Graveney end of tenancy cleaning

The first thing an inventory clerk does in a Graveney flat is tilt the shower screen to the light and look at the edge, because the hard Thames Water supply on the Mitcham side of Tooting leaves a film that a wipe never shifts. So an end of tenancy clean here has one job: satisfy the person who writes the check-out report. It is checklist-driven, fixed against the 57-point agent-approved checklist, £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against that report. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the Merton side of Graveney ward, the conversion flats and terraces off Streatham Road, around Figges Marsh and toward the Mitcham Lane fringe, across the SW16, SW17 and CR4 postcodes on the north-Mitcham border. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Merton.

What does the inventory clerk in Graveney check first?

The screen edge on the shower, held up to the light. On a Mitcham-side conversion flat the bathroom is usually the one wet room shared between two bedroom doors, it takes the whole household’s use for the length of the tenancy, and the hard Thames Water supply leaves a film on the glass and the chrome that a quick wipe never touches. That is where the clerk starts, and it is the reason a mop and a spare Sunday rarely gets a deposit back here. This is what an end of tenancy clean in Graveney has to be built for: the person who writes the check-out report, checklist-driven, priced at £30 per hour per cleaner with the 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against that report. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.

Start with how the money actually moves, because almost nobody runs it until the check-out has already gone wrong. When you moved in, a clerk walked the flat and wrote down every surface, usually with photos, usually with the word “clean” against the kitchen and bathroom because the flat had just been done professionally. At the end you are marked against that same report, line by line. Anything worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear, comes off the deposit. Match the report and hand over the evidence that you matched it, and the deposit conversation is short.

Graveney is the Merton side of the river, not the Tooting side

People muddle this constantly, so it is worth being exact. The River Graveney has marked the boundary between Mitcham and Streatham for more than a thousand years, and it still separates the London Borough of Merton from the London Borough of Wandsworth. The ward is named after the river, and it sits on the Merton side of it. That matters for a hand-back, because the Wandsworth “Graveney” that most people picture, the Longley Road low-traffic grid, Sellincourt Road, the streets between Tooting High Street and Mitcham Road, and Graveney School on Welham Road, is over the boundary in Wandsworth’s Furzedown, on the Tooting side. This page is about the Merton ward: north Mitcham, reaching up toward Streatham Road, Figges Marsh and the Mitcham Lane fringe.

The housing on this side is mostly late-Victorian and Edwardian terraces, a lot of them split into upper and lower flats between the 1970s and 1990s, with bands of inter-war semis and pockets of ex-council stock threaded between them toward Colliers Wood. The working tenancy is the conversion flat: one bathroom shared between the bedrooms, a small kitchen at the rear, and, in the upper flats, an entrance hall shared with the flat below. Young-professional sharers, couples and families cycle through it fast, because the rental demand spilling out of Tooting keeps this a high-churn patch.

That mix changes what the clean has to handle from one flat to the next. A period upper conversion carries original detail the inventory names by hand: a picture rail in the main bedroom, a moulded cornice line in the front room, a ceiling rose, the odd cast-iron radiator that outlived the central-heating upgrade. Nothing aggressive goes near any of it, because a scratch on original timber or plaster is a bigger deduction than a missed patch of grout. An ex-council flat a few doors along is the opposite job, harder surfaces and modern fittings that take a firmer product, and the clerk there is looking at wear on the kitchen units and the state of the vinyl rather than a paint line on a dado. We work the borough by what the stock actually is, not by a single method dropped on every address.

The ward is named after the river, and it sits on the Merton side of it.

Merton-wide private rents ran near £2,079 a month in early 2026, though the Graveney end sits below that headline because the period stock here lets as split flats rather than whole houses. A one-bed conversion advertises in the £1,400 to £1,650 band, a two-bed nearer £1,700 to £1,950. Under the five-week deposit cap in the 2019 Tenant Fees Act that puts a typical two-bed deposit around £1,950 to £2,250, which is the figure that comes back through the custodial deposit route on hand-back. The clean costs a fraction of it.

The licensing here catches more landlords out than anywhere in the borough

Graveney is one of the very few Merton wards sitting inside two licensing schemes at once, so the paperwork trips people up. Merton Council runs a selective licensing scheme across four wards, Figge’s Marsh, Graveney, Longthornton and Pollards Hill, and a separate additional HMO scheme across seven, both of them running 24 September 2023 to 23 September 2028. A single-household let or a two-sharer flat on the Streatham Road or Mitcham Lane side needs a selective licence. A shared house of three or more people over two floors needs an additional HMO licence instead. The council tracks condition, complaints and management across the five-year window.

There is a third layer that changed recently. The permanent Article 4 direction that removes the automatic right to turn a family house into a small HMO has covered the seven eastern wards, Graveney among them, since November 2022. In February 2026 the council resolved to extend that direction across the rest of the borough from 24 March 2026, so the whole of Merton now needs planning permission for that conversion. On this patch it was already the rule. The practical effect on a hand-back is quiet but real: the clerk’s photo set can land on the licence file as well as the deposit file, so a landlord under a licence has a sharper eye on the condition of the flat than a landlord without one.

Which clean you are actually booking, and why the water matters

Four different jobs get muddled on the phone, and booking the wrong one wastes your money. The end of tenancy clean is the hand-back clean, built to pass an inventory and get a deposit released. It is not the same as a clean for a home you are staying in.

Check-in inventory report

The document the clerk writes on day one, surface by surface, with photos. It is the benchmark your check-out is judged against, which is why we clean to it rather than to a generic standard.

End of tenancy clean

Built to pass that inventory and release the deposit, against the letting-agent standard, with the flat empty and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee on it, at £30 per hour per cleaner.

Deep clean

A reset for a home you are keeping, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit and no clerk walking it afterwards, also from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

Ongoing weekly or fortnightly upkeep with the same cleaner kept on the home, from £22 an hour.

The water is the reason so many of these hand-backs turn on the bathroom. Tooting and Mitcham draw Thames Water’s south-west London supply, which runs hard, comfortably in the 270 to 300 milligrams per litre band. On a shared-bathroom conversion that gives the clerk three reliable photos: the shower head, the bath mixer, and the kitchen sink tap by the boiler. We mask the grout before a soft-acid stage on the chrome, soak the shower head off the wall to reach the jets, and finish dry. On the cast-iron radiators that survive in some of the upper flats we keep the descaler well away from the original brass and use a non-acid alternative on the valve handles.

The 57 points, and the handful that decide it in a conversion flat

Every Graveney booking runs to the 57-point agent-approved checklist, room by room, with the full list handed over on the day. Most of it is the unglamorous slog, ovens stripped rather than wiped, cupboards done inside and behind, appliances pulled out and the gaps behind them cleaned, skirting and door tops and the strip of floor behind the loo. That is a given. What actually loses deposits on this specific stock is a short list, and it is the one we brief the team on before we start. This is the focused block, the points a shared-bathroom conversion is failed on most often:

• The shower screen edge and the tap chrome, where the hard-water film sets and a cloth does nothing; soft-acid stage, then a dry buff, both sides of the screen.
• Grout in the wet line and along the kitchen splashback, scrubbed where steam and shower water settle, with any mould bloom on the sealant lifted by hand and photographed first where it is clearly past saving.
• The shared entrance hall and the communal side of the front door, in an upper flat, because that strip takes the boot traffic of two households and the clerk photographs it on the way in.
• Behind and under the fridge, the washing-machine drawer recess and its door seal, where the hard supply leaves a grey scale ring, and the oven interior with the door glass split apart to reach the film between the panes.
• The skirting run down the hall and the carpet edge along the gripper rod in the principal bedroom, where grit collects against the wall for the length of the tenancy.

Then the final walk-through, every room photographed before and after. That photo set is the evidence you keep, and on the well-documented jobs the clerk rarely picks a fight in the first place.

On the well-documented jobs the clerk rarely picks a fight in the first place.

What it costs, and the sum that makes the decision for you

Pricing is fixed by the size of the property, with the 57-point checklist and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee included in every figure. No VAT, no fuel surcharge, no charge for a first-floor flat.

Add-ons are priced the same way. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed. A single oven deep clean is £77, a double £110, a 90cm range £114, though a standard oven strip is already inside the end of tenancy price and only listed here for reference. Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape; a long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household or a flat that has not been deep-cleaned in years costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than after.

Now run the sum the way the deposit makes you. A two-bed conversion at £243 to protect a deposit near £2,000 is barely a decision. Every booking carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee, our pass rate across the north-Mitcham book sits near 97%, and there is a reason agents on this side of Merton keep our number. Over the years the work has helped tenants recover more than £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.

How a Graveney hand-back actually goes

Booking is four steps. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the postcode, the bedroom count, the check-out date and the agent’s name, and tell us if it is an upper conversion with a shared hall so we send a team that knows the stock. We confirm a fixed quote on the call, talk through the carpet add-on, the oven type and any access quirk, then email a written confirmation with the start time and the team lead’s name. The team arrives, usually two cleaners on a one or two-bed and three on a three-bed terrace, works to the 57-point checklist, and photographs the flat on completion. If the clerk flags a cleaning item inside 48 hours, we come back free.

“Two years in a two-bed upper conversion off Streatham Road, on the Mitcham side, first let through an agent and then renewed straight with the landlord. Both of us commute out to work, so the one bathroom took a hammering and the shower screen had gone cloudy with the hard water in a way I could not fix myself, no matter what I bought. Monster came on a Wednesday, two cleaners, about six hours, and stripped the screen and the taps back to clear glass and bright chrome. The clerk walked it the Friday and signed off the same afternoon. We got the full £1,950 back through the deposit scheme inside the week. The clean was £243.”
Aisha and Dan, Streatham Road SW16, April 2026

One honest note on the day. Parking on the spine roads, Streatham Road and Mitcham Lane, gets heavy around the school run, so we start our Graveney rounds mid-morning where we can and pull onto the quieter residential streets feeding off the main roads rather than the main roads themselves. Tell us the access arrangement when you book, whether that is a shared street door, a key safe or an agent drop-off, and the day runs smoothly. If your next flat is one ward over we cover Colliers Wood and Mitcham on the same round, and if you need only the cooker put right rather than the whole flat, standalone oven cleaning covers it, with carpet cleaning the other add-on tenants here ask for most.

Most of what we do on this side of the borough comes back through the agents, who send us the flats they need to turn round between tenancies and trust us to hit the check-out standard first time. A failed hand-back means a re-book, a re-inspection and a tenant chasing a deposit, and none of that is quick when move-outs are bunching. That is why the guarantee and the photo record matter more than any single trick with a cloth: they turn a nervous check-out into a short one.

Questions we get asked

How much is an end of tenancy clean for a two-bed conversion flat in Graveney?

From £243, fixed against the 57-point agent-approved checklist with the 48-hour re-clean guarantee built in. A typical Graveney two-bed is a converted flat in a Mitcham-side terrace off Streatham Road or near Figges Marsh, one bathroom shared between the bedroom doors, a small kitchen at the back, and fitted carpet on the principal bedroom. The standard fee covers the lot. No VAT, no fuel line, no charge for a first-floor flat over a shared entrance.

Is Graveney inside Merton’s landlord licensing schemes?

Yes, and it is one of the few wards inside both. Graveney sits in the four-ward selective licensing scheme (with Figge’s Marsh, Longthornton and Pollards Hill) and also in the seven-ward additional HMO scheme, both running 24 September 2023 to 23 September 2028. A single-household let or a two-sharer flat needs a selective licence; a shared house of three or more on two floors needs an additional HMO licence. On top of that, the permanent Article 4 direction for HMO conversions has covered the eastern wards including Graveney since November 2022, so turning a family house into a small share needs planning permission here.

Which Graveney streets do you work most?

The Mitcham side of the ward: the terraces and conversion flats off Streatham Road, the stock around Figges Marsh, the roads running down toward Mitcham Lane, and the ex-council pockets between there and Colliers Wood. We are on this round most weeks, so we know which front doors open onto a shared hall with the flat below and which give straight onto the street. If your address sits a street or two the far side of the boundary, ring the office; we almost certainly cover it on the same north-Mitcham round.

Do you clean the flats above the Mitcham Lane and Streatham Road parades?

Yes. The flats over the shop parades on the Streatham fringe are a steady part of the work. They tend to share a narrow stair and a single street door with the units below, the kitchens are small, and the extractor over the hob does a lot of the heavy lifting for a whole flat. We carry the kit for the tight galley kitchen and the shared-stair threshold, and we photograph the communal-side of the front door because that strip is the first thing an inventory clerk looks at on a flat above a shop.

What does the 48-hour re-clean guarantee actually cover?

If the inventory clerk flags any cleaning item on our checklist inside 48 hours of our visit, we send a team back at no charge to put that specific area right. That is the policy behind the 97% first-time pass rate. It does not cover condition items the clerk lists separately, such as a paint scuff, a chipped tile, a worn floorboard or a tired carpet, and it does not cover work outside the 57-point scope like the front garden or exterior glass above the first floor. Those are inventory disputes, and we back you up with our dated photo set.

Does the clean deal with limescale on the bathroom fittings?

Yes. Tooting and Mitcham sit on Thames Water’s south-west London supply, which is hard, in the 270 to 300 milligrams per litre band on the standard scale. That leaves a dull film on the taps, shower head and screen that a cloth will not shift. We run a soft-acid stage on the chrome, soak the hand-shower head off the wall, and finish on a dry buff. Where a flat still has original brass valve handles on a cast-iron radiator, those get a non-acid alternative, because the descaler would lift the patina.

Are carpets shampooed as part of the standard price?

No, carpet shampoo is a separate add-on at £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole-flat two-bed. On a Graveney conversion with fitted carpet on the principal bedroom and the stair and hard flooring in the reception, we usually recommend just the bedroom and stair. A carpet clause written into your tenancy is the common reason to take the whole-flat package; if the agreement asks for a receipt, we give you one.

How long does the clean take on a Graveney property?

A studio is a long morning, three to four hours with two cleaners. A one-bed conversion off Streatham Road runs four to five hours. A two-bed shared-bathroom flat runs five to seven. An Edwardian three-bed terrace runs seven to nine. A larger three-storey house with two bathrooms is usually a full day with three cleaners. We give you the fixed price and the likely window on the call, so nothing on the invoice is a surprise.

Section 21 has gone. Does that change the move-out clean?

Not the clean itself. Section 21 no-fault evictions ended on 1 May 2026 under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, and every assured shorthold tenancy converted to a periodic one, but the cleaning obligations at the end of a tenancy did not change. A landlord still cannot force a professional clean as a contract term under the 2019 Tenant Fees Act. What has changed is timing: move-outs are now more frequent and less predictable, so the deposit dispute rides on the inventory clerk’s report more than before, and a clean receipt against the 57-point checklist is a concrete thing to point at.

Can you do a mid-week clean for a Friday check-out?

That is the normal north-Mitcham pattern. We do most Graveney hand-backs on a Tuesday or Wednesday for a Friday clerk walk, and the 48-hour re-clean window covers the gap. If the agent has booked the clerk for the same Friday afternoon, we will usually shift the clean to the Wednesday so the flat has a full daylight cycle to settle before the photos are taken.

Do I need to be there during the clean?

No. Most clients have already moved out by the clean date, often onto a fresh let in Streatham, Colliers Wood, Mitcham or further out toward Croydon. We collect keys from the agent, use a key safe at the flat, text on arrival, and send a photo set on completion. The agent walks the property with the clerk the next day. If you want the move and the clean on one booking we can talk that through too.

How quickly can you book me in, and are you insured?

Usually 48 to 72 hours’ notice on the Graveney patch, and sometimes same day if a team is finishing nearby. We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, Companies House 9919639, trading since 2014, with public liability cover in place and an insurance certificate available on request. To date we have helped recover over £1.2m in deposits and we are on the books of 300+ letting agents, so agents on this side of the borough know the work and the paperwork.