What drives the price
We publish no prices, no rates and no minimums, because a building cannot honestly be priced without being seen. What we can tell you is exactly what moves the figure, so you know what we are looking at as we walk through.
What we are weighing up
How much there is
Not the size of the building — the volume of what is inside it. A large empty flat is a small job. A small house with a full cellar, a full attic and a full garage is not.
How it gets out
Which floor it is on, whether there is a lift and whether it may be used, how wide the stairs and the doorways are, how far a vehicle can get from the door, and whether that street can be stood in at all.
How much sorting it needs
A house that can be carried out room by room and a house where everything has to be examined first are different jobs. A hoarded interior, a lifetime of paperwork, or a family who need to see things before they go all take time — and time is most of what you are paying for.
How much of it has a life left in it
Where a good part of the contents can be used again, that is credited to you on its own line and it changes where the total lands. Where the contents are worn out, damp or broken, there is nothing to credit.
What it costs to be rid of the rest
Whatever nobody can use has to go somewhere that is allowed to receive it, and what that costs depends on what it is.
What the building itself imposes
Shared entrances and lifts to be booked, a syndic’s rules, a landlord’s handover date, an office that can only be emptied outside working hours, a shop on a street with delivery windows.
Asbestos
The one thing that can move a price after it is agreed. On finding undocumented asbestos the law requires us to stop, cordon, mark and notify. We cannot absorb that and nobody can price it in advance — anyone claiming otherwise is telling you they intend to carry on regardless.
Why the offer has two lines
Money runs in both directions. What has value is credited to you; the labour and the disposal are charged. Both appear, separately, and never as one netted figure — a single number hides which half of it moved.
Depending on the building, the end of that sum can be a bill, it can be nothing, or it can be a payment out to you. We will not guess which before we have seen it.
The visit is where all of this stops being guesswork.
The visit is the only route to a fixed price
It costs nothing, it commits you to nothing, and the written offer follows within 48 hours. Bring whoever you want to have in the room.