Moving can be stressful, whether you are moving across the country or town. Between packing, buying and selling homes, making lists to keep track of everything, and kids who want to know all about the new place, life can become cluttered and feel out of hand. However, many great sites and apps can help keep you organized and informed while you move.
Zillow
Whether you are looking to buy, rent, or sell, Zillow is a great site with a lot of different features. If you’re looking to sell, you can list your house here through a real estate agent or as the owner. You can calculate mortgages, refinances, and debt-to-income. You can even look at different designs for rooms of homes to get decorating or remodeling ideas. Zillow also provides an agent finder service for real estate agents, home inspectors, home builders, even house photographers.
Area Vibes
Area Vibes is a great site to find out the livability of towns or neighborhoods. It gives each place a grade for different things such as amenities, crime, schools, employment, and cost of living before giving it an overall grade. It also has in-depth demographic information. This helps you get to know your city before you move and will point out any red flags.
Yelp
A great way to find new restaurants, local businesses, nightlife, even home services is to go on Yelp. It provides customer reviews and ratings so you can see the local hotspots. You can also easily find places you would be interested in visiting.
Magic Plan
Magic Plan lets you take pictures of your empty home or apartment and then place objects to decorate and furnish your home. Instead of spending half your day measuring and moving around furniture, just snap some pictures and let the app measure for you. You can plan out your ideal floor plan without all the heavy lifting.
Move Planner
Move Planner may cost $1.99, but it comes preloaded with a list of checks for before you move. With suggestions such as “make sure you have all medical and dental records” and “make sure you have children school records,” you’ll be happy to have the reminder instead of keeping track in your head.
Great Guys Moving
Great Guys Moving helps you locate licensed, interstate movers and compare rates on a single platform. Now, instead of spending days calling moving companies and reading reviews, you can submit one quote form and receive quotes from multiple movers who have already been vetted by Great Guys.
Sortly
With Sortly, you can create a visual inventory of all you are moving. By printing off a QR code, you attach it to the box and then can scan the code to find out what is in the box and which room it goes. This gives you easy organization for you, so you don’t have to open up boxes to remember what’s inside constantly.
HireAHelper
Hire a Helper is a site that allows you to search local moving companies to compare prices, hours, and reviews. The site lists the businesses credentials as well the equipment lists of what the company will bring and what costs extra. You can then reserve the help you want for the day you are moving. This makes moving much less stressful than having to do everything yourself.
Thumbtack
Thumbtack is another source to find lower-priced moving companies. Many of the companies on Thumbtack are VERY mom & pop type shops. This can be good or bad, just know what you’re getting into. Many of the really small moving companies can offer better prices, terms, and availability. But, this often comes at a cost of less qualified movers, poor customer support, no recourse for broken/damaged items. This isn’t always the case though, so it’s worth looking into.