Office Moving and Relocation

It’s your office moving day, and the last thing on your mind is what your landlord intends to do with your unit after you leave. They may choose to decommission the building or lease it to a new tenant. Your landlord’s needs affect your move. Is your office moving and relocation company prepared or equipped to help you meet those needs for any potential situation?

Why is understanding your landlord’s intentions important?

Since a fixture is considered part of the real estate, a fixture will remain throughout the life of the office building until it is sold, decommissioned, or moved. You’ll want to be sure to take all your property, but should you forget to remove a personal item, it legally becomes part of the real estate after a period of time. In effect, it becomes your landlord’s property. If your current office moving and relocation company up for decommissioning, then likely any trade fixtures or business items that were left behind will be destroyed along with the rest of the building.

According to FEMA, what this means for your business moving needs depends on three specific definitions of terms as they relate to building decommissioning and corporate relocation:

Decommissioning involves the cessation of building or facility function, followed by the the controlled process of safely retiring the structure from service.

Structural Moving requires lifting a home or property from its foundation, placing it on a heavy duty flatbed trailer, hauling it to a new site, and installing it onto new foundations.

Office Moving, sometimes called office relocation, involves the moving of personal property from one office location to another.
Note: there is no decommissioning or structural relocation involved with Corovan’s business moving services.

Regardless of whether you’re moving an entire structure, decommissioning your office building, or simply moving your operations to another facility, for the duration of the move you will need temporary office space and a place to store your office furniture, as well as other business assets.

Four Factors to Consider when starting an Office Moving and Relocation project

When you’re making preparations for an office moving relocation project, there are many factors to consider. With so many competing needs, interested parties, and assets at stake, it can be almost too easy to overlook something critical. That’s where Corovan comes in. We’ve developed the processes, the infrastructure, and the training, over more than seventy years in business, to ensure that even the most intricate business moves go off without a hitch.

Today, we wanted to pass on some of that wisdom, with a few jumping-off points. Are you getting ready to move your business, and trying to balance your own needs with your building manager’s requirements, all without sacrificing productivity? We’re here to help. These basic questions are a great way to organize your thinking to get your next corporate move prepared, planned, and implemented.

How many offices do you have?

Let’s start with something basic. How many offices do you need to move? What’s the total scale? It’s often better to very slightly overestimate, to be sure of success. Let’s presume that you’re moving from several floors of a building, maybe 13,000 square feet. That’s about 50 cubicles, offices, and workstations. Each office space comes with infrastructure, power connections and cables, and a veritable maze of network access that is difficult and time-consuming to disassemble.

As part of the Corovan audit process, we take stock of the precise layout, organization, and complexities of your various office spaces. We’re ready to bring even a single piece of equipment to just the right place, making a map of where it came from and where it’s going before the move starts, which keeps our efficiency up, and your costs down. The last thing you need is a lost router, delivered in a box to Unit 420 when your primary network is operating out of Unit 416.

How many employees do you have?

Each employee has his or her own needs, preferences, layouts, and network settings, and each of those variables is integral to a successful office move. It goes almost without saying the more employees you have, the more complex your move will be. And the higher the stakes. The more people who are moving, the more productivity could potentially be lost. It’s important to consult with experts who can help you optimize the moving process to reduce loss of productivity.

What does your inventory look like?

This is another often overlooked factor. Many people make the mistake of thinking that their square footage, or total volume, is the most important element of their office move. That simply isn’t the case. Your inventory can be charted by volume or charted by real value, or it might be charted by practical value. That blue ethernet cord might be carrying your whole operation.

Any question of inventory depends on practical usage, and that’s the kind of detail that our audit will explore and catch. After seven decades, we have an eye for the little details that many movers miss.

Still, when we take your full inventory, it’s our job to explore it from every possible angle. Sometimes that means tracing cables, and sometimes that means taking note of how someone’s desk happens to face a window, and what that boost does for his productivity.

Put simply, your inventory extends beyond the things you want to move. The layout and orientation and purpose of your assets make an important difference.

How much time pressure are you facing?

When is your deadline for moving your offices or production facility? Are weather conditions likely to be difficult? Are you moving your whole business at once, or are you planning to relocate your operations in stages? It’s important to choose a relocation expert that can take timing and conditions into consideration.

If you do need to stagger your move, you’ll also need to consider storage and temporary accommodations to ensure that you’re not missing critical working hours.

It’s important to have an understanding about how much time will be required by your move We take the time to understand the implications of your situation and you needs, and make sure to communicate with you so that there are no surprises.

The intricacies of an office move include how many offices or how much space is involved, the amount of employees involved, the kinds of inventory you have, and the time pressure and conditions under which the move is to take place. These are the problems our office moving experts solve every day.

Here’s a quick checklist to further refine your thinking:

The Corovan Audit

One of the things that sets Corovan apart is our comprehensive audit. We work with move managers to ensure that every detail is considered so that an action-plan that puts your business’s productivity front and center.