B.C. Moving Companies Feel the Squeeze As Offices Get Smaller, Go Paperless

Corporate office moves haven't been tendered for that building yet, but Oseen tries to keep ahead of the game.

"Realtors, designers, builders call me on a weekly basis. 'What does it cost to move 50 people with furniture?'" Oseen said. "I'll tell you in five minutes what it'll cost."

Oseen often ballparks budgets for potential clients 12 to 18 months before a move, so companies can do their budgeting. It won't be until three or four months before the move that contracts are signed.

As Vancouver's recent flurry of downtown tower construction nears completion, Oseen is eyeing potential moves into 980 Howe, 1021 West Hastings, 745 Thurlow and 725 Granville among others. He's just moved 250-employee law firm Bull Housser and Tupper into Telus Garden at 575 West Georgia, and 150 people with accounting firm MNP into their new tower at 1021 West Hastings.

Of course, each move out starts a chain reaction of others moving in.

Oseen stumbled into the moving business as a university student when his mother was facilities manager for law firm Fasken Martineau.

"I started off being the guy who'd help pack them, then the moving company would come," said Oseen, 45. "Then I would pack and move them myself, then I'd call on half my soccer team to come in." Now he's up to more than 10 trucks and 50 employees.

Mind you, the moving business has changed a lot since Oseen started DLO Move Support Services in 1997.

"The office move is getting smaller and smaller," said Lorne MacInnes, who bought 99-year-old Ferguson Moving and Storage in 2001 and expanded it to Richmond, Surrey and Langley by franchising to former employees. "Ten or 15 years ago, there would be filing cabinets everywhere."

Clients may be moving to larger spaces, but they are packing more employees and less furniture into the space, Oseen said. Forget the large desktop monitors or heavy oak desks of the past. Modern offices are filled with lightweight open plan tables and laptops. Earlier this summer, DLO moved 267 Hootsuite employees who had lightweight desks, chairs, and one box and monitor per person, in just five hours.

Music stores, book stores and travel agents may have fought their last gasping battles publicly as the personal computer and Internet took them down, but moving companies - like filing cabinet manufacturers and map makers - have largely suffered their losses in silence.

"I have a client who does not have a single filing cabinet," Susan Steeves of SSDG Interiors Inc. said. "Everything is stored in the cloud."

Where 10 years ago, companies would allow 175 to 300 square feet per employee, including common areas. Today, the range has dropped to 125 to 250 square feet and "it is not uncommon for tech and gaming companies to get as low as 100 square feet per person or even below that," Steeves said. At the other extreme, law and engineering firms still have lots of paper, file drawers, libraries and corporate records rooms.

There have been casualties. Williams Moving and Storage, one of B.C.'s largest moving companies with offices in B.C. and Alberta, closed in January.

MacInnes of Ferguson survived tough times by developing a new market - delivering large kitchen cabinet orders to new high-rise condo developments.

"We had one of our best years in 2008 because of the Olympics," said MacInnes who parlayed a one-off temporary storage job into a new division for his company.

He had some extra warehouse space available when his commercial realtor told him a kitchen cabinet company needed some kitchens stored. "I convinced them that their installers are too valuable to be doing the logistics of the movement," he said. "It (the new division) really saved our company from experiencing a lot of the pain."

Ferguson has moved kitchen cabinets into the likes of the Shangri-La, the Olympic Village and the Woodward's tower - some 80 buildings in all. He delivered 900 kitchens to the Olympic Village alone.

"Something around 350 truckloads we took down there and it took us about two years to complete that. It was during construction, so we couldn't deliver the kitchens until the drywall was up so it happens in stages."

"For the Trump Towers, we're doing all the logistics for kitchens going in from Italy. Right now, we're at level 50 and we've got to go up to 71. We've got these great big overseas containers filled with kitchens in our warehouse and every Saturday, we can only deliver one floor at a time."

The kitchen cabinets come from Italy, through the Panama Canal, into the port of Vancouver, after which they are trucked to Ferguson's warehouse where they are unloaded, inventoried and put into storage containers to await final delivery.

The "commercial" kitchen cabinet work has different needs from MacInnes' corporate and residential divisions.

"On the commercial side, we're dealing with boxes and construction sites and steel-toed shoes, hard hats and high visibility vests. Residential requires uniformed movers, "clean cut guys coming into your house and pad wrapping your furniture," MacInnes said.

"Most moving companies really need to start focusing on newer markets rather than the traditional office," he said.

Aaron Hunter is a relative newcomer to the moving business, having bought the assets of Vancouver Office Movers this spring "at 30 per cent of the asking price last summer."

The company is "moderately busy," doing small office moves, Hunter said. The office moving season is busiest between September and January.

Moving is a good cash flow business, said Hunter, previously a van line agent. Rather than waiting 30 or even 90 days for payment, movers are generally paid within a week of a job. Hunter plans to find a niche to reinvent within the old industry and possibly build a franchiseable model. One thought is offering strata managers a service to help them manage elevator use as tenants move in and out. Hunter also owns Calgary Office Movers and residential B.C. Movers.

Hunter believes traditional large moving companies with expertise and bonding are priced out of the mid-market where most of the volume is today. Williams "was a bit of a dinosaur," that was "a little too big and the industry shifts and they can't adjust to it."

"It's not economical any more to have a large office, and that affects movers simply by volume," Hunter said. "What I see in the marketplace in the business is it's definitely shifting toward slimming down."

Lorne Bradley, sales manager with 34-year-old Movex Vancouver Moving and Storage, would seem to agree. "I see a new moving company truck that I've never heard of almost every single day," Bradley said. "Maybe it's low barriers to entry. If you get a truck and a few solid dollies, you're ready to do small moves."

Industry Canada listed more than 300 B.C. moving companies in December 2013. About half the companies had one to four employees and the rest had under 99.

Moving is becoming a more sophisticated skill as more and more company moves involve computers and servers, said MacInnes who predicts industry wages will increase over the next 10 years.

Oseen doesn't hire temporary labour or experienced movers. "We train young students who want to work through university," he said.

"Moving is about more than just trucks and manpower," Oseen's wife Laurie said. DLO will do everything from coordinating new furniture installation to setting up coffee service and a staff communication strategy. They will organize huge pre-move "purging" programs for clients, providing giant tubs to recycle metal, paper, cardboard, electronics and paint.

You can't leave even "one person not working on Monday morning," said Oseen, who doesn't do any residential moving.

Oseen has also made good use of his early experience with law firms which, fortuitously, still have a lot of stuff to move.

All this means Oseen charges a little more, but so far, so good - he says DLO is growing on average 25 per cent a year.