End of tenancy cleaning in London & Hertfordshire.

An end of tenancy clean is not a big domestic clean. It is a clean against a document. Somewhere there is a check-in inventory with photographs of how the property looked the day the tenant collected the keys, and at the end of the term a check-out report is compared against it. Deposit deductions come out of the gap between the two. That is the whole job: close the gap, and be able to show that you closed it.

Which is why the scope is unlike anything else we do. There is no furniture to work around and nobody living there, so we clean inside, behind and underneath everything: inside the oven rather than the front of it, inside the cupboards rather than the doors, behind the washing machine rather than in front of it, the tops of doors, the backs of radiators and the interiors of the window frames. It is done once, thoroughly, with a crew rather than one person, because it is a deadline job with keys due back.

We do it for three sorts of client and the brief shifts slightly each time. Landlords want the property re-lettable, which usually means a clean plus an honest defect list. Letting agents want it to pass their own check-out report without a second visit, on a date that is nearly always in the last two days of the month. Tenants want to protect a deposit, and often need the work done in a single day, between the removal van pulling away and the keys going back to the office.

After enough of these you learn that deposit disputes concentrate in a very small number of places. If you are inspecting the work yourself — or doing it yourself — go straight to these twelve.

• The oven. More deductions than anything else. Door glass from the inside, the roof of the cavity, and the grill pan.
• The extractor filter. The metal mesh above the hob is almost always missed and always noticed.
• Fridge and freezer seals. The rubber gasket, not just the shelves. And leave the door ajar if the power is going off.
• Washing machine drawer and filter. Pull the drawer right out; the housing behind it is usually worse than the drawer itself.
• Limescale on shower screens and taps. Hertfordshire and north London are hard-water areas, so this needs a descaler and dwell time, not elbow grease.
• Behind the WC pan and around the cistern. A standard check-out report looks there.
• Inside every cupboard and wardrobe. Crumbs in the bottom of a kitchen drawer are a classic deduction.
• Carpet edges and under the beds. Exactly where the vacuum did not go.
• Skirting boards and door tops. Run a finger along them, because the check-out clerk will.
• Window sills and frame interiors. Including the drainage channels at the bottom of UPVC frames.
• Light switches, sockets and handles. Finger marks read as “not cleaned” to an inspector.
• The garden and the bins. If the property has outside space, rubbish and overgrowth get charged for too.

How long it takes

Typical timings from our own scheduling, for an empty property in normal condition. Heavy kitchen grease, long-term mould, nicotine staining, hoarding, or a property that was never cleaned during the tenancy all take materially longer — which is why we ask for a few photographs before we quote rather than discovering it on the day.