“10 Steps to Simplifying
Your Move”
Here’s Help Magazine 
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Red Coats Moving Solutions was founded by Vicky Riley Keyes in 2004 and has managed the moves of over 500 families. Vicky leads a team of caring and experienced professionals, dedicated to ensuring that we manage every detail of your move, from downsizing to moving to staging your home for sale to settling you in comfortably in your new home.
A North American Presence
Vicky is proud to be the first Canadian to join the National Association of Senior Move Managers, a non profit professional organization dedicated to helping older adults and their families with the physical and emotional aspects of moving from one living environment to another (www.nasmm.com).
Vicky is a Certified Redesign & Staging Specialist, a Certified Relocation &
Transitions Specialist and a member of the Professional Organizers of Canada.
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“10 Steps to Simplifying Your Move” Here’s Help Article read >
For a complimentary consultation please email:
Vicky@redcoatsmoving.com
or call us at 416-920-1317.
Red Coats Moving Solutions helps smooth way for moving seniors
Pharmacist Lillian Hall says she and her siblings felt "completely daunted" when contemplating all the time, effort and psychological upheaval involved in helping their parents transition to living in a retirement community.
"They're in their 80s and they had lived in the same (Toronto) house for 40 years," Hall says. "They had to sell that, downsize everything they owned and then settle into their new apartment.
"Obviously, we wanted to help as much as possible," Hall says. "But my brother and I both have demanding businesses, and I live in Port Parry, he lives in Richmond Hill and our sister lives in Barrie. So without professional help, I don't know how we could possibly have got everything done on time and without stressing everybody out horribly."
That professional help came from Vicky Riley Keyes, who founded Toronto-based Red Coats Moving Solutions in 2004. Her company's focus is helping seniors through what she calls "the overwhelming challenge of changing residences."
"Moving is high on the list of most stressful life experiences for all of us. But for seniors, it's even more wrenching," she says. "And for their adult children, who are caught up in their own busy lives and often live far away, it can be a logistical and psychological nightmare."
Formerly a sales and marketing director at such prominent Toronto hotels as Sutton Place, the Radisson Admiral and the Park Plaza, Riley Keyes first learned how much help seniors can need when her father passed away in 2004 and she helped her mother transition out of the family home.
"It was a very stressful situation," she says. "A whole lifetime of belongings has to be sorted through, tough decisions had to be made about what to take and what to dispose of to fit into a smaller space, and there were countless arrangements to make."
Even apart from selling one residence and securing another, the additional chores included contacting reliable movers, packing and making address change notifications as well as telephone, cable and utility service changes, and then unpacking and arranging furniture and other belongings in the new home.
At the time Riley Keyes was helping her mother relocate, she was sales and marketing director at a retirement complex in Toronto. "We had managed to attract full occupancy and I was looking around for a new challenge. That's when I realized that I enjoyed working with seniors enormously, and there might be enough opportunity to help them in the same ways I had assisted my mother to actually support my own small business."
When Riley Keyes' research revealed that, in Toronto alone, the scope of the potential market includes more than 300,000 retirement-age people, she was convinced that she had a viable business concept.
Additionally, she learned that - thanks to demographic realities that will accelerate as millions of Baby Boomers age - a whole industry dedicated to helping older adults move has recently sprung up in the United States. There's even a professional organization called the National Association of Senior Move Managers, of which Riley Keyes is its first, and so far only, Canadian member.
Through a wide array of contacts, Riley Keyes also handles the appropriate dispersal of items that seniors have to part with. This is done by helping to sell valuable furniture through an antique broker, staging contents sales, delivering items to consignment shops and donations centres, and arranging for what's left over to be hauled away for disposal.
While Hall says those practical services made employing Red Coats "worth every penny," she adds that it was Riley Keyes' own "patience, kindness and thoughtfulness" and personal touches that resulted in "a wow factor" when her aged parents first walked into their new home.
Hall's father was amazed that his new study had been arranged to resemble his former digs right down to cherished photos of the Lancaster bombers he flew during the Second World War. And she says her mother was particularly touched that Riley Keyes had picked flowers from the couple's former garden and displayed them throughout the apartment.