5 Jun 2015 · MoveAdvisor
1.0 out of 51.0
We hired ProAce to move from a townhouse to a house 12 miles away. They gave the job to subcontractors who are full-time academics and do moving on the side to make extra cash. The problem was, they were bad at moving. Not only was it physically difficult for them to move heavy items, they also didn't know much about moving in general. The way they packed up the contents of our home was amateurish. Soft, non-breakable items – such as a foam mattress – were wrapped in six layers of bubble wrap and duct tape. They were also extremely slow. They had budgeted one day for packing and one day for moving. At the end of the first day they had only packed up half of our things. At one point it started raining, and instead of continuing to work, they just hung around the garage waiting for the rain to end. In addition, their truck was really small, meaning they needed to make 3 trips to empty a townhouse instead of being able to do it in one. Because this obviously took more time, we ended up paying the price. Also, although the trip between the two houses took us 30 minutes, somehow each trip took them 70 minutes. In the end, the entire move took 3 full days. By the evening of the 3rd day, we were so desperate to have them complete the job that we had them drop items in the garage for us to move inside and assemble ourselves – which meant WE did a large chunk of the work we were paying them for. We later discovered that many of the boxes had funny sayings scrawled on them. It was offensive to learn that they had wasted our time amusing themselves. Further, they were adamant that they could not fit our treadmill down our basement stairs. The very next morning, we did it ourselves. They did unnecessary things such as dismantling furniture that could have been moved whole. They removed the banister at our townhouse in order to get the bedroom furniture downstairs (even though the original movers who moved the furniture UPSTAIRS managed to do it just fine with the banister in place) and created a gaping hole that we then had to spend time and money repairing. There’s more. They left a leg of our patio table in their truck, rendering the table useless, and didn’t return it until a week later. They broke our TV stand (but to their credit, they did order a new one.) They lost the railing of a dresser drawer, rendering the entire dresser useless. When told about this, the owner told us that “replacement parts are probably available online.” Why is that our responsibility? When the move was finally over at 2 AM on Day 3, they forgot to return our house key and had to be texted to return in the middle of the night. Later, we found out they had left several items in our townhouse. At the end of it all, the charge was 300% of the original estimate. That meant that a 12-mile move cost us more than our last INTERSTATE move, with the same amount of belongings. When we questioned them, we got nothing but blame and excuses. Excuse #1: It was apparently our fault for underestimating how much we owned. (This despite the fact that we filled out a detailed online survey of our belongings. If 5 pages of questions could result in an estimate that was so drastically off-target, there is something wrong with the survey. Additionally, we, unlike many other people, actually know how much our belongings weigh because our last move was a military move, which requires having your moving truck weighed at a station.) Excuse #2: It was apparently our fault because we owned a lot of things. This is ridiculous. The CEO, Dan, never set foot in our house, and just believed everything the subcontractors were telling him. They TOLD him we had a lot of stuff in order to excuse their slow work, but it wasn’t true. Excuse #3: It was apparently our fault because our belongings were really heavy. That is absurd. We own exactly one bedroom set. The rest of our furniture is cheap and limited. Excuse #4: They charge more because they’re really careful. Really? Because they damaged more items than our last, cheaper, interstate movers did. Dan complained that despite our huge bill, he made almost no money. First of all, that’s not our problem. Secondly, if he's unhappy AND we're unhappy, something's seriously wrong with his business plan. In addition, although we spent $650 on boxes prior to the move at their request, we were charged an additional $500 for moving supplies. The reams of bubble wrap the movers wasted on toilet paper rolls got charged to us. In all, we were left infuriated at our treatment by this company and the subcontractors they used. To us, it feels like they committed fraud – they deliberately wasted time and material to drive up our cost, and they didn’t care at all about making the customer happy. This is money we don’t have and food out of our children’s mouths. We wonder if they’re writing fake positive online reviews about themselves. We have no choice but to make sure we spread the word far and wide to never, ever use ProAce Movers. .
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