Office decommissioning and liquidation

You asked what to do with a floor of office furniture.

Here is the short version. Most of it is worth money. Some of it is worth a tax letter. Almost none of it belongs in a landfill. Tell us what is in the building and we come back inside 48 hours with a disposition plan and the number it recovers.

Tell us what is in the building → No fee for the plan. A person reads it, not a bot.

What is it worth?

Brand, age, condition, and how well it matches. A floor of matched task seating is a different conversation than the same count in mixed models, because a buyer can take the whole thing. We price it line by line, not by the pound.

What does it cost?

Volume, labor, and building access, not a flat rate per square foot. The number that matters is the net after resale recovery. On a furniture dense floor, recovery offsets a large share of the removal.

How long does it take?

Ninety days before your lease ends is comfortable. Sixty is workable. Thirty means you are buying speed and losing most of the resale window, which is usually the most expensive part of a late clear-out.

The distinction nobody explains

Liquidation and decommissioning are not the same job.

People use the words interchangeably, then get quoted for one and billed for the other. Here is the difference, and where the two meet.

Liquidation

Sell what has value

Move the furniture that a buyer actually wants and put cash back on the ledger. Fast and profitable on the good stuff. It also stops at the good stuff, so the tired chairs, the filing wall, and the empty floor are still your problem on lease-end day.

Decommissioning

Hand back a compliant floor

Clear everything and return the space in the condition the lease requires. Removal, disposal, building paperwork, chain of custody. Done alone it treats a truckload of resellable assets as a haul-away line item and pays to throw money out.

What we do

Both, in the right order

Every piece gets graded once and routed to the highest use it can hold. Disposal is the last stop, not the default.

01 Resale, for cash back against the job
02 Donation, with the tax letter attached
03 Certified recycling, weighed and documented
04 Disposal, only for what nothing else will take

A clear-out is a revenue event, not a line item.

Most companies pay a hauler to make the problem go away and never see a dollar back. We work the other direction, and we show the math on the proposal instead of describing it. Bay Area second life inventory has real buyers waiting, which is why the numbers hold up here.

70/30

Split on the page

The dealer split sits on the proposal. No hidden markup, no shell games about where the money went.

12M+

Pounds diverted

Furniture we have kept out of landfills so far. Your inventory adds to it.

Landfill target

Zero landfill is the goal on every project. When something cannot be diverted, we tell you why.

48hr

Turnaround

A real person reads this and comes back inside two business days. Not a routing bot.

Tell us what is in the building.

Two sections. Rough numbers are fine, estimates beat blanks, and if you already have an inventory list you can skip most of this and attach it at the bottom.

What is coming out

Enough to price it. The walkthrough fills in the rest.

Square footage *

When does the space need to be clear *

Approximate counts

Workstations

Task chairs

Private offices

Filing and storage

Brands in the space

✓ MillerKnoll ✓ Steelcase ✓ Knoll ✓ Haworth ✓ Humanscale ✓ Teknion ✓ Mixed / unbranded ✓ Not sure

Brand drives resale value more than anything else on this page. A floor of Aerons is a very different conversation than a floor of unbranded task chairs.

Overall condition

What matters most * Every clear-out trades speed against recovery. This tells us which way to lean.

Where to send the number

Five fields. Then a person, not a sequence.

Full name *

Company *

Work email *

Phone

Market *

Site address Building and floor is enough. It tells us the freight situation before we walk it.

Your role

Industry

Anything else we should know

Attachments

Drag and drop, or click to browse

Inventory lists, asset registers, floor plans, and photos. A photo of a typical workstation and a typical chair gets you a tighter number. Up to 8 files, 12 MB total.

✓

In. Thanks.

A real person reads these, not a routing bot. We come back inside 48 hours with a disposition plan and what it recovers. If your clear date is inside two weeks, reply to the confirmation email and we will move you up the list.

See how a decommission runs

Answers

The rest of what you were about to ask.

What it is worth, what it costs, how fast it moves, and what happens to the part nobody wants.

Yes, if it is commercial grade and in serviceable condition. Task seating from the last seven years, height-adjustable bases, benching, matched systems furniture, and recent conference and lounge pieces all have real secondary value. RESEAT buys and brokers this inventory across the Bay Area. Unbranded budget furniture and anything broken or incomplete generally does not clear the cost of moving it.

It depends on brand, age, condition, quantity, and how well it matches. Matched volume lots in a consistent finish are worth considerably more than the same count in mixed models, because a buyer can take the whole thing. The fastest way to a real number is to send an inventory through the decommission intake: manufacturer, model, finish, quantity, and condition by zone.

A-grade task seating and height-adjustable bases can move in days. Bulk systems furniture typically needs two to four weeks of buyer coordination, because large lots usually get split across several buyers. That timing is why a decommission should start ninety days before the lease ends rather than thirty.

Yes. Partial clear-outs are common in the Bay Area right now, and a downsize is often a better lot than a full closure because you keep the worn pieces and release the good ones. We can also handle the reconfiguration of what stays in the same project.

Office decommissioning is the work of clearing a space at the end of a lease and returning it in the condition the lease requires. Done properly it is not just removal: the furniture gets inventoried and graded, then sorted into resale, donation, recycling, and disposal, in that order. RESEAT runs decommissioning across the San Francisco Bay Area, and the resale recovery is what offsets the cost of the job.

It is priced by volume, labor, and building access rather than a flat rate per square foot. Downtown San Francisco and San Jose towers with restricted freight windows and after-hours requirements sit at the high end. East Bay and Peninsula buildings are usually cheaper because access is easier. The number that matters is the net cost after resale recovery, which on a furniture-dense floor can offset a large share of the removal.

Ninety days before your lease end is comfortable, sixty is workable, and thirty means you are buying speed. Under thirty days you lose most of the resale window, because buyers need time to inspect, commit, and schedule a pickup. That lost window is usually the single most expensive thing about a late decommission.

It gets sorted into donation first, then recycling, and disposal is the last stop rather than the default. Storage and filing in particular are usually better donated than disposed of, because they are heavy, low value on resale, and expensive to tip. Every diverted pound gets weighed and documented so the numbers hold up in an ESG or grant report.

Yes. Certificates of insurance, freight elevator reservations, floor and elevator protection, after-hours scheduling, and the written waste plan most Bay Area property managers require. In downtown towers the freight elevator is usually the real constraint on the schedule, so it gets booked before the crew does.

Diverted weight, items rehomed, donation receipts, and CO2e avoided, packaged per project. On one 147,000 square foot enterprise decommission that came to 952 pieces rehomed and 588 metric tons of CO2e avoided, at a 183 percent ROI against the disposal-only alternative.