It is fairly expensive....I have to move out a tenant of mine because I'm selling that house..before the lease is up, so....cost of the move for tenant is out of my pocket.
Initial sticker shock of the cost of the move...once I picked myself up off the floor, the guy from the moving company told me what can be done to bring the price down. And when you stop and think about it...what he said made sense.
It's the cost of manpower, time, which is the big part of the equation. If they...the movers, have to take all your goods...pack them in boxes...boxes that they provide and charge for...and carry those boxes out to the truck...you're going to have a high cost. Rooms like kitchens are wicked expensive....think about it.
What can you do? Focus on taking much of that...packing it yourself into boxes...and placing those boxes in a location like your garage so they're easier and quicker for the moving co guys to carry to the truck. Kitchen cupboard items, closets, etc. And big items like artwork on the wall, large LCD/Plasma TVs...if you can..that's a big saver too.
For my house...to pack up the tenant...he priced for 4x people to spend 8 hours packing...plus packing materials. 2nd day was price of loading truck and moving to new location and carrying stuff inside. My wife and I will pre-pack a lot of the stuff, thus taking a huge bite out of that 4x peeps times 8 hours plus lotsa boxes....cutting my bill by approx 30-40%.
Luckily my wife is a real estate agent..so cost of selling my home was nice...did a FSBO..(for sale by owner)...so no sales commish to pay, plus we get money because she gets a cut of the buyers commish. And the house we're purchasing to move into (since we've been renting in the town we live in until I sold my home)....she's my buying agent...so commish from the sale comes right back to us.
And she was able to find our tenant a new apartment...so part of that rental commish comes back.