House clearance costs

[twilightcafe]

DM has moved from a 3-bed house into a sheltered accommodation flat.

Which is marvellous - except she is a hoarder, and the house needs emptying, cleaning and de-mousing due to an infestation.

She wants the house sold, and doesn't want it rented out (fine by me).

A house clearance company has quoted me £5k to tackle all of this.
Is this v expensive, or the going rate?

I have no idea how much it should cost. Neither me or my sister have the time or the means to clear it ourselves.

Sounds pretty good.

We paid over £1000 for a 1 bedroom flat that we had carted nearly 100 black bags to the tip already and cleaned.

It included getting rid of sofas, white goods etc which we didn't have the vehicle to do.

Sounds like your mother's house will take 2 people about a week to sort out plus the costs of disposal, pest control and cleaning.

@twilightcafe similar cost for a similar property here, extreme hoarding - we paid over 1k more but front and back gardens and a packed high garage also cleared. We were able to put some things into auction and make some of those costs back.

We had ‘house clearance is such a rip off’ from other older people but I think they have a rose-tinted idea of car boot sales for every little thing.

I’m getting quotes at the moment for this - for a complete hoarder house in SE England. 3 bed semi, plus large garage and garden.
Approx £8.7k to clear and it will take 3-4 people one and a half weeks to do.
i think that’s reasonable for what’s required. It’s a horrible thing to have to do.

N.B. Also includes a full sanitising deep clean and garden tidy up

Thank you. The job needs to be done before we can even think about getting the house on the market.

Mum will keel over at the cost - but she has more than enough funds to pay for it.

This is going to vary a lot depending on how much work and your area. I recently paid about £1600 to clear a 4 bed BUT there was no hoarding, we'd decluttered quite a lot anyway and taken a lot of the papers seperately for shredding. The only cleaning they did was a quick hoover through afterwards. TBH I expected it to cost more, so £5k may actually be a decent price.

I would get another quote or two and make a decision then. I go two quotes and they were similar - I didn't actually go for the cheaper one as I had more confidence in the slightly more expensive one.

@twilightcafe it might be helpful context to add that ours was on a ‘per load’ basis not all in one go and heavy tools and bulky garden things were included that got us to over a dozen loads (approx 2 loads per room). Auction company sent a van to collect and store too - higher commission but no storage costs and saved a couple of clearance van loads.

We also sold to a builder who is experienced with projects and ultimately only had to clear and sweep because they started serious renovations on completion day - they were also keen to complete quickly.

The quote sounds in line with what we were charged. Less stuff to clear in our case but a bigger house.

I have one elderly who has cleared houses herself in the past who thought house clearance was a ludicrous waste of money. But was happy to spent several days every week for most of a year sorting stuff out, dropping off to charity shops etc! Had no concept of the value of time!

Reasonable quote considering the time it takes and costs of disposal.

We've had to do it three times, for a grandma and our respective parents houses after they died.

My brother offered to do all the Knick knacks and objetsd’art in our Mums house and it took him nearly two years of having stalls at antique fairs to get shut of it all, ornaments, paintings, -fathers stamp collection, etc, all good stuff, no cheap tat, and he finally got d3cent money for most of it, but he spent a lot on petrol and stall fees, and probably didn’t make much more than he could have got as a job lot or auction. I wouldn’t have the time nor patience.

As for everything else, Constant runs to the tip, paying for big stuff to be taken away that wouldn’t fit in the cars, paying for skips for the rubbish, clearing rubbish out of the lofts, garages and sheds. Each of them took a good couple of months - a few days off work waiting for furniture collections and several weekends.

Id have willingly paid a few thousand for someone else to do it all.

Doesn't sound bad. Your time and energy is valuable.