Office Removals in Oldham
Commercial moves across the borough, from Broadway Business Park and Hollinwood to offices above the shops on Union Street. Planned so you are trading again quickly.
- Evenings and weekends
- Phased moves to stay open
- Fixed written quote
A commercial move is a trading decision
In short: give us a count of desks and storage, the floor and lift at each end, and the window you can work in. We will arrange a look round and send a fixed written price.
Businesses tend to approach a move as a logistics problem, and it is really a trading one. The invoice from a removals firm is rarely the largest cost involved. The larger cost is the period when people cannot work and customers cannot be served, and that period is decided by planning rather than by how fast anybody carries a desk.
Oldham sharpens this because of what the borough is made of. There is very little conventional corporate office space here and a great deal of small business premises, workshops, trade counters and offices above shops. Those businesses are usually run by a handful of people who cannot afford a week of disruption and do not have a facilities team to absorb it.
So the useful conversation is not about vans. It is about which parts of the business have to keep running, when the quietest window is, and what has to be working on the first morning. Get those three right and the physical move becomes the easy part.
Where businesses move around Oldham
Six kinds of commercial premises across the borough, each of which moves differently.
Broadway Business Park
Modern office and industrial units close to junctions 21 and 22 of the M60. Level access, room to turn a vehicle and proper loading provision. These are among the most straightforward commercial moves in the borough.
Hollinwood
A long-established mix of industrial units, trade counters and small office space along the Manchester border. Wide doors and yards, and the office is usually the smallest part of a job that is really about equipment and stock.
Oldham town centre
Offices above shops and around Union Street and Yorkshire Street. Older buildings, tight service access, lifts not designed for filing cabinets, and the Metrolink running at street level with the loading restrictions that come with it.
Chadderton and Failsworth
Industrial estates and light manufacturing on the flatter western side of the borough. Good vehicle access, and jobs here are usually priced on benches, racking and materials rather than desks.
Royton and Shaw
Smaller premises, trade units and converted mill space. Often a single floor above something else, with a shared entrance and stairs rather than a lift.
Saddleworth and the villages
Small businesses, studios and converted farm buildings around Uppermill and Delph. Charming premises, narrow lanes, and the reason we ask to look before quoting rather than after.
What we need to quote properly
Four things, and they take about ten minutes to gather. Everything else we can work out from a visit.
How many desks, how many cabinets and how many shelves, racks or pallets. Those three numbers size the job almost exactly. Staff numbers and square footage do not, because businesses vary enormously in how much they keep.
Including whether the lift is a goods lift, whether it can be booked, and whether it is shared with other tenants. In town centre buildings this decides the day more than the volume does.
Whether this is a weekday, an evening, a weekend or a shutdown period. It affects the price and it affects which crews are available, so it is much better decided early than late.
Machinery, stock, racking, a safe, catering equipment, anything hard wired. These are normal, and they need to be known at the quote stage rather than found on the day.
Tell us about your office move
Roughly how many desks and storage units, the floor at each end and the window you need. Nothing is booked until you say yes.
What businesses accumulate, and where
Small businesses accumulate in a way that surprises the people who run them, and the reason is simple. Nobody ever decides to keep something. Things arrive, get put somewhere, and stay there because moving them is not anybody job.
The places it collects are the same in every premises we go into. The stockroom or back office. The cupboard by the fire door. The space under the stairs. Whatever is on top of the units in the kitchen. The area around the printer, which acquires paper, toner and a table nobody ordered. And in workshops, the corner where materials that were bought for a specific job in 2019 are still waiting for that job to come back.
None of this is a problem until you are paying to move it. A rough rule that holds up well is that anything untouched since the last move should not survive this one. It is not sentimental to keep things and it is not ruthless to let them go, it is simply that transporting and then storing something you will never use costs money twice.
The practical version is a walk round with every door open, a fortnight before anybody packs anything, with somebody who is allowed to make decisions. An hour spent doing that reliably takes more off a commercial quote than any amount of negotiating over the price.
Moving without closing
Very few businesses here can afford to shut for a week. Five approaches work, and most moves use two of them together.
Move a department at a time
The most common way to stay trading. One team moves, gets set up and starts working, then the next follows. It takes longer overall and nobody is ever fully off.
Move the quiet parts first
Archive, storage, spare equipment and anything seasonal can go weeks ahead. It reduces the main move substantially and none of it affects trading.
Use an evening or a weekend for the core
The desks, screens and working equipment go in one concentrated block outside working hours, so people leave one office on Friday and arrive at another on Monday.
Run two sites for a fortnight
Where both leases overlap, this is the least disruptive option of all. It costs rent twice for a short period and it removes the deadline entirely.
Keep one person off the move
Somebody whose only job that week is answering the phone and dealing with customers. It sounds like a luxury and it is usually the cheapest insurance available.
Files, records and the things that should not go on a van
Most businesses hold considerably more paper than they think, and a move is the only time anybody looks at all of it properly. That makes it an opportunity as well as a task.
Start by separating what has to be kept from what has simply never been thrown away. Records with a genuine retention requirement need to travel and be findable at the other end. Everything else is a decision, and moving three filing cabinets of paper nobody will ever open again costs money twice, once to move it and again to store it.
Anything sensitive should not travel on a vehicle at all. Client files, personnel records, anything with financial or personal data in it, and anything you would struggle to explain the loss of. Those go in a car with a named person, in a box that person is responsible for from one building to the other. It is not that a removals vehicle is unsafe. It is that a chain of custody you can describe afterwards is worth having.
The same applies to the small physical things that carry more risk than value. Keys and fobs, including the set going back to the old landlord. Laptops and phones. Anything holding passwords. Every one of those belongs with a person rather than in a stack of identical boxes.
Machinery, catering and anything hard wired
Almost every business we move has some equipment that cannot simply be lifted onto a vehicle, and in Oldham that is more likely than in most boroughs because so much of the commercial stock here is workshop and light industrial rather than desks.
The categories are consistent. Anything hard wired into the building. Anything plumbed in, which in practice means catering equipment and some machinery. Anything under a maintenance or warranty contract, where the manufacturer may require an approved engineer to disconnect and recommission it. And anything genuinely heavy, which needs the right equipment and enough people rather than enthusiasm.
What matters is the order. If an engineer disconnects a machine on Friday afternoon and we lift it on Saturday morning, everything works. If those two are booked the other way round, or on the same morning without anyone talking to each other, the day stops. This is the single most common reason a commercial move overruns, and it has nothing to do with the removals at all.
So tell us at the quote stage what falls into those categories, and tell us who is doing the disconnection. We will build the schedule around them rather than turning up and discovering a machine still bolted to the floor.
The first week in the new premises
The move itself gets all the attention and the fortnight afterwards gets none, which is odd given that is where the disruption actually lives.
Expect the first two or three days to be slower than normal, and plan for that rather than being surprised by it. Nobody knows where anything is, the printer is not set up, and half the questions in the building are about the building. Booking anything important into that window is optimistic.
A few things make it shorter. Leave the boxes that do not need opening unopened, because unpacking everything immediately is how a new office fills up with things nobody wanted to bring. Give it a fortnight and a surprising amount can go straight out without ever being unpacked at all.
Put one person in charge of the question where is it, and make sure everybody knows who that is. Not a system, a person. It is the single cheapest thing you can do in week one, and it prevents the same question being asked forty times.
Finally, walk the old premises once it is empty and photograph every room before the keys go back. If you are handing space back to a landlord, the condition it is left in usually matters to a deposit or a dilapidations claim, and a set of photographs taken on the day is worth considerably more than a memory of how it looked.
Where we cover
Across the OL postcodes, including the town centre, Chadderton, Failsworth, Hollinwood, Royton, Shaw, Lees and the Saddleworth villages. Our business removals page covers the wider Greater Manchester area.
Other ways we can help
Business removals
Commercial moves across Greater Manchester, from one office to a whole premises.
Removals in Oldham
Our main Oldham page, covering domestic moves across the borough.
Storage
For a fit-out that overruns or equipment with nowhere to go yet.
Furniture dismantling
Desks, storage and workstations taken apart and rebuilt.
Questions businesses ask us
What does an office move in Oldham cost?
It is priced on the count of desks and storage, the access at both buildings and the hours you need us to work. A unit at Broadway on a weekday and a town centre office above a shop on a Sunday are very different figures for the same furniture. Give us the numbers and both addresses and we will arrange a look round before quoting.
Can you move us without closing?
Usually yes, by phasing it. A department at a time, or archive and storage first with the working areas last. It takes longer overall and it keeps you trading, which for most businesses is the better trade.
We are above a shop in the town centre. Is that a problem?
It is a common one and it is manageable. The two things that matter are the staircase and where a vehicle can legally stand, and near the Metrolink route there are times of day that work better than others. We would want to look at it first.
Do you move workshop and industrial equipment?
Yes, and around Hollinwood and Chadderton that is a good share of what we do. Benches, racking, materials and heavy items are normal work. Anything hard wired or plumbed in needs a qualified person, and we plan the day around whoever that is.
How much notice do you need?
Four to six weeks for a straightforward office, longer if either building is managed or you want a particular weekend. In practice the building approvals set the timetable more often than our diary does.
What about paper records and archives?
They move like anything else physically, but they need thinking about beforehand. Keep anything sensitive with a named person rather than on a vehicle, and use the move as the moment to work out what genuinely has to be retained.
Can you store things if the new premises is not ready?
Yes, and fit-outs overrun often enough that it is worth asking about early. Equipment goes into storage and comes out in the order you want it, rather than everything arriving at once.
Do you cover Royton, Shaw and Saddleworth?
Yes, and the rest of the OL postcodes including Chadderton, Failsworth, Hollinwood, Lees and the town centre.
Get your written quote
Send both addresses, a count of desks and storage, and the window you need to move in. We will arrange a look round and come back with a fixed written price.