It’s a situation that many people have found themselves in: Your current lease expires on the 31st of the month, and you have to be out of your home by midnight. At the same time, your new lease isn’t set to kick in until the 1st of the following month, leaving you in the unfortunate position of being technically homeless for one night. While your friends and neighbors have generously offered up their spare bedrooms and futons, the problem isn’t so much where to sleep for that uncomfortable 12-hour period of time; it’s that you need to find something to do with your stuff until your new home is ready.
Bobby Hughes is the marketing coordinator at Hughes Relocation Services, Inc., a full-service moving and storage company that has been serving the Philadelphia area since 1973, and according to him, this type of scenario is rather typical. In fact, contrary to what some may think, it’s pretty rare for a moving situation to work out perfectly in terms of being able to move out of one place and into another on the same date. Fortunately, Hughes has a solution for customers stuck in this predicament: the holdover.
According to Hughes, most moving companies are able to accommodate situations in which a customer’s belongings need to be stored overnight. What usually happens is that if the move in question is local and the lag time between when a customer moves out of one place and into another is less than 24 hours, then the moving company simply keeps the customer’s belongings in its truck overnight and charges him a fee accordingly. However, this fee will not be the same as the hourly rate that the company charges while a move is in progress, as storing stuff in a truck does not require physical labor.
But what happens if the lag time between your move-out date and your move-in date is more than 24 hours? According to Hughes, this type of situation is more typical when property sales are involved. In such scenarios, a customer would have to pay to have his possessions placed in storage during that interim period of time. Most moving companies do tend to offer storage services as well and therefore have warehouses that can be used for this purpose. So if you have to vacate your home on a certain date and your new place won’t be ready for another month, then your best bet is to find some type of temporary housing and keep most of your belongings in storage for the duration of that “limbo period.” While this may seem like somewhat of an expensive notion, keep in mind that if your moving company is reasonable, then its storage fees won’t be all that bad. And although finding temporary housing can be a challenge, there are plenty of extended-stay hotels that offer long-term rates at prices that won’t break the bank.
Moving can be a fairly stressful and complicated endeavor, and when your next home is not yet accessible, it can only make the situation worse. However, before you get bent out of shape at the notion of being temporarily homeless, remember that your moving company will probably do everything it can to help you deal with the circumstances.
