I am starting my own junk cleaning services here locally and was wondering what kind of tools/products I should look into buying?

I have a enclosed 6x10 trailer and a truck. Any special tools needed?

Good luck with this man. Obviously a good pair of gloves! lol

You can learn more here: entrepreneur.com/businessideas/rubbish-removal

Don't forget other tools such as management software. I have a friend who owns a junk removal business and he has online booking software that helps him manage a packed calendar, his client info, etc. Something to consider - it can only stand to make you more efficient! (I think he uses BookMyCity?)

You will probably experience that one of the first things you will want to do is trade in the little enclosed trailer for a 16' or 20' open trailer and build some sides on it.

It depends on what type of cleans you will do. Back before the housing bubble we used to do foreclosures for banks. All we did was get all the junk out and broom clean it (sweep it). No actual cleaning at all. Man those were the good ol' days..... $500 an hour easy back then. For those we didn't even own a trailer, we just rented a dumpster. Put 2 guys on it for 12 hours, boy was it great back then. But now back to 2014... if you are doing broom cleans all you need is a good back and a broom.

Most of the time with just regular junk removal all you do is load it up.... maybe a shovel and broom.... head to the dump. Maybe a tarp to cover it with.

Not really much to it. If you have a place to sort it out at, you can sort all the metals and scrap them. I own another type of business and we have a guy (Scotty) that comes by and gets the metal from Tim (my best worker) when he calls him and that guy scraps it.

What city do you live in? I have another couple of things you can do to get scrap if you're interested.

WOW, that is some bank!

I second heathw12 here. You can have all the tools in the world, but if you don't have the work, then it's meaningless.

It wasn't some bank... it was EVERY bank! The way it used to work was that you put in a bid and the lowest bid got the job. I don't think they did much advertising about the bids because we normally got about every bid we put in. If we wanted $12k for a job, we bid $12k and got the job. There were 2 companies that would over-see things and they would sub it out. This was nation wide, not just local. I have no idea how much they got paid from the banks but we would put our bid in to the company and they would pay us. But then the housing bubble hit and every Dick & Jane started cleaning for $3 an hour so it didn't take us long to hit the road!

We could have made more but we didn't take advantage of the situation, we just kinda thought it would always be around. We could have had crews all over and had way more jobs. They asked us many times if we would send crews to northern Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota but we never acted upon the opportunity.

good pair of gloves and an old trailer. Also have basic tools on hand. Good luck!