Every Piece Matters: Kim Falahati on the Stress-Free Move
Kim Falahati of Family Matters: nine services, one call.
Photographs by Harv Balu, standing in for Scott Capen, who was out this week recovering from a fall. Get well soon, Scott.
Thirteen years ago, Kim Falahati had to move her parents. Her father is 89. Her mother is 80 and living with dementia, and, as Kim put it, has nine lives. Somewhere in the middle of it she realized that nobody had taught her how to do this, that everyone she knew would face it eventually, and that there was a business in doing it well.
That business is Family Matters, founded in 2013 and based in Danville. Susan Munkner introduced Kim on September 10 as a Bay Area company that packs, moves, hauls, donates, declutters, sorts, unpacks, organizes and runs estate sales: nine services, one phone number, so a client who is already overwhelmed has one company to call. Kim has a background in psychology and early childhood development, is a certified life coach, and started out as a nanny and house manager before any of this had a name.
She was also, by her own account, a first-timer-long-timer. She has come to the council on and off for years and presented under earlier presidents, but not in this room. Her fun fact, offered when Anthony asked: after a thousand years she is finally the favorite child. She is the youngest, so it took a while.
The house is not the hard part
Kim's slides are illustrated with photographs of her own parents, on the theory that if she is going to use somebody's family in the advertising it may as well be hers. The line under one of them was the thesis of the talk: the house is not the hard part, the people are.
That includes the adult children. Nobody is taught how to help a parent through the emotional and physical side of leaving a home, and the people doing the helping tend to forget to look after themselves. The house is the fruit tree a father planted with his own father. It is the house that burned and was rebuilt the way they always wanted it. Moving, Kim said, is only one piece of the puzzle. The work starts well before the truck arrives and often carries on after it leaves, because a house full of boxes still has to be unpacked.
Start with what you want to keep
Most people begin with what they are getting rid of. Kim's first suggestion is the opposite: start with what you want.
Her method is painter's tape. Walk the house and tag everything that is not negotiable. Two people, two colors of tape. It does not mark the furniture, and by the time the movers arrive the decisions are already made, which matters because movers charge by the hour, some of them in half-hour blocks.
The other half of the money-saving advice was about the hauling. Junk and donation haulers, she said, charge by how much of the trailer you fill, not by the hour. So once the keepers are out, everything left can stay exactly where it is, in the cupboards and on the shelves, and the crew clears the house in one pass. She told the room about a client who hired a hauler that turned out to charge hourly and never donated the items the client had been promised would go to charity. Kim called it what it was, a scam, and noted that about nine in ten haulers price by volume.
Old is not the same as valuable
"How many of you hear clients say, I have all this china, where can I sell it?" Hands went up.
Kim's answer is that china is the number one thing people believe has value and almost never does, brand name or not. She grew up washing the china and the silver every holiday while the football played in the next room. Her niece and nephew, 20 and 22, have no idea what she is talking about. If you have china, her advice is to use it.
What does sell: mid-century furniture, and vintage in general. A set of four vintage chairs can fetch $1,200 in the right shop in Berkeley or Oakland. What does not, as a rule, is solid, heavy, well-made furniture from a generation that valued exactly those things. This generation likes cheap and easy to move. The $3,000 couch that lasted thirty years was worth every penny, Kim said, and the kindest thing you can tell a client is that they got their money's worth out of it, because Goodwill and Savers will very likely not take it, especially if it is upholstered. Even free furniture is work to give away.
For the middle case, a house with real value in a few items but not enough for an estate sale, she works with an appraiser who takes unique, antique and vintage pieces off site and sells them, so the proceeds can offset the cost of the move.
Pack a first 24-hour box
This is the one clients forget and the one Kim calls the most important. Medications, passport, jewelry, anything whose absence would wreck a day. Her parents take their medications to an alarm, and a missed dose throws off the entire day. Those things travel with you, never in the truck, because a box on a truck could be anywhere for three weeks.
The story that went with it: a client accused Kim's movers of losing her high-end handbags. Kim asked how the movers would have known where the handbags were. Well, the client said, it is written on the box. Nobody writes "high-end handbags" on a box. It turned out the client had hidden them inside a hutch and forgotten. The crew found them and brought them back. Had that hutch gone to a donation center or a dump, they would have been gone.
Know what costs extra
Pianos cost extra. Stairs cost extra. Pool tables come apart the way pianos do, and it takes time. All of it is in the contract, right at the red line that says sign here, and Kim's estimate is that nine in ten clients never read it, so her team spells out every extra charge in writing before anyone is surprised. Someone paying $20,000 to clear a home full of a loved one's collections is entitled to know what every dollar is for.
Mattresses are their own problem. If you are thinking of renting a dumpster and filling it yourselves, know that dumpsters will not take mattresses, hazardous material or much in the way of furniture.
The story here was about a job she turned down. She was the third company a family interviewed for an estate sale, and she declined it. There was not enough of value in the house to justify a month of her team's time, and the money, as she pointed out, is usually in the home rather than in what is inside it. A competitor had offered a two-week turnaround with a dumpster for whatever did not sell, and Kim told the family that was probably the better fit. Then she asked them one question: the $1,500 dump fee they had been quoted, did it cover the dated, well-loved furniture that was never going to sell, or would that be extra? The family hired Family Matters to haul everything. Sometimes you are not the right person for the job, Kim said. If you are honest and transparent, you can still get the job.
The biggest mistake is waiting too long
Kim's father came up in the Depression. If you need a tape measure, she has twenty. Her mother, who cannot walk far on her own, keeps everything within reach. When a senior is moving, and it may be, as her dad says, the last stop, they are being asked to go through twenty, thirty, fifty years of belongings in what feels like seconds. It is not a quick process, and nobody in it is thinking clearly.
She is working now with a client who can manage about three hours at a time before the emotion of leaving the house she raised her family in takes over. Ten or twelve hours of progress in a month. That is why the advice to this room was simple: the moment you think a listing is coming, call. Family Matters does a complimentary consultation and walk-through and builds a plan around the client's timeline, in whatever order the nine services are actually needed. Her line to clients is that they should start making decisions before somebody has to make the decisions for them.
And start with a room that carries no weight. A guest room, a room nobody uses. It builds the habit. Start with the paperwork and the photographs and it takes forever.
She closed on the line that gave this post its title. Start with what you know you want, then work through the rest one piece at a time, because when it comes to helping families move forward, every piece matters.
Questions from the room
The seller who has not moved out two days before closing. A lender asked what to do when the documents are rushed out and the seller's belongings are still in the house. Kim's team runs five trailers, from sixteen feet to twenty-eight, so same-week is often possible, and the larger corporate haulers can turn around fast too, at a price. Her practical suggestion for agents: have the seller put everything into the garage. Then a crew can come after hours, take it straight out, and nothing inside the house gets damaged.
Where does she go? All over the Bay Area, San Francisco, Napa and Marin included, and she is licensed for local, long-distance and statewide moves. She mentioned Copperopolis mostly because she likes saying it.
Chico? A member's in-laws had a house to clear up north. Kim's answer was a referral. She could drive to Sacramento or Chico and do it, but the drive time would go on the bill, and if she is not the right option she would rather send someone who is.
Watch it
Kim covers more than fits here, and the questions at the end are worth the extra four minutes. This opens where Susan introduces her.
The council recorded the meeting. This opens where Susan Munkner introduces Kim, and runs through the questions at the end of her talk. watch it on YouTube.
The rest of the morning
It was a heat wave Thursday, the kind where Anthony opens by telling everyone to stay hydrated, and the room was short two regulars. Scott Capen, who photographs the meetings, had taken a fall and was watching the Facebook Live from home, and Eliane Selwan, our Super Tour coordinator, was resting up as well. Both got a round of love from the room.
The mortgage market update was delivered by a loan officer who admitted she had nearly cried at the gym that morning. The ADP data showed private hiring improving slightly, to about 12,000 jobs a week over the prior four weeks, still weak. The Treasury's buyback of $6 billion in longer-dated securities had disappointed a bond market that wanted more, rates opened at a 52-week high, and the morning's inflation print came in at 5.4% year over year for August, up from 4.8% in July and above the 5.3% forecast. Her read was that the Federal Reserve, meeting September 15 and 16, was now more likely to raise than hold. Her advice was to lean on the positives, because buyers are watching rates like snails watching the sun. She left a flyer of pricing statistics in the back.
Four homes went on the Super Tour, a full house by any recent standard. 35185 Cabrillo Dr, Fremont from Debbie Stone Lowry of Compass, freshly painted with a new roof and water heater. 37659 Shelter Rd, Newark, a builder's model home with an extended patio, at $969,000. 6161 Broadway Ave, Newark at $1,295,000, presented on the listing agent's behalf with a song. And 6752 Grasshopper Ave, Newark at $2,795,000, which Anthony presented himself for the listing agent, who was hosting from 10 to 1. A fifth home had signed up on the website and did not make it. Four homes means $200 in the raffle for anyone who sees all four; last week's $150 went to Shufrah Alam.
Anthony also walked the room through the new way to get on the tour: go to the Super Tour page and add your listing there, for anyone who would rather not call at nine at night.
The council has a bank account now, and a card to go with it, which means member money can go back into the meeting and into the community. Susan floated a give-back later in the year, the food bank being the first idea, and asked anyone who knows a Tri-Cities organization that could use the help to talk to her or Anthony.
Birthdays. Chuck Edell, who provides the room we meet in every week, turned 85 the day before. Lucy shared the date and Jackie had hers on Monday. There were two cakes, and Anthony vacuumed.
Coming up around the council. Cheers to the Future, the Bay East Foundation gala, is September 18, with about 25 tickets left when Anthony checked; $75 gets dinner, a drink, a live auction and a band. The Women's Council's annual Wine, Chocolate and Friends is October 14 at Three Steves Winery, and its 2026 member appreciation mixer is September 22 at El Charro in Livermore. Save the date, too, for the inaugural in January at Casa Real at Ruby Hill: a room of 250 to 300 REALTORS® plus affiliates, with sponsorships open. SAVE, whose Chao Lee spoke to us two weeks ago, marks its anniversary with An Evening of Empowerment on Saturday, September 12, from 5:00 to 7:00 PM at 39900 Balentine Drive in Newark (more about SAVE). The Turkish festival runs the weekend at Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco, free entry. And a member who belongs to a local Toastmasters club has an open house Tuesday night, for anyone who wants to get better at exactly the kind of thing this room does every week.
Thank you
Thank you to Kim Falahati for a talk built on her own family, and to Susan Munkner for booking her.
Coming up: Newark Mayor Michael Hannon with a city update on September 17, and Roya Chaudhry, Chief MLS Officer at Bay East, on September 24.
We meet Thursday mornings from 8:45 in Fremont. Guests are welcome, and the speaker calendar has who is coming next.
Photographs and words by Harv Balu. The meeting was recorded by Tom Bigley, who runs the camera and the Facebook Live every week.
The conversation