Survey: Cutting Moving Expenses by Reading Reviews

Did you know you can instantly cut your moving expenses only by reading moving reviews? Here is how we got to this conclusion.

By gathering the data that our users have generated over the course of the existence of our website, we have compiled a very interesting survey that will hopefully shed some light on the usefulness of moving review sites and justify the money aspect of the user-generated reviews that populate our site. After a long data compiling and analysis, we’ve determined the approximate amount of money you save when reading our site and making the smart informed choice. But, before we begin, there’s some important caveats.

How it all started

Before we start, we should clarify that we have divided our survey into two main categories, the first being local moves and the second being long-distance moves. We based the survey on the average prices that these two categories offer, and depending on the grade that our users have given the companies we have determined an additional two sub-categories – reviews with a star rating of 1, 2 or 3, and reviews with a rating of 3, 4 or 5. One might ask “How is putting the middle of the scale, reviews with a rating of 3, in both categories, justifiable?”. We figured out that reviews with a rating of 3 were neither good enough, nor bad enough to be in a certain “black & white” pattern, but we didn’t want to exclude them entirely from the query, and that is why they persist in both categories as a regulative, middle ground statistic. Think of it as a balancing constant.

Charts and Graphs

The basic idea behind our survey was to determine the very purpose of our site and turn that purpose into numbers, visible to our audience – moving companies, customers, moving company employees, etc.

It seems logical that a bad company will (usually) cost a person more money than a good one, but contrary to this statement, a load of exceptions appeared during data gathering – it was not uncommon for people to get overcharged and still appear happy about the overall move. Processing such delicate cases was a challenge, but in the end, ratings are subjective according to the personal views of the reviewer, and we wanted to not exclude the subjective element – we preferred it to be the very core of our survey. In the end, what we got was the difference between what our average happy reviewer paid and the sum that our average unsatisfied reviewer had to part with.

The results were outstanding, as you can see from the charts.

What data did we use?

This is the kind of reviews we used:

• Only active reviews – we have an activation system in place to validate the reviews. Every person submitting a review should confirm it by email. Since some of the reviews are not confirmed, we do not display them in the website and we are not using them for this survey.
• Only genuine reviews – we have a filtering system that filters all reviews that we believe are fake, duplicated or not compliant with our terms of service. We do that filtering based on more that 10 factors. We did not include filtered reviews in the survey.
• Excluding reviews with significantly low or significantly high price for the move – we detected some reviews with very low or very high prices. Since we want our data to be more accurate, we decided to exclude reviews that are claimed to cost less than $50 and more than $20 000.
• Reviews within the USA – since we feature companies from around the world, we focused on moves that are performed in US Dollars, because this survey targets the US market.
• The most recent reviews – we wanted our data to be as fresh as possible, so we chose the last 2000 reviews that fit the above criteria to be used for the survey.

We performed the survey on a basis of 2000 reviews, utilizing 1000 queries of both local and long-distance moving reviews to determine the difference in savings in these two separate categories.

The Results

Local Moves – moves with origin and destination within the same state (see the chart above)
Data sample: 1000 reviews
Average price for moves with good reviews: $875
Average price for moves with bad reviews: $1386
Difference: $-511

Interstate Moves – moves with origin and destination in different states (see the chart on the right)
Data sample: 1000 reviews
Average price for moves with good reviews: $2649
Average price for moves with bad reviews: $3190
Difference: $-541

You save money just by reading reviews!

Turns out that a person, or a family, who are about to move and research moving companies online on websites like MyMovingReviews.com can cut their moving expenses significantly by just being informed. And, because we have the data to put the numbers on, we can now give our visitors an approximation on how much money they can instantly save.

If you have read reviews on our site you would have formed a basic opinion about your local companies, and now we can proudly say that those reviews which you have read do provide an idea of how much you will be charged for their services. It turns out that you could potentially save up to 511$ by just staying away from companies with negative reviews! And that is only taking the local moves into account, for long-distance moving the number goes up to 541$ saved! Let’s say, 5-10 minutes of reading reviews on your local companies, can save you up to 541$, how about that?!

What is interesting is that no matter that the prices of the local and the interstate moves are different, the difference between the positive and the negative reviews is very similar – a little above 500 dollars.

Why is that happening

Don’t get me wrong. Hiring a cheap moving company may not result in lower price. Usually what happens is just the opposite.

But why are these results like that? As we all know, usually the higher price brings better quality. The problem is with the popular moving scams in the industry (read more on that here) and the differences between the initial estimate and the final price. The reputable moving companies can estimate your move very accurately. Some of them even provide in-house visual estimates to make sure their quotes are as accurate as possible. This results in happy customers with expected final bill which leads to positive results.

There are also many moving companies that provide lower initial cost estimates just to get the business. What happens in many cases though is that the final price gets significantly higher than the initial estimated one. This is because once the movers load all the stuff in the truck, they are in position to inflate the bill easily because of the way the industry works. Usually it all comes as a surprise to the customer. Here are some more tips on how to choose a mover.

We owe these amazing results to all our visitors submitting moving reviews. For all of you, no matter if you’ve submitted a positive, or a negative review, we would like to say a big “Thank you“! Know that by posting your comments you are helping other people save money and you can be sure that we cherish every single review you write.

We, the team behind MyMovingReviews, can promise you that we will keep improving our platform in order to support the ever increasing number of people moving, so that every person who needs help or advice can find it here, amidst a friendly, beneficial community.

If you are reading this, and you’ve moved recently, please take 5 minutes of your time to review your moving company.