Movers’ Customer Satisfaction Gains as Housing Market Begins to Stabilize
This story appears in the Aug. 31 print edition of Transport Topics.
Customer satisfaction with full-service moving companies is on the rise, according to the results of a J.D. Power and Associates survey published earlier this month.
“Overall satisfaction with moving companies averages 804 on a 1,000-point scale in 2009 — up 16 points from 2008,” J.D. Power, Westlake, Calif., said in a statement announcing the results.
In addition, fewer consumers of full-service moving reported lost or damaged items.
One-third of 2009 survey respondents reported lost or damaged items, compared with about one-half of 2008 respondents, according to J.D. Power, which is owned by publishing company McGraw-Hill Cos.
The survey was based on responses from about 1,500 customers who used a full-service moving company some time in the past year. J.D. Power conducted its survey in the second quarter.
Mayflower Transit, Fenton, Mo., garnered the highest praise from customers and received a score of 831 out of a possible 1,000. Allied Van Lines, Westmont, Ill., was next with a score of 812, J.D. Power said.
Allied is owned by Sirva Inc., and Mayflower is owned by UniGroup Inc. The parent companies rank No. 12 and No. 17, respectively, on the Transport Topics 100 list of the largest U.S. and Canadian for-hire carriers.
The results of the J.D. Power study come at a time when the moving industry, like the rest of the freight transportation industry, is still being squeezed hard by the recession.
The troubled housing industry, which is recovering from the real-estate crash that sparked the recession, has cooled demand for relocation services to and from states that were churning with activity during the boom, according to the American Moving and Storage Association, an Alexandria, Va., trade group for the moving industry.
In one-time real-estate boom states Arizona, Florida and Nevada, for example, “an increase in mortgage foreclosures and frozen lines of credit are keeping people from buying or selling a home and moving,” according to an AMSA report.
The most recent AMSA data available reflects market conditions from the first quarter of this year.
More recently, federal data have hinted at signs of recovery in the housing market.
On Aug. 26, the Department of Commerce reported that new home sales in July rose 9.6% sequentially to an annual rate of 433,000 units. That still is 13.4% below the July 2008 level of 500,000 units, Commerce said.
Also on Aug. 26, Dennis Lockhart, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, called the housing data from Commerce “encouraging,” Bloomberg News reported.
In addition, “stabilization has taken hold, and the beginning stages of recovery are under way, in my view,” Lockhart said in prepared remarks for the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce in Chattanooga, Tenn.
The National Association of Realtors, Chicago, also has sounded optimistic notes about the housing industry but stopped short of declaring that the market had hit bottom.
“The housing market has decisively turned for the better,” NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun said in an Aug. 21 statement. “In some recovering markets like San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Orlando, the demand for foreclosed and lower-priced homes has spiked, and a lack of inventory is becoming a common complaint.”
