There is no standing price for a three-bedroom house, and any company that gives you one over the phone without asking a question has priced a different house than yours.
That sounds evasive. It is not. Two three-bedroom homes a street apart in Surrey can be genuinely different jobs — one is a rancher with a driveway and a garage that was cleared out in March, the other is a three-level townhouse with a stair turn, a shared visitor bay, and a garage nobody has opened since the last move. The bedroom count is the least informative number in the whole conversation.
What follows is what actually sets the figure, so you can influence the parts you control and compare the quotes you get on the same terms.
Why a bedroom count is a poor unit of measure
"Three-bedroom" describes sleeping arrangements. A move is not sleeping arrangements. It is volume, handling difficulty, and the distance every item travels between the room it is in and the truck.
A three-bedroom home with a finished basement, a double garage and a storage locker can hold twice the volume of a three-bedroom home without them. A family that has lived somewhere eleven years has more than a family that has lived there three. None of that shows up in the headline.
The useful unit is rooms plus everything that is not a room: garage, basement, crawlspace, shed, locker, and the space under the stairs.
The three things that move the number most
How ready the house is. This is the single largest variable you control. A home where every carton is closed, taped and labelled before the crew arrives loads at a steady rhythm. A home where the kitchen is still open on the counters means the crew is either waiting or packing — and packing on the day is a different piece of work than moving. If you want the kitchen and the fragile rooms handled properly, book that as packing ahead of time rather than discovering it at eight in the morning.
Stairs and the shape of the access. Not just how many flights, but what kind. A straight run with a landing is workable. A turn at the bottom that a sofa has to be lifted over is a different proposition, and a three-level townhouse where the bedrooms are above the main floor and the entry is below it means everything crosses two flights, both directions.
The carry. The distance from the door to where the truck can legally and safely sit is paid on every single item, both ends. A driveway at the door is the fastest arrangement there is. A townhouse complex where the nearest legal spot is around the corner past the visitor bays adds that walk to every trip.
Everything else is smaller than these three.
What barely matters
Driving distance inside the region. People assume the drive is where the cost sits, and it almost never is. A crossing within Metro Vancouver is a fraction of the working day, and the fraction shrinks the larger the home. Moving to the far side of the region rather than the next neighbourhood over is rarely the thing that changes your quote — a stair turn and a full garage will change it far more.
The exception is a genuine long-distance route, which is scoped and priced on a different basis entirely. That is a different conversation, not a bigger version of this one.
What a written scope should tell you
Ask for the scope in writing before you commit to anything, and read it for what is named rather than what is implied. A complete scope tells you:
- The crew size proposed, and the reasoning behind that number.
- The realistic working time it is built on, and what happens if the day runs shorter or longer than that.
- The protective materials included — blankets, wrap, straps, dollies, floor runners and corner guards at both ends.
- What disassembly and reassembly is covered as standard, and what is not.
- The coverage that applies to the load, at what level, and what its exclusions are — including how self-packed cartons are treated compared with crew-packed ones.
- What is charged separately rather than bundled.
If a quote is a single figure with no breakdown, you have nothing to compare and nothing to hold anyone to.
What normally sits outside the moving scope
These are legitimate separate lines, not surprises, provided they are named before the day:
- Packing materials, where the crew is doing the packing rather than you.
- Purpose-built crating for artwork, mirrors, stone tops and anything that needs a box built around it.
- Pianos, safes and oversized single items — these need specific equipment and crew, and they are scoped on their own terms.
- Storage between legs, when possession dates do not meet.
- Anything requiring a trade — an electrician, an appliance technician, a mount installer.
The test of a good quote is not that this list is empty. It is that you saw the list before you agreed to anything.
How to make two quotes comparable
Most people collect three numbers and then find they cannot line them up. The fix is to fix the variables yourself before you ask:
- Send every company the same information, in the same message.
- Ask each one to state crew size and working-time assumption explicitly.
- Ask each one what happens if the day runs over the estimate, in one sentence.
- Ask each one what is excluded.
Then compare. Two quotes that differ by a wide margin usually differ because one of them assumed a smaller crew, a cleaner house, or fewer stairs than you actually have — and that gap does not go away, it just arrives later in the day.
What to send so the answer is accurate
Whoever you ask, this is the information that turns a guess into a number:
- Both addresses, and which floor the front door is on at each.
- Stairs at both ends, including flights inside the home, and any turn a large item cannot go round.
- Where a truck can sit, and how far that is from the door.
- Whether the garage, basement, shed and any locker are coming.
- Photos of the garage, the storage room and anything unusual — photographs answer more questions than descriptions do.
- A list of the heavy or specialist items, honestly.
- Your date, and whether it is fixed by a possession time or a lease end.
- Whether anything is going to storage rather than the destination.
That takes ten minutes to assemble and it is the difference between a written commitment and a range.
The short version
The cost of a three-bedroom move is set by how ready the house is, how the access is shaped at both ends, and how far every item has to be carried to the truck — not by the bedroom count and not by the drive.
Send the two ends, the date and honest photographs of the garage, and you get a written scope you can hold someone to. Call 778-994-2303 if it is easier to talk it through, or start your move brief and we will come back with the scope in writing.