Tom’s Moving and Storage

I am going to start this review with the fact that the company has acknowledged the awful service that they provided us and compensated us for the horror that was this past weekend. So instead of a detailed description of the complete nightmare we experienced, I´m going to give Unilocalers advice for using this company.
1. If you cannot speak and understand uneducated Spanish, do not hire this company. I speak Spanish fluently and had a very hard time understanding and communicating with the movers. My fiancé grew up working in a hardware store in Little Havana and was fine.
2. Do not assume that this company knows what they are doing. You will have a walk through and an estimate, this will make you think that they know what it will take to move you. This is not true, make sure you are involved with the planning and trust the estimate and the crew.
3. If you live in a high rise apartment with strict moving guidelines and time windows, I would not recommend this company. You cannot trust this company to do what needs to be done to make the logistics work with tight timeline and the preparation needed.
4. Supply your own tools. Neither the movers not the packers brought tools to disassemble furniture, despite knowing that would be necessary. If you do not have them yourself, borrow them.
5. When hiring this company, ask for the foreman´s cell phone in case you need to communicate. The central office /​dispatch is not equipped to communicate efficiently with their teams. Also ask for the contact information for the senior mover, Apilene, that does scheduling and the owner, Arcela,… if there is a major problem you will need their help and they do not expect there to be issues so they aren´t tied to their phones. Text them.
6. Confirm the experience of the crew that you are being sent. One of the senior movers assigns a crew of movers to each move they have scheduled, make sure the experience matches what you need. Again, this is a function of timelines, the items you have and if you live in an high-​rise.
7. Prepare everything to make it idiot proof. You may have hired packers in the past and it went smoothly (like me). The prior packers may have asked questions and had experience to know things that should not be packed… aka. tools. These are not those packers. Segregate everything that needs to be available during the move.
8. Supervise everything. This again a function of experience… the team we had did not wrap adequately secure glass. We lost several items in a local move not to the risk of moving, but terrible packing.
9. Be paranoid. Think of anything and everything that can go wrong, and have a back up plan. This again does back to not trusting this company to know what they are doing.
10. If your move did not go well… talk directly to the owner. She and the senior moving coordinator are the only ones that understand customer service, but she is the only one that has decision making authority.
Why did they get 2 stars you ask? This is the 2^nd time we used this company. The first time, the packers and movers were efficient, nice and professional. We even recommend them to friends. They were 4 stars. The company repeatedly said this past weekend that they have never had a move as bad as ours, I would like to believe them.

I had Tom’s move me into my house in South Miami and 14 years later they moved me to Vero Beach. Very easy to work with. I don’t know how they got all my stuff onto one truck and moved into my new house without a scratch but they did. Good rates, good people.

If you care anything about your furniture do NOT use this company! Very unprofessional! They drag finished wood pieces along the floor instead of picking them up properly. They lay finished wood pieces on their sides in their rough, splintered wood-​floored van. Deep scratches, gashes, and chipped wood is the result!
I used them five years ago to move a bunch of stuff to storage. Yesterday, I went to retrieve some of the stuff and I witnessed how much damage was done to pieces five years ago that I hadn’t realized! Five years ago I noticed the damage to the top of my heirloom, antique table, and they sent someone out to «fix» it – take it away for two months and sand it down (it doesn’t look nearly as pretty as it used to.) But, yesterday I noticed a chair they had ruined, and much scratching to a king sized head and foot board.
Yesterday, the three movers I had, scratched up my entertainment center. I mean deep, unfixable gashes. I had to stay on top of them the entire move. Begging them to not drag pieces along the floor and to put a blanket under the pieces in the van!
They were so slow — I only had a few pieces to move and they took 5 hours plus an hour built in driving time. I wouldn’t even care so much about the $ 500 + dollars they wanted to charge me from moving three chairs over to storage and bringing over one chair and entertainment center if they hadn’t ruined it!!!
Seriously. I will NEVER use Toms again! I will go with a reputable National company.

One word: Phenomenal!
A friend recommended I contact this company and they were able to squeeze me in a week before my move.
They had a man come out to my house to estimate how long the move would take and he gave me two payment options: He estimated the move would take 6 hours, so I could pay a flat fee for 6 hours up front or just pay per hour. I chose the flat fee.
The day of move had a slogan: «What could go wrong, will go wrong.»
We hit so many snags during our move that I thought the guys were going to throw their hands in the air and say «Forget this!» The building I was moving from wouldn’t let the truck in, then the building I was moving to didn’t assign us an elevator so we had to use a tiny and slow one and worst of all, the new building didn’t want the truck inside the property so the poor guys had to haul our furniture across the street.
Needless to say, the move took over 8 hours. But the guys never complained — they were constantly cracking jokes.
They were very careful with our furniture. They even saw that I was short a few boxes and provided me with some extras that they had in their truck.
I’m more than satisfied with their work and recommend them to everyone.