The Catford cat and the end of a Catford tenancy
The black cat bolted to the front of the Catford Centre has hung there since 1974, sculpted by Owen Luder and Rodney Gordon, and it is the first thing most people picture when you say SE6. It is also a decent landmark for the job we do, because we spend a lot of our week within sight of it, cleaning flats that tenants are handing back. End of tenancy cleaning is the deep clean a property gets when one tenancy ends and before the deposit is settled.
The cat has hung on through years of talk about knocking the shopping centre down and starting again. The Catford Centre and the market beneath the cat have been part of the regeneration argument for as long as anyone renting here can remember, and whatever happens to the building, the rentals around it keep turning over. Tenants move in, tenants move out, and the deposit question comes round every time.
We are Monster Cleaning. We have been doing move-out cleans across south-east London since 2011. In Catford we clean two-bed conversion flats off Sangley Road, ex-council maisonettes near the South Circular, and the odd whole Victorian terrace over by Mountsfield Park. The brief is always the same. Get the place back to the condition written in the check-in inventory, so the deposit comes back instead of getting chipped away on cleaning charges.
There is more to the place than the cat, of course. The art deco Broadway Theatre on Catford Road has stood since 1932, designed by Bradshaw Gass and Hope, and it shares its frontage with the old Town Hall extension that the Duke of York opened that same year before he became George VI. Goldsmiths is due to move its fine art and design department into the former Lewisham Town Hall in the middle of Catford from 2027, which tells you the area is changing, and a changing area means more lettings, more move-outs, and more deposits riding on a clean.
This page is long on purpose. Catford has its own quirks, from the two railway stations to the selective licensing rules that now cover Catford South, and they all change how a move-out clean here actually runs. Here is what the rest of the page covers.
A few terms come up over and over once you are moving out, so here they are in plain words before we go on.
- End of tenancy clean
- A full deep clean of an empty property, priced on its size rather than by the hour, done to the check-in standard so the deposit can be returned. Sometimes called a move-out clean or a check-out clean.
- Check-in inventory
- The report and photos taken when you moved in, recording the condition of every room. At the end the clerk compares the flat to this document, so it is the thing your clean is judged against.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme that makes most private landlords hold a licence to let, with conditions on the property. Lewisham runs one across Catford South, set out on the Lewisham Council licensing pages.
- Deposit protection scheme
- A government-approved scheme that holds your deposit and runs free dispute resolution. The rules are on GOV.UK.
- End of tenancy clean versus deep clean
- An end of tenancy clean is done to an empty property against the check-in report so the deposit can be returned. A deep clean is a thorough clean of a place you are still living in, with no inventory to answer to. Different jobs, different scope.
Two stations, one postcode, and what it does to moving day
Catford has two stations sat almost on top of each other. Catford station runs Thameslink trains on the Catford Loop, one stop down from Crofton Park and one up from Bellingham, while Catford Bridge a few steps away is a Southeastern stop on the Hayes line into town. They sit at different levels, split by the patch of ground where the old greyhound stadium used to be.
Why does that matter to a cleaner. Because moving day logistics in SE6 are shaped by where those lines and the South Circular cut through, and the van has to get to your door regardless. The A205 South Circular grinds through Catford and the one-way system around the town centre backs up at the obvious times, so an early slot is worth having when you are trying to get a Luton van parked, loaded, and gone before the road seizes up around the school run. It gets busy. Plan early.
We plan our Catford jobs around that. If your flat is on one of the busier roads near the gyratory we will usually aim for a morning start, get the clean done while the parking is still findable, and have the keys ready for the agent by early afternoon. The parking around the town centre is the worst part of working here, honestly, and a permit bay that was free at nine is gone by ten.
The River Ravensbourne runs right through here, past Catford Bridge and on down the valley, and the ground-floor and basement flats nearest it can sit a touch damp. That is worth knowing at a check-out, because a clerk will note mould on a bathroom ceiling or a musty skirting board, and a proper clean takes the surface mould off so it does not get logged as your neglect rather than the building’s.
If you are moving out from a road off Bromley Road or up towards Hither Green, the streets are quieter and the timing matters less. We still ask for hot water and electricity to be on, because a move-out clean needs both.
For tenants without a car, Catford is well served. The bus garage sits on Bromley Road and the interchange around Rushey Green and the two stations is a proper hub, which is why so many of our Catford clients never owned a car the whole tenancy and still got around fine. It also means a lot of move-outs here are van-and-bus jobs, with the tenant gone on public transport while a small removal van does the heavy lifting.
One more thing on access. A lot of the conversion flats have no off-street parking and a narrow shared hallway, so we carry the kit in from the road and work around the lack of space. It is normal for Catford. We are used to it.
The parking around the town centre is the worst part of working here, honestly, and a permit bay that was free at nine is gone by ten.
The housing you actually rent in SE6
Catford rents come in three broad shapes, and each one cleans differently at the end of a tenancy. There are the Victorian and Edwardian terraces, many long since carved into flats. There is a big stock of ex-council housing, maisonettes and low-rise blocks, some of it still council-owned and some sold on. And there are the purpose-built and converted flats, including the newer blocks Barratt put up on the old stadium site after it was cleared.
The conversion flats are the ones that catch tenants out. A high Victorian ceiling means cornicing and picture rails that collect dust you cannot see from the floor, sash windows with deep painted reveals, and original floorboards or tired carpet that an inventory clerk will photograph in detail. When a three-storey terrace has been split into a ground-floor flat, a first-floor flat, and a top conversion, each one has its own check-out and its own deposit on the line.
Catford has a strong sharer market too. Plenty of these flats are let to two or three people splitting the rent, often young and on the move every year or two when the tenancy rolls over. That churn is steady work for us, and it is also why so many SE6 lets now sit inside the licensing rules in the next section.
Rents are not small. The Office for National Statistics put the average private rent across Lewisham at £1,810 in March 2026, up 2.6% on the year from £1,764. On a two-bed Catford flat the deposit behind that is real money, usually five weeks of rent, and cleaning deductions come straight off it.
The terraces are a different job again. A whole Edwardian house near Mountsfield Park, the sort that hosts the old People’s Day crowds in summer, has more rooms, more original features and more square footage of skirting and floor than a flat, so the clean is bigger and the quote reflects it. High ceilings, a long staircase, a cellar in some of them. All of it gets checked.
The Barratt blocks on the old greyhound stadium site are the newest stock, nearly 600 homes where the track used to be until it closed in 2003 and burned in 2005. Newer flats clean up faster, but the inventory clerks hold them to a high standard precisely because they started near-new, so a scuffed worktop or a marked wall stands out more than it would in a tired old conversion.
Ex-council flats have their own habit. The kitchens are often smaller and the extractor fans get neglected, so the grease build-up over the hob is heavier than tenants expect. We see that one a lot.
Selective licensing in Catford South, and why it raises the bar
Lewisham Council brought in borough-wide selective licensing on 1 July 2024, and it runs for five years, to 30 June 2029. Catford South sits in Designation 1 of that scheme, alongside Brockley, Lewisham Central, New Cross, Perry Vale and Rushey Green. In plain terms, most landlords letting a flat to a single household or to two unrelated sharers now need a licence to do it.
HMOs are handled separately. Where a property is let to three or more people forming two or more households, it needs an HMO licence instead, and Lewisham added an extra HMO scheme for smaller HMOs back on 5 April 2022. You can read the detail on the Lewisham Council selective licensing pages.
Why does a cleaning company care about a licensing scheme. Because a licensed let is a managed let, and managed lets get a proper check-out. A licensed landlord has a written agreement to keep the property in good order, an agent or inventory clerk doing the inspection, and a paper trail that a deposit scheme will read if there is a dispute. The casual “give it a wipe and hand the keys over” arrangement is dying out in Catford South, and the standard you are cleaning to has gone up with it.
The deposit itself is protected by law. Your landlord has to put it in one of the government-approved schemes within 30 days, and the rules are set out on GOV.UK. When the tenancy ends, Shelter puts it simply: you should get your deposit back, and the landlord needs a reason to keep any of it. Cleaning is the reason landlords reach for most.
Catford town centre is also a long-running regeneration priority for the council, with plans that have been talked about for years and the Goldsmiths move into the old Town Hall now firming up for 2027. Regeneration brings new blocks, new tenancies and turnover, and every one of those tenancies ends with a check-out. The cleaning standard in a regenerating, increasingly licensed town centre only goes one way.
The law around all of this is shifting. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 changes how tenancies start and end, and it makes a clean, well-evidenced check-out matter more, not less. If a deduction does land on you unfairly, Citizens Advice notes that a receipt for a professional clean is useful evidence when you take a cleaning charge to the free dispute service, which is one practical reason tenants book us rather than doing it themselves.
You usually have a window to dispute, not forever. The deposit schemes run their own free adjudication, and the condition you leave the flat in is half the argument, so a documented clean against the same room list the clerk uses gives you something solid to point at if a charge looks steep.
How a Catford check-out actually runs
It helps to know what happens on the day the keys go back, because the clean is built to answer it. An inventory clerk, or the agent, walks the empty flat with the check-in report in hand and goes room by room, comparing what they see to what was photographed when you moved in. They note anything dirtier or more damaged than that baseline, and each note is a potential charge against your deposit.
Cleaning and damage are scored separately. Fair wear and tear is not your liability, so a carpet that has thinned naturally over a couple of years is the landlord’s cost, not yours. A carpet with a curry stain ground into it is a different matter, and that is where a proper clean earns its fee, because hot-water extraction lifts marks that a household vacuum never will and turns a “stained, charge the tenant” line into a “clean, no action” line.
The clerk works to a checklist of their own. That is the whole reason we work to one the agents recognise. When the list we cleaned against and the list they are scoring against line up, there is simply less to argue about, and the inspection moves quicker for everyone in the flat that morning.
Timing is tight in Catford. Tenancies often end mid-week, the agent wants the keys promptly, and the inspection sometimes happens the same day you leave. We slot the clean into that gap, usually the morning you move out or the day after, so the flat is inspection-ready the moment the clerk arrives rather than a scramble of last-minute wiping while the van waits on a yellow line outside.
Get this wrong and it costs twice. You lose the deposit money on the deductions, and you lose the time and stress of a dispute weeks later, by which point you have moved on and the evidence is whatever photos you happened to take. Booking a clean to the inventory standard up front is the cheaper path, almost always.
What our Catford move-out clean covers
Our supervisor arrives with a 57-point agent-approved checklist and works through it room by room, and you can ask for a copy at the end so you can walk the flat against it before the agent does. The list is the same one the letting agents we work with recognise, which is the whole point. It maps to what the check-out actually scores.
In the kitchen that means the oven stripped inside and out, the hob and extractor degreased, the fridge and freezer cleaned once defrosted, and the cupboards wiped inside and out. Bathrooms get the limescale taken off taps, screens and tiles, the grout scrubbed, and the toilet, basin and bath or shower sanitised. Through the rest of the flat we hoover carpets and upholstery, clean skirting and doors, wipe down switches and sockets, clear cobwebs, and do the windows on the inside.
Bedrooms and living rooms get the full treatment too. We hoover the carpets right into the edges and under where the bed and sofa stood, wipe down every door and frame, clean the light switches and sockets, run a cloth along the skirting and the tops of the radiators, take the cobwebs out of the corners, and clean the windows and sills on the inside. Mirrors and any built-in wardrobes get done inside and out.
The hallway and stairs in a converted house matter more than people think, because that is the first thing the clerk sees walking in. A scuffed banister and a dusty stair carpet set the tone for the whole inspection. We do them properly.
It is priced on the property, not the clock. A move-out clean is not an hourly service here, so the team stays until the checklist is done, even if a neglected oven in a Sangley Road flat eats an extra hour that nobody planned for. You pay for the job, not the overrun.
A few things sit outside the standard clean and get added on when the flat needs them. Carpets that are stained rather than just dusty want a proper carpet cleaning with hot-water extraction. A badly burnt oven sometimes wants a dedicated oven clean. Sofas and mattresses can have an upholstery clean, hard floors a separate floor clean, and outside glass a window clean. We will tell you straight whether you need them or not.
The jobs that cost Catford tenants their deposit
Some charges come up again and again on SE6 check-outs. The oven is the classic. The oven is the single most common cleaning deduction we see, because a grill pan and a glass door that look passable to a tired tenant at eleven at night look filthy to a clerk with a clipboard and a torch the next morning, and the charge for a professional oven clean then comes off the deposit at a worse rate than booking it yourself would have cost.
Limescale is the next one. Then carpets.
Bathrooms in the older Catford terraces and the ex-council blocks build up scale on the taps and shower screens, and a clerk will mark a chalky screen as not clean even when the bathroom is otherwise fine. Carpets in a sharer flat take a hammering over a year, and the line between fair wear and a stain you owe for is exactly the line a deposit dispute turns on.
The kitchen extractor is the one tenants forget completely. Behind the metal grille the filter clogs with grease, and in a small ex-council kitchen with a fan that has run for years that grease is thick. Nobody cleans it during the tenancy and nobody remembers it at the end, so it shows up on the report.
The oven is the single most common cleaning deduction we see
Then there are the small ones that quietly add up. The white plastic toilet seat that has gone yellow at the hinges. The window tracks full of dead flies and grime. The fridge seal with old spills set into it. None of these is a big charge on its own, but a clerk who lists six of them has built a deduction worth more than the clean would have cost, and that is exactly how a deposit gets whittled down a tenner at a time.
Sharer flats throw up one more issue. When three people move out on different days, the last one out often gets blamed for the state of the shared kitchen and bathroom that everyone used. A single clean to the inventory standard, booked for the whole flat once everyone has gone, settles that fairly for all of you.
None of this is exotic. It is the same short list of jobs that lose deposits all over Catford, and it is the list our checklist is built around, because we would rather you spent a fixed fee with us than an open-ended deduction with the inventory clerk.
What it costs, and how the guarantee works
The price depends on the property, not the hours, so a studio off Rushey Green costs less than a four-bed terrace near Mountsfield Park, and you know the figure before we start. Tell us the postcode and how many bedrooms and bathrooms, mention anything in a bad way, and we will quote it. You can see the structure on our prices page.
The guarantee is the part that matters at a check-out. We hold a 97% first-time pass rate on managed Catford lets, which means the clean clears the inspection on the first visit nearly every time. When it does not, the 48-hour re-clean covers you. If the inventory clerk or the agent flags anything within that window, we come back and put it right at no extra cost, which is the cleaner end of the deal than arguing a deduction after the deposit is already docked.
We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, and over the years we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. That is not a slogan. It is what a clean to the inventory standard, backed by the checklist the agents already recognise, actually adds up to across thousands of move-outs.
Booking through us also tends to be smoother when your agent is one of those 300, because they know the 57-point checklist, they trust the result, and the check-out is quicker as a result.
People ask why we do it on a fixed price when an hourly rate would let us charge more on the bad jobs. The honest answer is that hourly pricing makes tenants watch the clock and worry, and a worried customer who thinks they are being spun out does not book you again or send a neighbour. A flat fee, quoted up front and held even when the oven is grim, is simply how we would want to be treated, so it is how we work.
Booking a move-out clean in Catford
Booking is quick. Phone 0333 555 2076 or send the details through the contact page, and tell us the postcode, the bedroom and bathroom count, and the date the keys are due. We work seven days a week, weekends included, which matters when your tenancy ends on a Saturday and the agent wants the keys on Monday.
Two practical things on the day. The property needs electricity and running hot water on, and it needs to be empty of your belongings so the team can clean every surface. If there is a fridge or freezer, defrost it the night before. Beyond that we bring the machines, the cloths and the detergents, and we get started.
If you are moving on rather than just out, we also run a removals service, and if it is a live-in deep clean you want instead of a move-out one, see deep cleaning or our regular domestic cleaning. The full end of tenancy service sits across all of south-east London.
We cover the rest of the borough and the streets around it too. There are matching move-out pages for Rushey Green, Bellingham, Hither Green, Ladywell, Crofton Park, Brockley, Forest Hill and Lewisham.
Common questions from Catford tenants and landlords
How much is an end of tenancy clean in Catford?
The price is set on the property, not the hour, so a studio near Rushey Green costs less than a four-bed terrace by Mountsfield Park. Tell us the postcode, the bedroom and bathroom count, and anything in a bad state, and we will quote it before we start. The structure is on our prices page.
Do you guarantee the clean will pass the check-out?
We hold a 97% first-time pass rate on managed Catford lets. If the inventory clerk or agent flags anything within the 48-hour re-clean window, we come back and fix it at no extra cost.
What does the 57-point checklist actually cover?
It runs room by room, from the oven, hob and extractor in the kitchen to limescale on the bathroom taps and tiles, plus carpets, skirting, doors, switches, cobwebs and the inside of the windows. You can ask for a copy at the end and walk the flat against it.
Does selective licensing in Catford South affect my move-out clean?
Indirectly, yes. Catford South is in Designation 1 of Lewisham’s selective licensing scheme, so most lets are managed and get a proper check-out against the check-in inventory. That raises the cleaning standard you are judged against. The detail is on the Lewisham Council pages.
Can a landlord take cleaning costs out of my deposit?
Only with a reason. Your deposit is held in a government-approved scheme, and the rules are on GOV.UK. If a cleaning charge is unfair you can use the scheme’s free dispute service, and Citizens Advice notes that a receipt for a professional clean helps your case.
Do you clean carpets and ovens as part of the service?
A standard clean hoovers carpets and wipes the oven, but heavy stains or a badly burnt oven want the deeper add-ons. We can include carpet cleaning with hot-water extraction and a dedicated oven clean where the property needs them.
How quickly can you clean a Catford flat?
Often within a day or two of you calling, weekends included. Most one and two-bed flats are a single day on site; we stay until the checklist is done, so a neglected kitchen never gets rushed.
What do you need from me before you arrive?
Electricity and running hot water on, the property emptied of your belongings, and any fridge or freezer defrosted the night before. We bring the machines, cloths and detergents ourselves.
Is an end of tenancy clean the same as a deep clean?
No. An end of tenancy clean is done to an empty flat against the check-in inventory so your deposit comes back. A deep clean is for a home you still live in and has no inventory to answer to. If you are unsure which you need, tell us the situation and we will point you to the right one.
Which parts of Catford and Lewisham do you cover?
All of SE6 and the streets around it, from Rushey Green and the town centre out to Bellingham, Hither Green, Ladywell and Crofton Park. We have matching pages for Bellingham and Lewisham, and we cover the rest of south-east London too.