A house built to be looked at
Eltham is the SE9 town where the grandest house was built twice. Edward IV put up the great hall at Eltham Palace in the 1470s, with the third-largest hammerbeam roof in England, and the future Henry VIII grew up in the grounds. Then in the 1930s the millionaire Stephen Courtauld and his wife Virginia grafted a startling Art Deco house onto that medieval hall, designed by Seely and Paget between 1933 and 1936, and English Heritage has run the place since 1995. Two ideas of a good home, four centuries apart, sharing one roofline.
That is the thing about Eltham. The houses were meant to be looked at.
It runs right through the town. The Progress Estate at Well Hall was a government showpiece, the interwar semis off the A20 were sold on their bay windows and their gardens, and even the flats above Eltham High Street sit in a parade that the council guards as a conservation area. None of that is trivia when you are moving out, because a property built to look good is a property a check-out clerk holds to a higher standard. The detail that sells the house is the detail an inventory report picks at.
If you want the short version before the detail: we are an Eltham end of tenancy cleaning firm, we charge by the size of the property rather than the hour, and we back the work with a 97% first-time pass rate and a free re-clean if the agent disputes it. The rest of this page is the how and the why, written for the housing and the rules you actually have around SE9.
The 1915 showpiece at Well Hall
You cannot understand renting in Eltham without the Progress Estate, so start there. In 1915 the government needed to house the skilled workers pouring into the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, and it built them a garden suburb at Well Hall in a single year. Between January and December 1915, under the Housing Act 1914, HM Office of Works put up 1,086 houses and 212 flats on curving, tree-lined streets, with Frank Baines as principal architect. It was meant to be a showpiece, and it still looks like one.
The estate was not called the Progress Estate until 1925, when the Office of Works sold it to Progress Estates Ltd, an arm of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society. It became a conservation area in 1975, and it has stayed one. So the cottages you might be renting at Well Hall are listed-quality homes on a protected estate, well over a century old, with the original windows, the original layouts and a lot of original timber still in place.
That age is the whole story at check-out. A 1915 cottage breathes in a way a new flat does not. Dust settles along the picture rails and the deep skirtings, the runs behind cast-iron radiators pack with it, and a kitchen that has served tenant after tenant carries the residue of all of them. None of that loses you a penny if the clean reaches it. It loses you money when somebody treats a Well Hall cottage like a new build and hopes the clerk does not look behind the cooker or up at the architrave.
There is a quieter Eltham fact buried in the same streets. Bob Hope was born at 44 Craigton Road in Well Hall in 1903, in an ordinary terraced house a short walk from where the Progress Estate would go up twelve years later. The point for a tenant is the housing type: this is a town of solid, old, deliberately built homes, not throwaway stock, and the inventories written for them tend to be detailed.
The detail that sells the house is the detail an inventory report picks at.
Cottages, semis and flats over the shops
Not all of Eltham is Edwardian and wartime cottages. The housing comes in a few rough types, and each one is a different day’s work. Knowing which you are in tells you where the deductions will land.
First, the Well Hall stock. The Progress Estate cottages and the older terraces around them keep their original detail, which means more surfaces for a report to pick at: picture rails, deep skirtings, panelled doors, fitted cupboards and sash windows that a clerk will open and check the runners on. The clean here is about the years baked into the kitchen and bathroom, plus the unglamorous edges that a quick wipe skips.
Second, the interwar semis. Eltham filled out between the wars, when the suburbs pushed along the A20 and the speculative builders threw up bay-fronted three-beds by the thousand. These have halls, through lounges, sometimes a loft conversion a previous owner added, and they tend to keep a fair bit of original detail. A semi with a converted loft is the one people underestimate, because the room at the top is the one nobody thinks to dust before the clerk climbs the stairs.
Third, the flats. The parades above Eltham High Street hold flats over the shops, there are interwar and post-war blocks dotted around, and a handful of newer conversions. A modern flat cleans quickly and predictably, with flush surfaces and sealed windows and no decades of grease to cut through. If you are in one of those, your clean is shorter and your hotspots are fewer, and we will say so in the quote rather than charge you for a house you do not live in.
Most of what we are called to, though, is the older stock. So most of this page is about the cottages and the semis, because they are the ones that catch tenants out.
The council, the rent and your deposit
People moving within Eltham often want to know how the council comes into a deposit. For the deduction itself, it does not. Your deposit is protected under a government-backed scheme and judged against your tenancy agreement and your check-in inventory, and that is national law rather than anything the town hall sets. Eltham sits in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, and Greenwich rents are part of the story, but the rules that decide a cleaning deduction are the same across England.
Where the borough does bite is the money. The average private rent in Greenwich reached around £1,944 a month by March 2026, up from roughly £1,865 a year earlier, and a deposit scales with the rent. So on a typical Eltham let there is real money riding on the state you hand the place back in, more than people tend to assume when they are busy with the move.
A check-out clerk is paid to find fault, and on an older Eltham let there is plenty to find. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents and have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. The way you stay out of that column is simple enough: hand back a clean the clerk cannot reasonably argue with.
The rules are also shifting under your feet. Under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which received Royal Assent in October 2025 and is being brought in through 2026, the old fixed-term assured shorthold tenancy is on its way out and most lets become periodic. The end of a tenancy then becomes a notice period rather than a date you have had circled for months, so the hand-back can land when you are least ready for it. A booked, professional clean matters more under that arrangement, because you may get a shorter run-up than you used to.
Licensing in the Royal Borough of Greenwich
Eltham landlords and the tenants of shared houses ask about licensing a lot, usually because Greenwich has more of it than the boroughs next door. The Royal Borough runs three layers, and only two of them are likely to touch an Eltham let.
The first is mandatory HMO licensing, which applies anywhere in the borough to a large house in multiple occupation with five or more people from two or more households, under the Housing Act 2004. The second is an additional HMO licensing scheme that Greenwich brought in for smaller shared houses, the ones with three or four people from more than one household, and that scheme runs across the whole borough, Eltham included. So a smaller Eltham house-share that would need no licence over the boundary in Bromley does need one here.
The third layer is selective licensing, which covers ordinary single private lets, and this is the one that does not reach Eltham. Greenwich runs selective licensing in named wards only, in Plumstead and Glyndon, Plumstead Common, Shooters Hill, Woolwich Common and Woolwich Riverside, not in the Eltham wards. You can confirm the current position on the Royal Borough of Greenwich licensing pages, which list the selective wards and the HMO rules. If you are letting a single home in Eltham you are outside selective licensing; if you are letting a share, check whether the additional scheme catches you.
None of that licensing changes the cleaning standard at the end of a tenancy. It changes who the paperwork sits with, not what the clerk checks. The deposit and the check-out clean run off your tenancy agreement and the protection scheme, full stop. A few terms come up again and again when people are sorting a move, so here they are in plain English.
- End of tenancy clean
- A full top-to-bottom clean of an empty property to the standard a letting agent or inventory clerk checks against when a tenancy ends. It is the clean tied to your deposit, and it is what this page is about.
- Check-in inventory
- The report and photos taken when you moved in, recording the condition and cleanliness of every room. The check-out is judged against it, so it is the document your clean has to satisfy.
- Additional HMO licence
- The licence a smaller shared house needs in Greenwich once three or four people from more than one household live there, on top of the mandatory scheme for larger HMOs. You can read the rules on the council’s licensing pages.
- Deposit protection
- Your deposit must sit in a government-backed scheme within 30 days, and any cleaning deduction has to be justified against the inventory. The rules are set out on GOV.UK’s deposit protection guidance.
One thing worth knowing if a deduction does get proposed. The protection schemes run a free dispute service, and they lean hard on evidence. As Shelter sets out, a landlord who wants to dock you for cleaning has to show the property’s condition at the start and end of the tenancy, and the schemes tend to reject a claim with no inventory or check-out report behind it. A clean done to a recognised checklist, with the place handed back in good order, is hard to win an adjudication against.
The 57-point clean, room by room
Our cleaners work to a fixed 57-point checklist that letting agents already recognise. It is not a vague promise to leave the place nice. It is a room-by-room list of jobs that has to be ticked off before we leave, and it is the reason we hold a 97% first-time pass rate at check-out.
In the kitchen the oven comes apart so the racks, trays, door glass and interior are degreased properly. The hob, extractor and splashback get the same. Cupboards are emptied and cleaned inside and out, the sink and taps are descaled, and the floor is washed last. A fridge or freezer that has been defrosted gets cleaned through. On a Well Hall cottage where the kitchen has done years of service, this is where the most time goes.
Bathrooms come next, and they are mostly a descaling job. Limescale comes off the taps, the shower screen, the tiles and grout, the showerhead and the toilet, and the chrome is buffed so it does not dry to a film. Across the rest of the house the work is the unglamorous detail clerks check: skirting boards, door frames, light switches and sockets, picture rails and architraves, internal glass, radiators, and the insides of fitted wardrobes. Cobwebs come down from the high corners. Carpets are hoovered through and hard floors are washed.
Living rooms and bedrooms get the same room-by-room treatment. Skirting boards wiped their full length, including the runs behind where furniture stood. Internal doors and frames on both sides. Light switches, sockets and the dusty tops of door architraves. Mirrors and any glazed internal doors polished streak-free. Radiators cleaned front and back, where a surprising amount of dust hides. In a semi with a converted loft, that top room gets done to the same standard as the rest, because a clerk who has the check-in photos will go up and look. The point of a 57-point list is that none of this is left to memory; every job is on the sheet and gets ticked.
We stay until the list is done. Not until a booked hour runs out, because we do not sell this by the hour.
Where deposits get docked in SE9
After enough check-outs in this postcode you learn where the marks land. On the cottages and semis around Eltham the list is fairly consistent, and most of it comes down to the age of the building and the years of tenants before you.
Kitchens are first, almost every time. On a long let the oven builds up carbon on the door glass and the racks, grease settles on the extractor and the wall behind the hob, and the seals around the sink collect a grime a clerk will pick at with a fingernail. We take the oven apart and degrease the lot, because a kitchen that only looks clean at a glance is exactly where a check-out report finds its first few hundred pounds.
Then the things that come with older Eltham homes. Deep skirting boards and the gaps behind radiators, where dust packs in out of sight. The tops of doors and the architraves around them. Picture rails, which the cottages and the better semis still have and which nobody dusts until a clerk points at them. Fitted wardrobes built into the bedrooms, cleaned inside rather than just shut. Original sash and casement windows, where the runners and the corners of the glass collect more than you would think. Gardens get flagged too on the houses with a decent plot, because an overgrown patch counts against you, though the heavy garden work itself sits outside a standard clean.
Limescale is the other steady one. It hazes the shower screen, rings the toilet, crusts the showerhead and films the taps in both the kitchen and the bathroom, and a clerk spots it in seconds. We go at it directly, which a rushed clean rarely does.
One last thing about this stock, because it changes the job. The cottages and family semis tend to be long lets. People take them for years, the schools and the train into town being part of the draw, so by the time a tenancy ends there can be three or four years of living baked into the kitchen and the bathroom. Three years of cooking on an extractor is not the same job as three months, and three years of hard water on a shower screen is not either. The longer the let, the more the descaling and the deep detail matter, and the further a casual clean falls short of the check-in standard. Get the kitchen, the limescale and the older-house detail right and there is very little left for a clerk to argue with. That is the whole game.
Getting to the job: the High Street and Well Hall Road
A word on the practical side, because access in Eltham has its own quirks. Eltham station sits on Well Hall Road, about half a mile north of the High Street, in fare zone 4. It opened in 1985, when it replaced the two older stations the town used to have, Well Hall and Eltham Park, and it is Southeastern now, on the Bexleyheath line. From here you get trains to Charing Cross, Cannon Street and Victoria, and the same line carries on to New Eltham, Mottingham and Falconwood, all in zone 4. Our crews travel to jobs and so does your inventory clerk, and those timings shape when a hand-back can realistically happen.
Eltham station is not a smooth one, mind. It has no step-free access to the platforms, and a redevelopment that would have fixed that was ruled out by Network Rail and Southeastern early in 2026, so if you are moving heavy boxes by train you are carrying them up and down the stairs. Most of our customers move by van, which brings its own Eltham problem.
The High Street is the pinch point. Eltham High Street is a busy shopping parade on the old road south, and parking a van anywhere near it during trading hours is a fight, so for a flat above the shops we plan the access before the day rather than circling the block while the clock runs. The A20 does the heavy lifting for getting across the area, with the Well Hall Pleasaunce and the run up to Shooters Hill and Oxleas Wood off to the north, but the side streets around the High Street and the Progress Estate were laid out long before two-car households, so kerb space is tight.
The Well Hall cottages are their own thing again. The Progress Estate streets curve and narrow by design, part of the garden-suburb layout, and they were never meant for the number of cars parked on them now. We sort a sensible spot out beforehand rather than blocking a neighbour in. The interwar semis off the A20 are usually easier, with driveways and wider roads, and the newer flats near the station tend to have parking of their own.
Most jobs, in the end, are ordinary family homes on ordinary streets. We turn up with our own kit and water, and we work seven days a week at the same price, weekend or not.
The Progress Estate streets curve and narrow by design, part of the garden-suburb layout, and they were never meant for the number of cars parked on them now.
What it costs and how we price it
We price an end of tenancy clean by the size of the property, not by the hour. You tell us the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, whether the carpets need doing, whether there is an oven that has not been touched in a while, and we give you a fixed quote before anyone turns up.
Pricing this way suits Eltham. The stock varies a lot, from a one-bed flat above the High Street to a Progress Estate cottage to a four-bed semi with a loft conversion, and an hourly rate punishes you for the bigger places simply because they take longer. A fixed quote means you know the figure in advance and it does not climb while the crew works. Set it against the deposit at stake. With Greenwich rents around £1,944 a month, a fixed cleaning fee is small next to the deduction it heads off.
What pushes an Eltham quote up is usually the things this older stock comes with. An oven that has not seen a sponge in a year. Carpets that want hot-water extraction rather than a hoover. An extra bathroom, or a loft room that doubles as a fourth bedroom. None of those are surprises once you know the houses, and we would rather tell you in the quote than spring them on you on the day.
The figure depends on the property, so a three-bed semi with extras costs more than a one-bed flat near the station, which is only fair. What does not change is the standard or the guarantee. Every quote includes the 57-point clean and the 48-hour re-clean cover.
Booking, access and the 48-hour re-clean
Booking is a phone call. Ring 0333 555 2076 or use our contact page, describe the property, and we give you a quote and a slot. We work seven days a week, and a Saturday or Sunday costs the same as a Tuesday.
For us to do the job properly the property needs to be empty of your belongings, with the electricity and hot water on and any fridge or freezer defrosted. Empty matters most, because we cannot clean a cupboard you have left full or hoover a carpet under boxes. If you are mid-move and the van is late, tell us, and we will work around it as best we can.
Then the guarantee. If your inventory clerk or letting agent flags any part of the clean, we come back and put it right within 48 hours, free. That is the 48-hour re-clean, and it is why our pass rate stays at 97%. Before you pay, you are welcome to walk the property and check it yourself.
Extra cleaning we bring on the day
An end of tenancy clean covers the standard list, but the older houses around Eltham often need a bit more, and it is easier to add it to the same visit than book separately.
We bring the kit for all of it on the day.
It saves you a second booking.
Add our carpet cleaning when carpets need a proper deep clean rather than a hoover; we use hot-water extraction to lift ground-in dirt the inventory photos will otherwise catch. Our upholstery cleaning handles sofas, mattresses and curtains left in a part-furnished let, using the same method. If the oven has been ignored, our dedicated oven cleaning strips it back to bare metal, racks and door glass included. For the outsides of the glass, our window cleaning uses water-fed poles and purified water for a finish with no streaks. We also offer a one-off deep clean for properties you are staying in, and regular domestic cleaning once you are settled at the new place. If the move itself is the headache, ask about our removals service.
This page is part of our wider end of tenancy cleaning coverage. Eltham sits in the middle of a cluster of SE9 districts we cover, so the areas next door are easy to reach on the same round. Just up Well Hall Road we work in Well Hall and across to Avery Hill. Out along the Bexleyheath line and the A20 there is New Eltham, Mottingham and Falconwood. To the north and west we cover Kidbrooke, Middle Park and the green run up to Shooters Hill.
Eltham end of tenancy FAQs
Do you guarantee I will get my deposit back in Eltham?
We cannot guarantee what your landlord decides, because a deposit can be held back for damage or unpaid rent that has nothing to do with cleaning. What we guarantee is the clean. We hold a 97% first-time pass rate at check-out, and if the inventory clerk or agent challenges our work we return within 48 hours and put it right free of charge, so cleaning is not the reason you lose any of your deposit.
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Eltham?
We price by the size of the property rather than by the hour, which suits the mix of cottages, semis and flats around SE9. You tell us the bedrooms, bathrooms and any extras like carpets or a neglected oven, and we give a fixed quote up front. Set against Greenwich rents around £1,944 a month, the fee is small next to the deduction it prevents. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a quote.
Why do the Progress Estate and older Eltham houses need extra attention at check-out?
The Progress Estate at Well Hall went up in 1915 and is a conservation area, and a lot of Eltham is interwar semis with original detail. Those homes keep picture rails, deep skirtings, panelled doors and old windows, and decades of tenants leave grease in the kitchens and limescale in the bathrooms. A clerk knows where to look, so a deposit-safe clean here has to reach the build-up an ordinary wipe-down leaves behind.
Do I need a licence to rent out a property in Eltham?
It depends on the type of let. The Royal Borough of Greenwich runs mandatory HMO licensing for larger shared houses and an additional scheme that also catches smaller shares of three or four people from more than one household, both across the whole borough. Selective licensing for single private lets covers only named Woolwich, Plumstead and Shooters Hill wards, not Eltham, so a single Eltham home is outside it. Check the current position on the council’s licensing pages. Licensing does not change the cleaning standard your deposit is judged against.
Can you clean a Well Hall cottage or an interwar semi?
Yes, those are most of our Eltham jobs. The Progress Estate cottages and the bay-fronted semis keep older skirtings, picture rails, panelled doors, fitted wardrobes and original windows, and the kitchens and bathrooms have usually served many tenants, so the inventories are detailed. We clean the runs behind radiators, the tops of doors, the insides of wardrobes and the window runners, treating older floors with the right product rather than soaking them.
Do you work weekends, and is there an extra charge?
We work seven days a week and charge the same on a Saturday or Sunday as on a weekday. Around Eltham High Street and the curving Progress Estate streets, parking a van is tight, so we plan access before the day. Book by calling 0333 555 2076 or through our contact page.
What do you need from me before the clean?
The property should be empty of your belongings, with electricity and hot water on and any fridge or freezer defrosted. Empty is the important one, because we cannot clean a full cupboard or hoover a carpet buried under boxes. If your removals are running late on the day, let us know and we will work around it where we can.
What is the difference between an end of tenancy clean and a deep clean?
An end of tenancy clean is measured against your check-in inventory and is the clean tied to your deposit, so it follows the fixed 57-point list a letting agent recognises. A deep clean is for a property you are staying in or one that has been let go, and its scope is whatever you decide rather than an agent’s checklist. If you are moving out, you want the end of tenancy clean; if you just want the place freshened up, our deep clean is the one to book.