An office clearance checklist for facilities managers
OfficeMatrix
Most office clearances go wrong for the same reasons: the inventory is done too late, removal is booked before anyone checks what the stock is worth, and the building's access rules only surface a week before handover. The order of work below is designed to avoid all three.
Start with the inventory
Before anything is quoted, you need to know what is actually on the floor. The asset register is the natural starting point, but it is rarely accurate after a few years of churn, so treat it as a draft rather than the truth.
Walk the floor with a phone and take photos as you go: each desk run, the storage, the meeting rooms, a representative sample of the seating. Mark quantities against a floor plan. That single exercise gives you everything you need to brief a buyer, a clearance contractor and your own finance team without repeating yourself three times.
Establish what has resale value before booking removal
This is the step that gets skipped, and it is the expensive one to skip. Once a removal contractor is booked by volume, the residual value of the furniture is gone — everything on the floor is treated as waste regardless of what it is.
Get the stock valued first. Branded seating, height-adjustable desks, quality bench systems and good storage often carry real resale value, and that value can either be paid to you or offset against the cost of clearing whatever is left. Even where the answer comes back as "not much", you have made the decision on evidence rather than by default.
Check building constraints early
Ask building management the awkward questions at the start, not the week before. Which goods lift can be used and how is it booked? Is there a loading bay, and what are the dock time windows? What hours are permitted for works on the floor, and does that change for a large load?
Then the landlord conditions: floor protection requirements, permitted routes through the building, inductions or permits to work, and any restrictions in the lease around the state the space must be handed back in. These constraints shape the entire schedule, so they belong at the front of the process.
Line up the paperwork
Building management will normally want risk assessments and method statements, insurance certificates and operative details before they will sign the works off. Ask your contractor for these in advance and pass them on early — a missing certificate is a very common reason for a collection date slipping.
On the other side of the job you need records: waste transfer notes for anything disposed of, a collection note itemising exactly what left the building for the asset write-off, and, where you report on it, a reuse and recycling summary showing what was diverted from landfill.
Plan the sequencing around handover
Work backwards from the date the space must be handed back, and leave a buffer. Decide what leaves first: usually the resaleable stock in one clean collection, then the remainder, then any strip-out trades that need an empty floor to work in.
Where a move is phased, clear floor by floor or department by department rather than trying to stage everything into one week at the end. It costs the same, spreads the disruption, and leaves room to absorb the inevitable lift booking that gets cancelled.
Planning a clearance in London? Send us your inventory and a few photos and we will tell you what carries resale value before you book anything.
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