by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
Relocation Management, a new relocation company in Jacksonville, wants the market on your high-end clients.
“We are a full-service moving and storage company,” said Rich Morey, president of Relocation Management. “We handle everything from local to long distance as well as international. We have our own trucks and anything that I can’t handle, I work with three other independent companies so if we can’t do it or if I can get you a better deal we can run it through other companies as well.”
Morey said his company eliminates all of the homeowner’s labor.
“As far as packing, you can sit on the couch and we can take care of everything in your house,” he said. “At a lot of our high-end jobs, we end up going in and packing up the whole house. Or if someone wants to save a little bit of money, they can get their own boxes and pack for us.”
Their market in California is mostly high-end $6-8 million homes and that is the market they would like to focus on here in Jacksonville.
Morey said he is attending several Realtor organizations to meet the Realtor community because they are an integral part of his business.
“Realtors are our best source of business,” he said. “Everyone Realtors sell homes to are moving. Most of the time, there are usually two moves, the move in for the people they sold it to and the move out of who sold the home. A lot of times, customers will ask the Realtors if they know a moving company and if they look in the phone book whoever they get is who they get.”
Relocation Management was started three years ago in Los Angeles.
Morey said they have trucks all over the United States, but do a lot of work moving people from and to the Northeast.
He decided to open an office in Jacksonville earlier this year.
“We were sending a lot of trucks across country that were coming back empty,” said Morey, “so we put an advertisement in the phone book and the way it has grown we saw a need to open an office here as well. I see a lot of relocation from and to this area. With the growth that is going on, this is a hot market. It’s a good place for a moving company.”
He said he also chose Jacksonville because it is on the eastern end of I-10 and connects to I-95 so he can get up to the northeastern states easily as well.
“This is also where my family is from, so I wanted to get back here as well,” he said.
Morey first got into the moving business by opening Morey’s Movers in St. Augustine in 1976. He decided to sell that business five years ago to his brother-in-law, Todd Ravan, and move to Los Angeles to get into acting. After two years of acting, he decided to get back to work and started Relocation Management.
Morey, who still lives in Los Angeles, comes to Jacksonville for 45 days to oversee the business until it is fully up and running and then returns home for 10-15 days.
“It’s just for the next six to eight months until everything is up and running well,” he said. “Basically we need to get this area developed since we already have the Los Angeles market going. I have a general manager, Jay Kanekoa, who will take care of things here from that point.”
Currently, there is no formal office; it is being run out of Kanekoa’s apartment. Rochelle Bannister also works there and takes care of the administrative and marketing needs of the company.
Morey said there really isn’t a need for an office right now — in order to estimate a move, they need to visit the home to determine either the weight of the move if long distance or the time involved for a local move.
They plan to open a storage and storefront facility off I-95 and I-10. Until then, they are using Morey’s Movers’ storage facility in St. Augustine until theirs is open.
“Storage is needed for people whose house isn’t ready when they move here,” he said. “If their house isn’t going to be ready for, say, two months, we will store their belongings. When the house is ready, we will move them in.”
Morey’s Movers is going to handle a lot of the local work while Relocation Management will handle more of the long distance work.
The company’s website is relocationmanagement.us.