to seek remedy at that point. We suggest you prevent the problem when it's still easy to fix.
MOVING BLANKETS
Out of all these options, only the U-Box and FULL SERVICE moving companies automatically supply the needed moving blankets. With All the other options, you'd need to either buy or rent your needed moving blankets. If you're getting a U-Haul truck you can rent them from U-Haul for $10 per dozen. You can do the same for Penske except Penske blankets are so thin you can see through them, and are not good protection. You can buy moving blankets from U-Haul, Harbor Freight, Walmart, Home Depot type stores, or online from many providers. You can also get them used far cheaper on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. You can easily sell these again when you're done.
Ideally, you're going to want to get one moving blanket for every scratchable item that's about the size of a dining chair or smaller, like a night-stand, coffee table, or unboxed pole lamp. If it's bigger than a dining chair, like a dresser, you want two per that kind of item. Blankets can also be used for unboxed (cheaper) wall pictures. Each sofa could use four blankets. More blankets beyond this count can be used to do an even better job, if you have them. The moving blankets should be 72"x80", not the "half size" kind. You need to check. You can always sell these blankets when you're done.
PACKING
You are definitely saving significant money if you do your own packing of things into boxes. You can find very helpful tips on how to do your own packing on our PACK YOURSELF page on this website. But if you don't want to do your own packing, it's certainly an option to have us (or some local mover) do it. For in-town jobs, our packers are $50/hr plus reimbursement at cost for packing supplies. Just call us at . . .
MORE DETAILS ON EACH OPTION
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U-PACK TRAILER
A good option is to use a "U-Pack trailer", which is where you hire the U-Pack company to park a very large (extra tall, 28' long) "ABF" trailer in front of your house. A professional crew (that you hire separately, like us) loads the U-Pack trailer. You can call them when you're done loading and are ready to have them pick up your trailer. You can have the trailer be at your house for up to three days before they need to pick it up. They then drive the trailer to your destination across the country, where you would hire a separate local moving company to unload it.
This is the basic way it's supposed to look inside when it's being loaded, tight and stacked all the way to the ceiling. You pay for only the portion of the truck you use, and your loaders would put a bulk-head up across the truck to partition off the part of the truck with your property in it. To utilize your space, things need to be stacked up to the ceiling nine feet up, so you need to be using solid, preferably double walled, or good condition boxes. You also need to get your own moving blankets. Buying them used is usually best. But you can then sell them when you're done moving.
Reminder to be aware that as simple as this looks to load, many apparent legitimate moving companies use crews that are not trained, and don't care what happens, and so about half of the unloads we do coming from out of state are loaded poorly, and about 20% of our unloads are not only HORRIBLE, they don't even use half the height of the truck, costing you THOUSANDS of dollars in wasted truck space more than what was needed. The pictures of the mess you see here are not of a partially unloaded U-Pack trailer, they are pictures of the way this trailer was loaded before anything was removed.
A suggested solution to this is to text to AGMC pictures of your U-Pack trailer being loaded by your other moving company, taken and texted to AGMC early in the load, right when they first finish their first load-wall. This way AGMC can call you right away and let you know if there is a problem with the load and what that problem is, while there's still time for you to do something to correct the problems.
U-HAUL TRUCK
U-HAUL
Renting and driving your own U-Haul truck is often the cheapest way to move across country, but sometimes it's not the cheapest way, especially if the truck rental rates have swung on the far high side. U-Haul and Penske determines their one-way truck rental prices based on their current inventory of trucks in your stated load and unload locations, and depending on the volume of moves going on for them. It's a separate fleet of trucks used only for one-way rentals, owed by their corporation (not by the local U-Haul dealers) so the volume of trucks you see at the local dealerships has nothing to do with the available inventory of one-way rental trucks. This is why the price of one way rentals can swing wildly at different times, being triple the price at one time compared to the same rental (& same locations) at a different time. This is why using U-Haul or Penske for a long distance move is sometimes not the cheapest way by the time you calculate in gas, hotel stays, food, and all the many hours of driving.
When you rent a one way truck, you'd also need to rent enough moving blankets along with the truck rental. U-Haul rents these for $10 per dozen blankets. U-Haul does have the relatively better moving blankets compared to the other rental companies. If the largest U-Haul truck (a 26') is not quite enough hauling capacity for your needs, you can add up to a 12' enclosed trailer to be towed by your U-Haul truck. Or, if you have a car you need to bring along with you, you can add a car tow dolly to tow your car. It's a worthy option to have a professional crew only load your U-Haul truck, and then you (or a single professional driver) drive the U-Haul truck across country, and have a separate crew do the unload. That way, you're only paying the moving crews by the hour for a few hours.
When U-Haul states their truck lengths they are measuring the length of the top of their truck boxes, which includes the "mom's attic" cubby hole over the cab. The truck bed floor length of what U-Haul calls a "26' truck" is near 23' long, so If you deduct the cubic footage you're not getting out to the 26' measurement, that makes a 26' U-Haul have about 80 cubic feet of space less than a 26' Penske truck. That cubby hole is, however, a useful extra protected area.
U-Haul will also take a one-way rental reservations without knowing for sure if they are going to have a truck available in your area to rent on your "reserved" day. For one-way U-Haul rentals, on the day before your move, the U-Haul "scheduling" department determines what one-way trucks are available, and gives the first available trucks to the people that made their reservations longer ago. If they're short on trucks, they send the more newly reserved people to farther away U-Haul facility locations, sometimes even to other towns to pick up their truck. That's why U-Haul doesn't guarantee any particular pick up location for one-way reservations. For this reason, if you're going to rent a one-way U-Haul, do so well in advance (preferably at least a month in advance) and put yourself higher on their list. It's easy to cancel the reservation later if you change your mind.
PODS
"PODS" stands for "Portable On Demand Storage". If you need to move out of one place, and store your property for a while before moving in somewhere else, then PODS containers provide this storage and delayed delivery service. If you give yourself this delay by moving into a storage unit first, you need to hire a moving company to load you up, move you into storage, reload you up again from storage, move you, and re-unload you into your end destination. That's moving twice. With PODS it's one load and one unload into your destination. There's also no gas or driver expenses, although there are storage and delivery expenses. But you are paying more per square foot of PODS than you'd pay for the other methods, so PODS is usually only a good deal if you actually need this delayed delivery aspect.
PODS (8' or 12' or 16')
For example, a recent customer paid $4,176 for one 16' PODS delivered to New York state. A drawback with PODS (besides the extra high expense) is that their service areas are limited, and they only pick up and drop off in certain areas, maybe not where you need your service. You need to check. For example, they don't pick up or drop off in Bend Oregon. There are also some rare times when PODS are handled more roughly than other methods. For example, at the PODS warehouse I have seen them drop a PODS container several feet, smacking down hard. You also need to arrange getting your own moving blankets if you use PODS.
Further, for you to figure out how big of a PODS you need, or how many of them you need, it can be of help to use a computerized program that calculates this for you, by you just plugging in the items you're going to have moved. Below is a link to the PODS calculator.
link to PODS Volume Calculator
U-BOX
U-Boxes each come with a couple dozen moving blankets. They're fine for a very small amount of stuff, but as you can see in the picture to the left, it barely fits one big sofa, and it can't even sit down or stand on end in a way that is good to fit in other items. It's only about four and a half feet wide. The tiny size loses space utilization efficiency per cubic foot.
It is way cheaper than PODS or a RELOCUBE, but if you're thinking of getting multiple of these to add up to your needed higher volume capacity (for a big house), keep in mind that the lesser space efficiency will require more of these U-Boxes than the cubic feet alone would make you think. It's common for customers to later need to add more U-Boxes than they originally ordered. But for small amounts of stuff, like a common one bedroom apartment (with a shorter sofa), this can be a good option.
FULL SERVICE BIG NAME MOVING COMPANYS
Then, of course, there's the option of a full service moving company that loads you up, drives your property across country, and has their crew unload you. This last option is usually the most expensive and riskiest way to do it, with the most resulting problems on average. Beware of companies that claim to be "fully insured" which can legally translate from the fine print of their contract to mean that they can legally pay you only 80 or even 60 cents per pound of the item they lose or damage, which is only an insult on a 65" TV that weighs 40 lbs so they pay you only $32 for breaking it. Study the review history of any company you are considering, and I recommend not going with any company that has not been around for at least a few years. It's also common for the sales people of moving companies to SAY all kinds of stuff on the phone to make the sale, and they might even believe what they are saying (being sheltered from the end results of their company's jobs), but if you don't see it in writing from them (or guaranteed on their website) don't count on what they're saying.
BUDGET TRUCKS, HOME DEPOT TRUCKS, ENTERPRISE, RYDER.
BUDGET
For one way truck rentals, Budget trucks are usually cheaper than U-Haul or Penske, sometimes a thousand dollars cheaper. But there's a number of reasons why. Problems problems problems. Budget trucks are very poorly maintained and you have a far greater chance of mechanical problems and break-downs. They have bad roadside assistance, which you are ten times more likely to need than with a U-Haul or Penske. They often have very dirty trucks. They mess up their reservations, have a history of charging you the wrong amount, and they have bad customer service that may or may not fix your problems. That's why Budget is not listed as one of the main options, even though the advertised price is likely to be cheaper. One customer of theirs said their reservation cost was supposed to be $1,179, and they were actually charged $1,430. But another customer I recently talked to said their Budget truck cost them $1,000 less than U-Haul quoted them. So.... maybe it's worth it to you.
HOME DEPOT
Home depot trucks only come up to 12' for the box length, for one way rentals. They rent up to 25' trucks but those are Penske trucks, which are good, but if you're going to rent a Penske truck, rent it from Penske, not Home Depot, because Penske's business is set up for truck rentals and it will be less hassle and more specialized customer service, which is very good customer service (for Penske).
ENTERPRISE & RYDER TRUCKS
Enterprise & Ryder trucks do not rent one-way long distance trucks, only local, and so that's why they aren't listed in our "main methods" Long Distance section.
BIDS AND ESTIMATES VS HOURLY RATES+EXPENSES (FOR A MOVING COMPANY)
Oregon law says the end resulting price of an estimate may not be over by more than ten percent above the given price estimate figure, unless the volume or description of the job changes. 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. This is why AGMC will not give a bid or estimate without actually seeing what you've got.
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 presentation you gave them, beware, 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.
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.
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. Also, if you're getting an estimate or bid price (instead of hiring hourly), then 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 near your move date or on the day of your move to see the paperwork.
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 or three months is better (especially in the summer) or else the better moving companies might be already booked up and not available on the dates 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 estimators guess of what the real world hourly rates would add up to.
In addition to this, you're paying for an estimator to come out and spend the time to inspect and make the bid, either paying by a direct cost for that visit, or by that cost being added into the bid or estimate.
This is why paying hourly rates should normally 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 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.
MORE U-HAUL tips
IF YOU'RE GOING TO DRIVE YOURSELF IN A U-HAUL TRUCK
If you don't return the U-Haul truck with the same amount of gas that the truck started with, U-Haul charges not only the price of the missing gas, but a lot extra. So do bring the gas back up to the original level shown on your U-Haul contract. If you return the truck late in the evening, near closing, or after hours by dropping the keys in the Night Drop Box, you have another issue to deal with. On a nightly basis, thieves often steal gas out of some of the U-Haul trucks at night. Even if you did bring the gas back up to where it should be, the only way to protect against U-Haul charging you for missing (stolen) gas, is for you to take a good picture showing the truck's ending odometer reading and gas level of the truck upon the truck return. This way you can prove to U-Haul that the gas gauge was where it was supposed to be upon the truck return, even if there is gas stolen from the truck at night, before the truck is checked back in the next morning. If you're doing a night-drop, after hours, then if your truck does not come with a lock on the back door, you should lock your rented blankets and hand-truck in the cab of the truck, not in the unlocked back of the truck, because people often steal those, and U-Haul will try to charge you for those missing items. After the rental truck return, U-Haul will email you your final rental cost charges. Check it for mistakes and problems, because problems occur more often that you might guess.
THE U-HAUL TRUCK RENTAL RESERVATION
For out-of-town one-way rental reservations, always ask for "extra miles". They are instructed to be able to give at least some to you by you just asking, and those miles just might come in handy, especially if they're free.
For in-town U-Haul rentals, the U-Haul rep (or website app) tells you that most people only need the truck for a certain number of hours, and asks you if you will have the truck back by that specified time (like in four hours). This is a trick question, because if you tell them "yes" or "ok", that commits you to need to have the truck back by that specified time with the consequence of you being charged extra if you are at all late. If you instead answer that you want the "one day" "or 24 hour" rental, it's exactly the same price without the possibility of being charged extra (within the 24 hour period). Just say "I'll take my 24 hours".
If you are having someone else pick up the truck for you, it's easiest to choose the option called "counter pick up", which is U-Haul terminology meaning that the person picking up the truck will remain unspecified for now, but who will provide all driver information (such as name, DL # & birth date & such) when that person is at the counter picking up the truck. This saves you a good bit of time and effort on the phone or online.
It is recommended that you get U-Haul's "Safe-move Insurance" for in-town rentals, or the "Safe-move Plus insurance" for one way long-distance rentals. When you make a reservation time to pick up a U-Haul, you and everyone else renting from U-Haul all pick a time that is either on the hour or on the half hour. If you show up ten or fifteen minutes before your scheduled pick up time you can usually miss most of collected line of people who show up on the hour or half hour. Be aware that you can return the truck after hours, but if you do so they charge you an extra $20. The three full-time U-Hauls in Eugene (Franklin Blvd, W. 7th, & Santa Clara U-Hauls) all open at 7am and close at 7pm, on all days except Sundays when they open at 9am. For after-hours truck returns, be sure you take a picture of the odometer and gas gage to prove your gas level upon return because people regularly steal gas from the trucks at night.
If you are picking up your own truck, while you are there at U-Haul facility, check the free cardboard box for free used boxes, and get any supplies you might need such as moving blankets, a hand-truck, mattress bags, ratchet straps and tape for securing the moving blankets. When you check out your truck, actually look to see that the gas gauge matches the claimed level of gas on the contract, because they are semi-regularly off by a bit, and right then is the time have them correct the contractual gas level. The rental truck is usually in the "tow-haul" mode by default when you pick it up, so when you start driving the U-Haul with no cargo, hit the tow-haul button to take it out of the tow-haul mode until after you have your truck loaded, and this will save you on gas and unnecessary revving of the engine.
REMINDER TO CHECK OUT OUR PACKING TIPS PAGE, EITHER TO SEE HELPFUL TIPS FOR YOU TO PACK YOURSELF, OR TO SEE THE KIND OF WORK OUR PACKERS DO.