Moving Into an Apartment in Minneapolis or St. Paul: What You Need to Know

Apartment moves come with logistics a house move usually doesn’t have. House moves tend to involve short carry distances and few unknowns. Apartment moves often mean long hallways, elevators or flights of stairs, and working around other residents the whole time.

Professional movers often make an apartment move look easy, and that comes down to experience and having the right tools for the job. At CMM, we don’t just pad and wrap your furniture. We use dollies and carts that let us move items quickly down long hallways and into elevators. Carry those same items one by one instead, and the job turns into hours of exhausting work.

That same experience is what keeps large furniture from damaging hallway walls and door frames along the way. Navigating a dolly loaded with a couch or dresser through a narrow hallway takes practice, not just strength, and it’s usually the difference between a clean move and a scuffed-up wall.

Most apartment moves also work more efficiently with more than two movers on the crew. With an extra mover or two, one team can prep items and send them down the hallway or elevator while the other loads the truck, rather than one crew handling both ends of the job in sequence. Our own data backs this up: the average apartment move on our books uses more than two movers, closer to two and a half, which lines up with how much of this relay-style coordination an apartment move actually needs.

Parking looks different at an apartment than it does at a house. Across the apartment moves in our records, parking lots and street parking account for the large majority of access points, and driveways barely factor in at all, the opposite of what you’d typically see at a single-family home.

Street parking brings its own wrinkle in Minneapolis specifically. In several parts of the city, particularly downtown, the North Loop, and Uptown, a temporary obstruction permit is required to legally park a moving truck close to your building. Without one, your truck may need to park farther away, which adds real time and real cost to an hourly-billed move. You can apply for a Minneapolis temporary obstruction permit online through the city’s website, and we recommend doing this as soon as your move date is confirmed.

St. Paul has its own equivalent: an obstruction permit issued through the city’s PAULIE platform, which covers parking lane use and parking meter hooding, the two scenarios most relevant to a moving truck. Applications require proof of insurance naming the city as an additional insured, so this is worth handling with enough lead time rather than the day before your move.

Loading docks solve a lot of this for buildings that have them, but they usually come with their own scheduling window, which is worth confirming early. More on that below.

More than half of the apartment moves we’ve completed involve using an elevator to reach the unit, and it’s rarely optional given how many Twin Cities apartment buildings are mid-rise or high-rise construction.

What catches people off guard is the reservation requirement. About 1 in 10 apartment moves we handle need the elevator reserved in advance. That’s different from simply having an elevator available: a reservation means the building blocks off a window of time where that elevator is set aside for your move and unavailable to other residents. Buildings vary widely on how far ahead they need this request; some ask for 24 hours, others want a week or more.

A single bottleneck can throw the whole schedule off by hours. On one move I was on, the customer lived many floors up in a 2-bedroom unit, and we brought a 4-person crew because of the size of the inventory, a large book collection and several pieces of heavy wooden furniture. A bigger crew often pays off in exactly this kind of situation: two movers load dollies and basket trucks onto the elevator while the other two unload at the truck and secure everything for transport, so the elevator never sits idle waiting on one team to catch up.

This particular building didn’t allow elevator reservations, and with the unit so high up, each ride took over a minute, on top of sharing the car with other residents coming and going. We adapted by staging boxes and furniture near the elevator ahead of time, loading it fully in one trip, then having the second team pull everything out and load the truck while the first team staged the next load. That kind of coordination is often the difference between a move that stays on schedule and one that doesn’t, especially in a building where reserving the elevator isn’t an option.

Freight elevators, where a building has one, are sometimes required specifically for moves rather than the standard passenger elevator, and those often come with their own separate reservation process. If you’re not sure which applies to your building, your leasing office or property manager will know, and it’s worth asking before your move date rather than on it.

For buildings without an elevator, stairs are the default, and carry distance matters as much as flight count. A short carry up two flights can move faster than a long carry across a single floor to a distant unit. Long carries and tight stairwells are also where a lot of move-day damage happens; our breakdown of what gets damaged most during a move covers how to protect against it.