If you're moving within Australia, do yourself a favour and avoid UtilityOne, a company that offers to handle all your utility connections and disconnections for free. After giving it a go, I found the service overpriced.

It all begins with a box on your lease application. "Tick here and UtilityOne will contact you to arrange your utility disconnections. This is a free service." I'd allowed my skepticism to rule in past moves, but this time I decided to give it a shot. Within a few days of lodging my application, UtilityOne called me on my mobile phone to get all the details.

The phone call was friendly and straightforward, and basically consisted of confirming my details and then asking me if I'd like them to handle the migration of each of my utilities in turn: electricity, gas, telephone and water.

Though the company bills itself as an expert in dealing with utilities, that expertise doesn't mean it can deal with lots of different companies. For each utility (electricity, gas, water, telephone), it has selected one or two providers that it works with. If you want to use someone else, UtilityOne can't help you.

I use Origin Energy for my electricity and gas, because its GreenEarth programs let me pay a little extra for services based on renewable resources with zero greenhouse emissions. UtilityOne doesn't deal with Origin Energy.

I use iiNet for my home telephone, because I can bundle its competitively priced telephone services with its superior ADSL service and save money. UtilityOne only deals with Telstra.

There isn't a lot of competition for water services in Melbourne, so UtilityOne was able to hook me up with City West Water. But two months later I received a water bill for my old address. City West Water says UtilityOne never contacted them about disconnecting it.

So I gave UtilityOne a call about it. Here's what the helpful agent on the line said:

Ah, I see what happened. We didn't organize the disconnection of your water service because you didn't ask us to.

So apparently, although the company will proactively ask to arrange the connections of each of your utilities, you have to ask for disconnections yourself if you want them. I guess disconnections don't equate to referral dollars.

To be fair, a quick poll around the office hasn't indicated that any of the other companies offering similar services in Australia do much better. My advice: If you want something done right...