TOEIC Link Office Relocation and Facilities Move Vocabulary: The Cluster for Part 3, Part 4, and Part 7

In TOEIC Link, the company is moving, and a move is never a single event — it is a schedule of dates, notices, and people who each have one thing to do. Two coworkers discuss which floor their team is assigned to in the new building and when they have to pack up their desks (Part 3). A recorded announcement from the facilities department tells staff that the elevators will be reserved for movers on the cutover weekend and reminds everyone to label their boxes (Part 4). A relocation memo sits beside a moving schedule and a floor plan, and a question asks which team moves first or where the printers will go (Part 7 triple passage). Because every move follows the same arc — decide, plan, notify, pack, move, settle — ETS can lay a schedule against a memo and leave exactly one defensible answer. Miss a term like cutover, floor plan, movers, or relocate and you can lose a linked pair in a single move.

This article organizes the cluster by the move lifecycle — the lease decision, the floor plan, the notices, the packing, the moving day, and the settling-in — because that sequence is exactly how ETS threads the pieces together. Because a move is a facilities project before it is a moving-day event, contrast it first with the equipment maintenance and repair scheduling cluster; the scheduling and access language overlaps directly. Because a new office is announced before anyone packs a box, pair this with the conference registration and event logistics cluster when the question turns on who was notified and by when, and with the employee onboarding and orientation cluster once staff have to find their way around the new space.

Why office relocation and facilities move vocabulary is overweighted

Reason 1 — a memo plus a schedule is a ready-made linked set. A relocation memo announces the new address and the move date; a moving schedule breaks the weekend into slots by team or floor. The announcement and the timetable cross-reference each other perfectly, forcing a single conclusion — exactly what a linked set needs. ETS asks which team moves first or when a floor is closed, and only one reading survives.

Reason 2 — a move passes through defined stages. Because every relocation follows the same checkpoints — lease signed, plan drawn, staff notified, boxes packed, move executed, office reopened — ETS can ask "What must happen before the move date?" or "Why was the packing deadline changed?" with exactly one correct answer. The reader has to match the stage against the instruction.

Reason 3 — the terms are fixed facilities conventions. Relocate, floor plan, cutover, movers, and workstation mean the same thing in every office move. That rigidity makes the cluster perfectly testable — and perfectly learnable. The collocation, not the isolated word, is the unit of memory.

The cluster, organized by the move lifecycle

Stage 1 — the lease decision

Verbs and collocations: sign a lease, secure the space, relocate the office, expand the premises, vacate the old building.

Nouns: lease, premises, headquarters, square footage, landlord, occupancy date.

Stage 2 — the floor plan

Verbs and collocations: assign a floor, allocate workstations, lay out the space, reserve a meeting room, designate a common area.

Nouns: floor plan, layout, workstation, cubicle, common area, seating chart.

Stage 3 — the notices

Verbs and collocations: announce the move, notify staff, circulate a memo, post the schedule, update the mailing address.

Nouns: relocation memo, notice, effective date, new address, directory, signage.

Stage 4 — the packing

Verbs and collocations: pack up the desks, label the boxes, dispose of files, back up the data, clear the workspace.

Nouns: packing deadline, box, label, inventory, storage, equipment list.

Stage 5 — the moving day

Verbs and collocations: hire the movers, reserve the elevator, disconnect the equipment, transport the furniture, complete the cutover.

Nouns: movers, moving company, cutover, loading dock, freight elevator, downtime.

Stage 6 — the settling-in

Verbs and collocations: reconnect the network, set up the workstation, unpack the boxes, report an issue, reopen the office.

Nouns: setup, punch list, help desk ticket, orientation, reopening, welcome notice.

The paraphrase traps that decide the linked questions

The reason this cluster shows up in triple passages is that the move memo and the moving schedule almost never use the same words for the same fact. The memo says the office relocates over the weekend; the schedule says the third-floor team's slot is Saturday morning. The Part 7 question asks "When does the marketing team pack up?" and you have to bridge relocate to the specific slot, and marketing team to the floor it sits on. Nothing is stated twice — the answer lives in the gap between the two documents.

Watch three recurring traps:

• Effective date vs. move date. The new address becomes effective on Monday, but the physical move happens over the weekend. A question about "when can staff use the new address" is not the same as "when is the move," and the two dates are placed close together to tempt a mismatch.
• Which floor moves first. The schedule lists teams by floor and slot; the memo lists teams by department. A question about the first team to move requires you to match a department to a floor to a time slot — three hops, one answer.
• Access reservations. A recorded announcement says the freight elevator is reserved for movers on the cutover weekend. A question about "how staff should reach the upper floors that weekend" turns on catching that the normal elevator, not the freight one, stays open — a paraphrase of reserved into unavailable for regular use.

How to drill this cluster

Do not memorize the words as a flat list. Rebuild the move on paper: draw the six stages as a timeline, and under each one write the two or three collocations that only appear there. Sign a lease can only sit in Stage 1; reserve the elevator can only sit in Stage 5. When you can place a term on the timeline without hesitating, you can place it in a passage — because ETS is testing the same sequence.

Then practice the bridge. Take a memo sentence ("The office will relocate the weekend of the 14th") and a schedule line ("3F — Sat 8 a.m.–12 p.m."), and force yourself to answer a linked question out loud: which team, which day, which slot. That is the exact move the test rewards, and it is a muscle, not a fact.

For the broader system behind these clusters — why TOEIC Link rewards the buying, hiring, and facilities lifecycles over isolated words — start with the TOEIC Link procurement and purchase order cluster, which shares the same document-pair logic. Once the lifecycle is in your ear, the linked questions stop being traps and start being a checklist.

The one-line takeaway

Office-relocation vocabulary is tested as a sequence of dated notices, not a vocabulary list. Learn the six stages — lease, plan, notify, pack, move, settle — with their fixed collocations, and you can bridge any memo to any schedule and leave, like ETS intends, exactly one defensible answer.