An inventory clerk checking out a Gravesend flat opens the shower screen runner before anything else, because the chalk in this water leaves a ridge fast enough to catch a tenant who cleaned everything else properly. That single habit decides more Gravesend deposits than the carpet ever does.
We have cleaned end of tenancy jobs across Gravesend and the wider DA11 and DA12 patch since 2014, checklist-driven, priced by bedroom count, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the same report the clerk writes. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.
Last updated July 2026. We cover DA11 and DA12 across Gravesend town centre, the West Street conservation streets down by the river, Riverview Park, the Wrotham Road corridor and the newer apartment blocks going up near the Town Pier. This page sits inside the Kent directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Kent.
What the inventory clerk in Gravesend checks before you’ve said hello
End of tenancy cleaning
from £176
For a studio, fixed by property size, agreed before we start.
Get your price0333 555 2076 · 8am to 7pm
The report written on your first day is the standard you are judged against on your last. Match it, document the match, and the deposit conversation is short.
- Before anything else happens on a check-out, a clerk walks the flat with a report from the day you moved in. That report described every surface, usually with photographs, usually with “new” or “as new” written against the kitchen and the bathroom, because the flat had just been professionally cleaned when the first clerk wrote it.
- On the way out, a different clerk compares the flat to that same document line by line.
- Anything worse than fair wear and tear gets flagged, and flagged items become deductions.
You are being measured against a professional standard whether you agreed to that or not, which is exactly why a Sunday afternoon with a supermarket spray rarely closes the gap.
- The Tenant Fees Act 2019
- A Gravesend landlord cannot make professional cleaning a contractual condition, so nobody can force you into booking us.
- Damp and mould
- These are a landlord’s obligation under the Homes Act 2018, not a tenant cleaning failure. Where we find genuine structural damp behind a wardrobe or in a cold bathroom corner, we photograph it separately so the charge sits where it belongs.
What 1 May 2026 changed for Gravesend move-outs
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. For a Gravesend move-out it changed the timing and left the cleaning alone.
- Section 21
- No-fault evictions are gone.
- Existing tenancies
- Every assured shorthold tenancy in England converted to a periodic tenancy on that date.
- Notice
- A tenant can now give two months’ notice whenever they choose rather than waiting for a fixed term to expire.
- The cleaning
- This is the part people get wrong: it did not change. The Tenant Fees Act still applies, the check-in report is still the benchmark, and the deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before.
What changed is timing, and Gravesend already runs hot on timing. HS1 gets a Gravesend commuter into St Pancras in about 22 minutes, which has pulled a wave of shorter, more mobile tenancies into the town over the past few years.
Let those tenants leave on a rolling two months instead of a fixed end date and the check-out calendar gets messier, not calmer. Book earlier than you think you need to.
The cleaning side of a move-out did not change.
The 57 things we go through, room by room
Every Gravesend booking runs to a 57-point checklist built from a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what the clerks working this town actually flag. The full list comes with the job; this is the shape of it.
Kitchen, where Gravesend deposits mostly go
The oven, booked as an add-on from £31, is cleaned properly, not wiped: racks into a soak, interior, fan, element and seals by hand, and the brown film between the door panels removed where the glass can come out.
Then the rest of the room:
- Hob rings and knobs off and washed separately
- The extractor hood degreased inside and out, and the filter soaked or swapped
- Every cupboard, inside and out, including the deep corner units that turn up in the older terraces around West Street and the side streets off it
- Fridge and freezer cleaned through once defrosted
- Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind and under them get done, then put back
- The washing machine drum, drawer and door seal scrubbed, because the seal is the first thing the water leaves a mark on
- Dishwasher filter, seals and spray arms
- Sink, taps and drainer descaled properly, since the local water never lets that job go easy
- Tiles and grout scrubbed
- Bins emptied and washed
- Floor pulled back where it lifts, hoovered and mopped last
Bathrooms, and the chalk problem
Scale comes off taps, shower head, screen and tile joints first, because in Gravesend it builds fast and the clerk knows exactly where to look for it. Grout gets scrubbed back as far as honest effort takes it, and photographed first where it is clearly past saving. Then the rest, in order.
- Toilet done properly: inside, under the rim, base, cistern, hinges, and behind the pedestal where nobody looks but the clerk
- Shower screen both sides, tracks and the sealant bead
- Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, overflow and plughole
- Mirrors and cabinets, and behind them where they pull away from the wall
- Extractor fan vent wiped, sealant cleaned to a usable state
- Floor into the corners, behind the loo and under the basin pedestal
Bedrooms, living rooms and the rest
- Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard
- Skirting, door frames, doors, handles
- Light fittings, lampshades, switches, and ceiling roses in the older West Street houses, which hold years of dust and get checked every time
- Window sills, reveals and frames on the inside
- Radiators behind, under and on top; the older cast-iron ones take longer than a modern panel radiator
- Walls spot-wiped for marks, with a realistic line drawn, because nail holes and scuffs are a decorator’s bill and not yours to scrub away
- Hard floors washed with the right product for the material
- Upholstery hoovered through
- Switches, sockets, thermostats, intercoms
- Internal doors both sides with handles and hinges
- Stairs and bannisters where the property has them
- Cobwebs out of the ceiling corners
Two of these often need their own pass. Hot-water carpet extraction is written into a fair few Gravesend tenancies as a hard requirement, which is what carpet cleaning covers on the same visit. A hard-used sofa in a longer let sometimes needs a full upholstery job rather than a hoover.
Last comes a final photographed walk-through, every room, before and after. That photo set is the evidence you keep.
What the chalk in Gravesend’s water does to a shower screen
Gravesend sits at the hard end of the south-east supply. Scale on shower screens, kettle elements, toilet rims and chrome taps comes back faster than most tenants expect, sometimes within a fortnight of a proper clean.
- DA12
- 279 parts per million calcium carbonate, on South East Water’s own published readings
- DA11
- Close behind at 272
- The band
- Both well into the very-hard band
The clerks know this, so a shower screen is one of the first things a Gravesend inspection checks:
- a thumbnail run down the glass
- a look edge-on against the light
- a close pass over the shower head nozzles
Limescale that has set into chrome is not a five-minute job. On the older brass and chrome fittings that survive in some of the West Street houses, an aggressive descaler does more harm than the scale itself, so we use a proper soak-and-lift approach rather than anything abrasive.
Grout is the other one, and it fails Gravesend tenants almost as often as the shower screen does. We scrub it rather than wipe it.
Where it is genuinely past saving, which happens after a five or six year let, we photograph the state before we start so nobody bills you for wear that predates your tenancy.
Scale on shower screens, kettle elements, toilet rims and chrome taps comes back faster than most tenants expect.
Gravesend end to end: the stock changes street by street
Gravesend is a working Thames-side town, not a satellite of London that happens to have a station. People have crossed the river here for centuries.
- The Tilbury ferry
- The passenger ferry dates back to medieval times, when the crossing was run by the Lord of the Manor of Parrock, and it carried wool and livestock as much as it carried people. It has been suspended since 2024, funding for its return still unresolved, but the crossing point and the working-river character it built into the town have not gone anywhere.
- HS1
- What has changed the town more recently is the 22-minute run into St Pancras, which has pulled a genuinely new kind of tenant into Gravesend over the last several years.
That mix of old river town and new commuter demand shows up directly in what we clean. Three bands, three sets of problems.
West Street and the old town, close to the water
Down by the historic riverside, inside the West Street conservation area, the housing is largely Victorian:
- bay-fronted terraces
- narrow frontages
- an original fireplace in most front rooms
- sash windows on the upper floors of the better-kept houses
Long tenancies are common here, and long tenancies mean years of build-up in places nobody touches between lets: behind the cooker, under the fridge, into tile grout that has not seen a scrubbing brush since the last check-out. We win these jobs on patient, unglamorous work rather than anything clever.
Riverview Park and the Wrotham Road corridor
Further out, the housing turns to 1930s and 1950s semis. Riverview Park and the streets running off Wrotham Road toward the Civic Centre are the heart of this band.
- pebbledash gables
- box rooms
- a separate pantry off the kitchen in some of the older ones
- family-sized, three and four bedrooms
- gardens front and back
These are the properties where the checklist runs longest simply because there is more house to get through, and where the cast-iron radiators, where they survive, take real time to do properly.
The riverside new-builds, and what “regeneration” means here
Newer apartment blocks have gone up near the Town Pier over the last decade, on land that used to be working port. Integrated appliances, engineered floors, a management company rather than a private landlord.
For cleaning purposes the newer riverside flats behave nothing like the West Street terraces. A different checklist entirely:
- silicone beads behind the hob
- integrated-appliance gaps
- engineered-timber floor edges where mop water has pooled
The regeneration itself:
- St George’s Square
- Gravesham secured £20m from the government’s Levelling Up Fund toward a wider scheme: a proposed new civic centre and theatre to replace the current Woodville Halls auditorium, alongside homes and retail near St George’s Church.
- Timescale
- As of mid-2026 no firm timescale has been set for when, or whether, it goes ahead.
- Woodville Halls
- Built in 1968 and still the town’s main venue, it is not going anywhere in the meantime.
Gravesend boundaries can be confusing if you are new to the area. Not sure which postcode you sit in? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the address and we will tell you in about ten seconds.
What it costs, and the maths nobody runs until it is too late
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio flat (town centre, above a High Street shop) | 3-4 hours, 1 cleaner | From £176 |
| 1-bed flat (riverside new-build) | 4-5 hours, 2 cleaners | From £227 |
| 2-bed terrace (West Street area) | 5-6 hours, 2 cleaners | From £263 |
| 3-bed semi (Riverview Park, Wrotham Road) | 6-8 hours, 2 cleaners | From £359 |
| 4-bed house (Wrotham Road corridor, larger plots) | 8-10 hours, 2-3 cleaners | From £445 |
A job that does not fit the fixed tiers is £30 per hour per cleaner, kit and products included. Those figures assume a property in ordinary lived-in condition. These cost more, and we say so on the phone rather than after the invoice lands:
- a long tenancy with heavy wear
- a pet in the house
- a flat that has not had a proper clean in three or four years
Run the maths the way the deposit forces you to. A two-bed West Street terrace at £263 protecting a deposit north of £1,400 is not really a close call.
Every Gravesend booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Flag any cleanliness issue inside 48 hours and we come back and redo it free, provided:
- the flat is still empty
- it is in the state we left it
We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, including the firms that rotate check-out clerks through this town, and that work has helped recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.
Licensing, HMOs, and how booking actually works
Gravesham has not introduced a selective licensing scheme, so an ordinary single-family let does not need a council licence to be rented out. What does apply borough-wide is the national mandatory HMO licensing regime.
- Mandatory HMO licensing
- Covers any let to five or more people forming two or more households.
- The register
- At the end of March 2026 the council had 107 licensed HMOs on its register, with more applications under review.
- Article 4 Direction
- Gravesham’s own HMO pages confirm the council is separately working on one. It would remove permitted development rights for small HMO conversions, so more of them need planning permission rather than sailing through automatically.
- What it means for the price
- If your Gravesend let is an HMO, common parts get priced as standard rooms; you are not paying a premium just for the classification.
Booking itself is straightforward.
- Ring 0333 555 2076. Price in about three minutes. Give us the postcode, bedroom count, check-out date and anything the check-in report already flagged.
- We confirm a slot, ideally the day before check-out with a buffer built in. Allow 5 to 7 days’ notice where you can.
- Property empty when we arrive. Furniture out, rubbish cleared, keys with the agent or in a key safe.
- Photo record at the end. Every room, before and after, on an itemised invoice.
- Check-out happens. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back free.
Parking is worth a mention. Tell us the arrangement when you book and we plan the day around it.
- West Street
- Some of the streets run tight and permit-controlled close to the town centre.
- Riverview Park and the Wrotham Road corridor
- Easier for a van.
Add-ons, and what actually separates end of tenancy from everything else
A Gravesend move-out often pulls in more than the core clean.
- Carpet cleaning is the most common add-on, sometimes a contractual line in the tenancy rather than optional.
- Oven cleaning is an add-on to any end of tenancy job, from £31, and also stands alone, from £97, if the oven is all that got flagged.
- Removals lets you put the move and the clean on one booking, which helps on the narrower West Street streets where several van trips through a permit zone become their own headache.
- Upholstery cleaning covers a furnished let.
- Window cleaning handles exterior glass an inventory sometimes asks for.
Four different jobs get muddled by tenants booking for the first time, and it is worth knowing which one you actually need.
- Check-in inventory report
- The document a clerk writes on day one describing every surface, usually with photographs. It is the benchmark your check-out gets judged against.
- End of tenancy clean
- Built to pass that inventory and protect a deposit, with the property empty and the 48-hour guarantee attached, from £176.
- Deep clean
- Resets a home you are keeping, no formal standard to hit, priced from £206, which covers two cleaners for at least three hours and the kit.
- Regular domestic clean
- Ongoing maintenance on a property you live in, from £23 an hour weekly or £24 an hour fortnightly.
Questions we get asked
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Gravesend?
From £176 for a studio, £227 for a one-bed riverside flat, £263 for a two-bed West Street terrace, £359 for a three-bed Riverview Park or Wrotham Road semi, and £445 for a four-bed house. Carpet and oven add-ons are priced separately, and the price is fixed once we have the details, not hourly.
Do I have to use a professional cleaner before I move out?
No. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 stops a landlord making professional cleaning a contractual condition. The catch is the benchmark: your check-in report was written against a professionally cleaned flat, and matching that standard without the right kit is genuinely hard, especially with Gravesend’s water.
Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change anything for Gravesend tenants?
From 1 May 2026, Section 21 evictions are abolished and existing assured shorthold tenancies converted to periodic tenancies. Tenants can now give two months’ notice at any point. The cleaning standard at check-out has not changed at all.
Does Monster Cleaning cover all of Gravesend, including Riverview Park and the riverside apartments?
Yes. We cover DA11 and DA12 across the town, from the West Street conservation streets through Riverview Park and the Wrotham Road corridor to the newer riverside developments near the Town Pier.
How long before check-out should I book?
5 to 7 days’ notice is usually enough. Gravesend does not cluster check-outs quite as hard as inner London, but the last few days of the month still get busy, so booking earlier gives you the pick of slots.
Is carpet cleaning always necessary?
Not always, but a fair number of Gravesend tenancies write in a professional hot-water extraction clause with a receipt required at check-out. If that clause is in your agreement and you skip it, the deduction is close to automatic.
What happens if my landlord disputes the clean after a re-clean?
Escalate to your deposit scheme’s adjudication service, such as mydeposits. Our invoice, dated photo report and re-clean record are admissible evidence, and a tenant with a full professional-clean paper trail rarely loses.
Do you handle Gravesend’s older properties with original features?
Yes. The West Street conservation streets carry original fireplaces, some original sash windows and period detail that needs the right products. We do not put anything aggressive near original woodwork or plasterwork.
Do you handle the newer riverside apartment blocks?
Yes. Integrated appliances, engineered floors and management-company sign-in procedures are all routine for us. Send the building’s inventory spec ahead of the job and we clean to it directly.
Does the property need to be completely empty?
Fully empty is strongly preferred. Furniture left behind blocks access and creates uncertainty at the check-out. A single item left for the next tenant can usually be worked around.
Do you work with specific Gravesend letting agents?
Yes. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and locally that includes regular work through Wards on Windmill Street, Robinson Michael & Jackson on King Street and Sealeys on Parrock Street, among others. Agent-specific requirements get briefed to the cleaning team where they apply.
What about the hard water and limescale on taps and shower screens?
Gravesend reads at 279 parts per million in DA12 and close behind in DA11, both firmly in the very-hard band. Every shower screen, tap and kettle element in the town carries a scale ridge faster than tenants expect, and it is one of the first things a check-out clerk looks for.
Do I need an HMO licence for my Gravesend rental?
If the property is let to five or more people forming two or more households, yes, under the national mandatory HMO scheme. Gravesham does not run selective licensing for ordinary single-family lets. Check current requirements with the council directly if you are unsure.