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Shipping supplies to Chile

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GrahamS
  11/4/2014 15:54 EST

Hi,

I want to move to the Lakes region of Chile, and I want to send all of my personal belongings to Puerto Montt or Valdavia. The shipping companies that I've talked to in the US all ask for a specific destination address for me to send it to, but I haven't yet found my house or land yet. Right now, I have an approximate area in mind. Is it possible to ship your stuff to Chile, and put it in a storage unit I get my housing situation settled?

If I have to buy my land (or housing property first), then I'd have to fly all the way back to the US just to ship my stuff out. I can't get a solid answer from anyone I've contacted about shipping stuff to Chile, and where to potentially store my things til my housing gets ironed out.

There has to be a basic solution to this, and I keep coming up with nothing everywhere I go. I even went down to Chile last year, and got no answers anywhere. I can't believe that you can't ship and store somewhere.

Socium
  11/4/2014 17:42 EST

Hi Graham

There isn't almost internal transportation of containers by sea in Chile. Or at least to Puerto Montt from another port. So, your options to send a container would be to San Vicente on the Region 8th ( Concepcion area) or to San Antonio or Valparaiso ports in Central Chile.

Then trucks will take your container to the destination you choose.

There are warehouses where you can rent space to keep your belongings on the larger cities. Probably more seldom and expensive than in USA. However, there are more alternatives in Santiago than in the rest of Chile.

Be aware of asking all the questions possible to your Custom Broker regarding paperwork to proof the ownership of your stuff before sending it. Although the Bill of Lading entitles you to withdraw your belongings. But do it well to minimize duties and VAT to be paid locally. Also it is important that you bring appliances able to function and to have maintenance under Chilean energy and services available. It may result sometimes better to buy new stuff here, and save the freight and the warehouse.

My best regards.

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DDLSQM
  11/7/2014 07:05 EST

Our experience, latest of 4 international moves Bogota-Santiago 2014, is that one must have a destination address to ship to, that is where you will be receiving the shipment otherwise your shipment will not even leave your home country. This address is final destination and is independent of any storage agreement that you might have with the moving company.

We ended up storing for several months in Bogota while I purchased a place in Chile.

FYI recently the most recommended for international moves to Chile is Allied Van Lines.

drmicrochp
  12/9/2014 19:32 EST

I agree with what the other guys said, but it doesn't necessarily require that you have a specific home picked out to ship your container to. Any address (preferably the address where you will be temporarily staying in Valdivia) will do. Then travel to Chile and embark upon finding your house or apartment. Chilean apartments are small so figure out what the square footage of your present home is as a reference.
Then fill out your bill of lading with address of your temporary residence. Travel to Chile and find your home where you want to live (you will have six weeks at least as that's how long it will take your container to arrive in San Vicente or San Antonio). It took my wife and I a month to find our apartment (2,000 square feet or 700 sq meters). The container arrived a few weeks later and now we had our definitive address to ship our container. There was never a need to rent a storage space. But, yeah, if you had to you could rent a storage space in one of the big cities, but they would probably charge you a lot.

drmicrochp
  3/10/2015 19:28 EST

I finally posted a blog article relating to my whole experience packing and shipping a container from California to Chile and then finding a place to live and bringing everything from the port to our new apartment. I put in a lot of details about the weird hurdles we went through (striking dockworkers, trucking our stuff during the na. holiday, finding/paying an "agente de aduanas", etc.) I'm happy overall that we did it as it would have been impossible to find/replace our belongings with products from the Chilean marketplace. Anyway, if you're interested, navigate to www.drmicrochp.tumblr.com

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