Florida Moving Complaints: 2,593 Companies, 7,188 Complaints, and the Broker Problem

Florida has 2,593 registered interstate movers in FMCSA's database. Of those, 419 have at least one NCCDB complaint on file. Together they account for 7,188 total complaints, more than every other state combined in our current dataset. The Southern FMCSA region, which includes Florida, Georgia, and Texas, generates roughly 76% of all national complaints. Florida alone is responsible for the majority of that share.

This is not a story about a few bad actors in a large state. It is a story about a specific business model, concentrated in a specific geography, that produces consumer harm at industrial scale.

The six most-complained-about companies registered in Florida:

1. Safe Ship Moving Services: 321 complaints (broker, 0 trucks) 2. Amerisafe Vanlines: 293 complaints (carrier, 6 trucks) 3. Menards Moving & Storage: 290 complaints (broker, 0 trucks) 4. Coastal Moving Services: 229 complaints (broker, 0 trucks) 5. American Van Lines: 215 complaints (carrier, 81 trucks) 6. New Start Relocation: 179 complaints (broker, 0 trucks)

Five of the top six are brokers with zero trucks. They do not own vehicles, employ drivers, or physically move anything. They take consumer bookings online, provide estimates, collect deposits, and dispatch the job to a carrier. When the carrier holds goods hostage, inflates the price on moving day, or damages property, the broker has already been paid.

The one carrier in the top six, Amerisafe Vanlines, operates just 6 trucks but has accumulated 293 complaints. That is roughly 49 complaints per truck. American Van Lines, at 81 trucks and 215 complaints, runs about 2.7 complaints per truck. The per-truck rate tells a very different story than the raw count.

Florida has approximately 1,045 companies classified as brokers in FMCSA's database. That number is misleading. The broker classification in FMCSA's system is not specific to household goods. It includes property brokers, freight brokers, and other categories that have nothing to do with consumer moving.

Of the 1,045 Florida brokers, roughly 238 have household goods complaints in the NCCDB. These are the ones actively brokering consumer moves. The rest are either inactive, operating in other freight sectors, or registered but not conducting HHG business.

This distinction matters because policy discussions about broker regulation often cite the total registered broker count, which overstates the scope of the HHG brokerage problem while understating its concentration. The actual number of active HHG brokers generating complaints is smaller, more concentrated, and more identifiable than aggregate numbers suggest.

Florida's complaint-generating movers are not spread evenly across the state. They cluster in a corridor running through Pompano Beach, Broward County, and Palm Beach County in South Florida. Multiple companies share registered addresses. Phone numbers overlap. The same principals appear on the FMCSA filings of different entities.

This geographic concentration is a well-documented pattern. When FMCSA revokes one company's operating authority, a new entity is registered at the same address, sometimes within days, often by the same person or a family member. The NCCDB complaint history does not transfer to the new entity. From a consumer's perspective, the company is new. From a regulatory perspective, it is a clean record. From an operational perspective, it is the same people, the same office, the same phone number.

Trunk's shell company detection system, which normalizes addresses and phone numbers across all 8,500+ scraped companies, has identified dozens of multi-company clusters in this corridor alone.

Florida is not simply one bad state in a national problem. It is the origin point for a business model that generates the majority of consumer complaints nationwide. Brokers in South Florida sell moves to consumers in New York, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles. The consumer never interacts with anyone in Florida. They find a company online, get a quote, and pay a deposit. The carrier who shows up may be based in a different state entirely.

This means that complaint data filed against a Florida broker often reflects harm experienced in other states. A consumer in New Jersey whose goods were held hostage by a Georgia carrier, dispatched by a Florida broker, files a complaint that appears in Florida's numbers. The geography of complaint filing does not match the geography of consumer harm.

The full Florida dataset, including complaint category breakdowns, company type analysis, and cluster detection, is available in Trunk's NCCDB Complaint Intelligence dashboard at trunk.lorea.ai/dashboard/nccdb.