If you or your spouse’s career is taking you places, literally, you may end up working with a relocation specialist.
That is, someone who specializes in relocation services or works directly for a relocation services company. If a business has offices around the world, they may use a relocation services company to help employees, often called transferees, with the logistics of moving.
That means you’ll generally have somebody, and often several people, assisting you with moving your life from one part of the country to another — or to another part of the world.
But if you’re put in that position, it might help to know what a relocation specialist can and can’t do. After all, it feels a little luxurious having someone at your beck and call, sort of like your own personal moving maitre d’. Still, there are limits to what they can do.
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What a relocation specialist will do.
It really runs the gamut, relocation specialists say. Some of what they will help clients with include …
Selling and buying or renting a home. This is the big one.
“Much of what we do is handling paperwork, especially related to buying or selling a home. It’s very time-consuming, and often, people don’t have much time,” says Kim Starks, an associate broker with Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty in Warwick, New York. Starks is also a relocation specialist.
“I’ve had clients come in on a Friday night, and they’re just there for the weekend to look for a house. So I’ll be with them all weekend, to make sure they’ve found a house to live in before they fly back wherever they came from, so they can get ready to move,” Starks says.
Travel logistics. This is another area where a relocation specialist spends a lot of his or her time. If you’re moving overseas, and you need help with passports, immunization shots, airline tickets, travel insurance and so on, a relocation specialist will likely be involved.
Pets. Do you have pets that will need help traveling to another part of the country or world?
“We’ve been asked to move all kinds of animals that are outside of the scope of a typical relocation. For example, we’ve been asked to move livestock, a llama, exotic birds,” says Dianne Amos, a Chicago-based vice president of global services at RELO Direct, a relocation management company.
Pat Tooman, based out of the District of Columbia and a senior vice president of government services at RELO Direct, says she recalls a client who owned six horses and wanted them moved. While the client’s company wouldn’t pay for the cost of shipping the horses, Tooman says that the relocation specialist working with him gathered information for him on what permits he would need and found a company for him that ships horses.
Helping parents enroll their kids in school. Starks says she has done that a lot when parents are moving during the late summer or in the middle of the school year. She’ll make the necessarily phone calls and help get the school’s paperwork to the parents.
Laura Clarke, a relocation consultant and a real estate broker with Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate Go Realty in Raleigh, North Carolina, says she has had to find schools for transferees with specialized educational programs — as well as preschool and after-school care programs.
Grunt work, when it involves your home. Starks says she has stood in someone’s backyard in the rain, watching a heating oil tank be lifted by a crane out of the ground (long story). She has met with inspectors, electricians, contractors, carpet layers, painters and interior decorators — for homeowners who have not yet moved to their new home.
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What a relocation specialist can’t do — or where they’re limited.
Baby-sitting. For a variety of reasons, your relocation specialist can’t baby-sit your kids. Amos says she once had some parents who were in town over the weekend and asked if a relocation specialist could baby-sit their 3-year-old child.
“That was outside of the scope of our role, but we were able to find a qualified child care professional to come to the hotel and watch the child throughout the weekend,” Amos says.
Finding employment for the other spouse. So a couple moves from one city to another because of one of their jobs. The other spouse is now unemployed and would like to find work.
On one hand, you can ask your relocation specialist for what’s called spousal career assistance, Amos says. But relocation specialists can’t actually find a job for the spouse. Amos says that relocation specialists get that request often.
They won’t lie to your employer for you. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, why would I ever want to do that, anyway?” then you aren’t using your imagination.
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Amos says her company sometimes gets requests from employees that they’d prefer the relocation service not disclose to their employer.
“A transferee was moving from Belgium back to the U.S. He was adamant that we move a firearm that he’d gotten into the country without documentation back with his shipment and that we not disclose this to his company. We were not able to meet his request,” Amos says.
Don’t ask a relocation specialist to do something that you wouldn’t ask anyone else to do. Probably good advice all around.
“We are ready, willing and able to do anything it takes to assist our client, but there are times when even we have to draw the line,” says Bill Mulholland, the owner of a domestic and international employee relocation company, ARC Relocation, headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia.
Mulholland says he recently had a client who was traveling for work and asked a relocation specialist helping to sell the house if she would come and change the cat’s kitty litter box while the client was out of town.
It wasn’t really what the specialist signed up for, Mulholland says.
“But she obliged and said, ‘Yes,'” Mulholland says. “However, when the client sent a follow-up request to ‘also be sure to check and wipe the cat’s butt if the cat had potty issues …’ the agent politely said, ‘No, sir.'”
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Working With a Relocation Specialist? What They Can and Can’t Do originally appeared on usnews.com
