The line that runs through Lee Green
Stand at the Lee Green crossroads, by the Old Tiger’s Head, and you are standing on a border. The old coaching inn, rebuilt in 1896, sits on one corner; its rival the New Tiger’s Head once faced it across the junction before it closed. Run a finger along Lee High Road and the Quaggy, the little river that slips through Manor House Gardens, and you have traced the boundary between two London boroughs. North and west tends toward Lewisham. East and the Eltham side falls to the Royal Borough of Greenwich.
That matters for renters more than the average SE12 resident realises. The two councils run their private-rented rules differently, so the postcode SE12 8AS is not one regime but a seam between two. A landlord on Manor Lane and a landlord on the far side of Burnt Ash Road can face different legal duties on the same street pattern, in near-identical houses, built in the same decade after the railway arrived.
Lee got its station in 1866, and the streets filled in behind it.
What followed was row after row of late-Victorian and Edwardian terraces, the kind with a tiled path, a bay at the front and a long thin garden at the back, plus a scatter of 1930s semis out toward Horn Park and the Greenwich fringe. Most are let to families now. That housing stock is the reason end-of-tenancy cleaning here is a particular job, not a generic one, and it is why the council you answer to is the first thing worth pinning down.
You can see the older Lee in Manor House Gardens, off Manor Lane. The grounds were laid out in the 1770s, complete with a lake and an ice house cut into the ground to store winter ice through the summer; the ice house was restored around the year 2000 and still sits there. The Manor House itself opened as a public library in 1902 and serves as one today, which is rare enough that local renters use it as a landmark when they describe where they live. A short walk away on Lee High Road stands Boone’s Chapel, a small almshouse chapel that has been carefully brought back to use.
None of that is tourism trivia. It tells you the age and grain of the place, and the age of a building is exactly what sets the cleaning job in front of any tenant moving out of it. A flat carved out of an 1890s house behaves nothing like a 1930s semi when you come to scrub it back to the inventory standard, and the clerk who inspects it knows the difference.
Which council your Lee deposit answers to
Here is the part that catches people out. If your flat sits on the Lewisham side of the line, the landlord almost certainly needs a selective licence. Lewisham brought in a borough-wide selective licensing scheme on 1 July 2024, a five-year scheme covering roughly 20,000 privately rented homes, and it reaches nearly every single-family let in the borough. Only Telegraph Hill and a small slice of Blackheath sit outside it. Most of Lee is well inside it.
Cross to the Greenwich side and the picture changes. Greenwich does run a selective licensing scheme, but it only covers five wards, all of them up around Woolwich and Plumstead. Lee and Lee Green are not among them. A landlord letting a single-family house on the Greenwich side of the boundary does not need a selective licence at all, while the identical house thirty seconds’ walk away on the Lewisham side does.
A landlord letting a single-family house on the Greenwich side of the boundary does not need a selective licence at all, while the identical house thirty seconds’ walk away on the Lewisham side does.
The exception cuts the other way for shared houses. Greenwich’s additional HMO licensing scheme is borough-wide and started on 1 January 2024, so if a Greenwich-side property in Lee is let to three or four sharers from more than one household, it needs an HMO licence even though it would not need a selective one. And the mandatory HMO rule, five or more people forming two or more households, applies everywhere in England regardless of the boundary.
Why does any of this touch your deposit? Because licensing and deposit protection sit in the same legal frame, and a licensed property is a watched property. The licence conditions push landlords to keep proper records and to lean on the check-out inventory, which means the end-of-tenancy clean gets scrutinised harder, not softer. You can read Lewisham’s position in full on the council’s selective licensing page. The practical takeaway is short: find out which council your SE12 postcode falls under before you assume anything about how your move-out will be judged.
The deposit itself is governed by national law, not by the council. Your landlord must protect it in one of the three government-approved schemes within 30 days of taking it, as set out on the gov.uk deposit protection guidance, and return it within ten days of you both agreeing the figure. The newer Renters’ Rights Act 2025 tightens the rules around tenancies and possession, but it does not change the core point about cleaning: you are only expected to return the property as clean as it was when you moved in.
So the same deposit law applies on both sides of Lee Green, yet the licensing backdrop differs, and that backdrop shapes how strictly the clean gets checked. A licensed landlord has more riding on getting the paperwork right, which tends to mean a thorough check-out with a clerk and a written inventory rather than a casual walk-round. For a tenant that is no bad thing. A proper inventory cuts both ways, and it gives you something concrete to point at if a deduction looks unfair.
One more wrinkle is worth flagging for anyone letting out a room rather than a whole flat. On the Lewisham side, a single-family let needs the selective licence; on the Greenwich side, a single-family let needs nothing, but a small shared house needs the additional HMO licence because that scheme runs borough-wide. It is an odd inversion, and it means the question is never simply whether a property is in Lee. The question is which council, and what kind of let.
What the clean covers in a Lee terrace
An end-of-tenancy clean is a top-to-bottom reset of the whole property, room by room, against the standard recorded at your check-in. It is not a fortnightly tidy with the good cloth out. We work through a 57-point agent-approved checklist, the same one the letting agents around Lee Green recognise, and we sign nothing off until every line on it is done.
In a typical Lee terrace that means the kitchen takes the longest. Cupboards emptied and wiped inside and out, the tops of the wall units degreased (that strip nobody reaches), splashbacks descaled, the extractor filter pulled and washed, the floor scrubbed into the corners. Bathrooms get the full treatment: tiles and grout, the shower screen, sealant, taps and the limescale that builds fast on the hard SE12 water. Then the rest of the flat, every room, in plain terms:
- Skirting boards, picture rails and door frames wiped down, including the runs behind where furniture stood.
- Internal windows, sills and the painted bay reveals that catch condensation in these older fronts.
- Light fittings, switches, sockets and the tops of doors dusted.
- Carpets and any upholstery hoovered through; hard floors mopped.
- Inside the wardrobes and built-in cupboards, including the shelves you cannot see from the doorway.
We bring our own kit and products, so you do not need to leave anything behind or have the place stocked. A few things have to be in place for us to do the job properly: the electricity and hot water on, the fridge and freezer defrosted, and personal belongings cleared out so we can reach every surface. Empty rooms clean faster and clean better, which is the whole point on a move-out.
The detail is where deposits are won. A clerk doing a Lee check-out does not glance round and tick a box; they work a room at a time with the check-in report open, photographing as they go. They open the oven door and look at the glass. They lift the toilet seat and check the hinges. They run a hand along the top of a door and inside the kitchen drawers. We clean to that level because we have watched enough check-outs to know exactly where the camera points. The hidden surfaces, the undersides, the backs of things, are where the standard clean earns its keep.
It helps that we are not strangers to these inspections. Working with 300+ letting agents means we have seen the in-house checklists the local firms use, and the 57-point list we follow lines up with what they expect. When an agent recognises the standard, the sign-off is quicker and the deposit moves faster.
Our pass rate on these jobs is 97% first time, and on the rare occasion a clerk does pull us up, the 48-hour re-clean means we come back and put it right at no extra cost. That guarantee is part of why 300+ letting agents keep sending us their Lee check-outs.
The hidden surfaces, the undersides, the backs of things, are where the standard clean earns its keep.
What end of tenancy cleaning costs in Lee
We price by the size of the property, full stop. No hourly meter running while you watch the clock, no padding the bill if the job runs long. You know the figure before we arrive, and it does not move unless the property is much larger than described.
For a standard end-of-tenancy clean in Lee the prices are: a studio at £156, a one-bedroom flat at £207, a two-bedroom at £243, a three-bedroom at £339, and a four-bedroom house at £425. Those cover the full property clean against the checklist. If you would rather book labour by time for a part-job or a top-up, that is £30 per cleaner per hour instead.
Most of our Lee work is the one and two-bedroom conversions in the older terraces, with the odd whole three-bed house when a family lease comes to its end.
Why fixed pricing and not hourly? Because hourly punishes you for the state the previous tenant left the oven in, and we would rather quote honestly and stand behind it. It also means our cleaners are not rushing to beat a clock. They work the checklist properly, which is what gets the deposit back and keeps the agent happy. Over the years that approach is part of how we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposit money that would otherwise have been swallowed by cleaning charges.
It is worth being clear about what an end-of-tenancy clean is and is not, because people sometimes book the wrong thing. A regular clean is upkeep: surfaces, floors, the loo and basin, a tidy. A one-off deep clean goes further and is what you might book once a year, or before guests, to reset a home you are staying in. An end-of-tenancy clean is the deep version aimed squarely at the inventory, with the move-out standard as the target rather than your own taste. If you are leaving a Lee flat for good, this is the one you want; the regular clean will not pass a check-out and the deep clean costs much the same without being framed around the report.
For most tenants the move-out clean is a one-time spend that protects a far bigger sum sitting in a deposit scheme. A two-bedroom clean at £243 set against a deposit that might run to five weeks’ rent is straightforward maths, which is why agents so often recommend booking it rather than risking the deduction.
Where Lee tenancies lose money
The same few things sink Lee deposits again and again, and most of them trace back to the age of the housing. These streets went up after 1866, so the fabric is old and it shows wear in predictable spots.
Hard water is the first. SE12 sits on a chalk supply, so limescale builds quickly on taps, shower heads, kettles and the inside of the loo. A clerk will run a finger over the bathroom fittings and a furred-up shower head reads as neglect, fair or not. We descale all of it as standard, because furred chrome is one of the cheapest things for an agent to flag and one of the easiest for us to put right.
Condensation is the second. Older terraces with single-glazed bay sashes and the odd retrofitted unit hold damp around the window reveals, and black spotting on the sealant or the painted frames is a classic deduction. The original sash boxes in the front rooms trap dust in the cords and the staff bead, and an inventory clerk will check inside the lower sash where it meets the sill.
Then there is the garden question. A lot of Lee lets come with a long back garden, and while we do not do landscaping, an end-of-tenancy clean does not cover an overgrown lawn or a shed full of someone’s leftover junk. That is worth sorting separately before check-out, because a neglected garden is one of the few things Shelter confirms a landlord can fairly deduct for if the inventory shows it was tidy when you arrived.
The flats around Manor Lane and the park have their own habit: original wood floors. People love them, then strip a rug back at the end and find scuffing and dust trapped in the board gaps that a domestic hoover never touched. We get into those. Built-in alcove cupboards either side of the chimney breast are another one, because tenants forget they are even inventoried, and a clerk always opens them.
Then there is the kitchen, which in these houses is often a later extension stuck on the back. Grease travels. It settles on the wall above the hob, on the underside of the extractor, on the cupboard doors nearest the cooker, and over a tenancy it builds a film that a sponge and washing-up liquid will not shift. That film is the single most common thing we are called in to deal with, and it is the single most common thing a clerk marks down. We degrease it properly, hob to ceiling.
Bathrooms in older Lee houses tend to be small and tiled floor to ceiling, which means a lot of grout, and grout holds mould and soap residue that brushes off as neglect. The sealant around the bath and basin yellows. Shower screens scale over. We treat all of it, because a tired bathroom is the easiest room in the house for a clerk to photograph and price up. The chalk water does not help, leaving a chalky bloom on glass and chrome that needs a descaler rather than a wipe.
None of this is exotic. It is just the specific way an old SE12 terrace gets marked down, and knowing the pattern is half the battle.
Extras worth booking near Manor Lane
Some jobs sit outside the standard clean and are worth adding when the inventory calls for them. We can do them on the same visit so you only coordinate one appointment.
Carpets matter at the final inspection, and a hoover does not lift ground-in traffic marks from a hallway that has had two years of family use. Our deep carpet cleaning uses hot-water extraction to pull the dirt out of the pile. It runs at £36 per bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bedroom flat done together.
The oven is the other usual flashpoint. Grease and burnt-on residue build up in a way that no quick wipe shifts, and a dirty oven is one of the most common single deductions an agent will make. Our deep oven cleaning takes the appliance apart, lifts the door glass out and cleans each piece by hand: £77 for a single oven, £110 for a double, £114 for a range cooker. Upholstery and mattresses can be extraction-cleaned too if the check-in listed them.
If your let came furnished, the sofa and mattresses may be on the inventory, and a stained sofa is a deduction like any other. Our upholstery cleaning uses the same hot-water extraction to lift marks out of fabric seats, dining chairs and mattresses. It is worth doing when the check-in photos show the furniture clean, because the clerk will compare the two and a tea-ringed sofa arm stands out.
Exterior windows are worth a thought if your tenancy specifies them, since the inside glass is part of the standard clean but the outside is not. We can bring the gear to reach the upstairs panes on a terrace safely. None of these extras are compulsory; book the ones your inventory actually calls for, and skip the rest. We will tell you honestly on the phone which are likely to matter for your particular property.
How booking works around Lee
Booking is a phone call. Ring 0333 555 2076, tell us the size of the property and your postcode, and we give you a fixed quote on the spot. We work seven days a week, weekends included, so a Saturday check-out is no problem. Lee station and the buses along Lee High Road mean our teams reach SE12 easily, and we time the clean to land between you moving out and the clerk arriving.
One tip. Book the clean for after the removals van has gone and the flat is empty, not before. We clean faster and more thoroughly with nothing in the way, and an empty flat is what the check-out is judged against anyway.
If you are moving within the area, it is worth lining up the dates so the clean happens the day before or the morning of your inspection. That keeps the place fresh for the clerk and leaves a buffer for the 48-hour re-clean in the unlikely event anything is queried. You can also email [email protected] if you would rather put the details in writing, and our office will sort a slot.
Parking is usually fine on the Lee back streets, which makes the practical side of a clean easier here than in tighter parts of south-east London. The team can get the kit from the van to the door without a long carry. End-of-month dates are the pinch point, not parking. Everyone’s tenancy seems to end on the same Friday, so the last week of the month books up first, and a Saturday slot at month-end is the first thing to go. If your move date is fixed, tell us early and we will hold the time.
We are a south-east London firm and we have run these SE12 jobs since 2014, so we know the rhythm of a Lee move-out: the removals overrun, the clerk is booked tight, and the clean has to slot cleanly into the gap. We plan for that. The point of fixed pricing and a same-day extras option is that you make one call, get one number, and do not spend moving week chasing three different trades.
We cover the wider area too, so if your move takes you across to end of tenancy cleaning in Lewisham, up to Blackheath, over to Hither Green or down toward Grove Park, the same fixed pricing and the same guarantee apply. Lee falls under our Greenwich end of tenancy cleaning coverage, which spans both sides of that borough line.
Lee end of tenancy questions
- Selective licence
- A council permit a landlord needs to let out most single-family homes in a designated area. Lewisham requires one borough-wide; Greenwich only requires one in five Woolwich and Plumstead wards, which do not include Lee.
- Check-out inventory
- The report a clerk compiles when you leave, compared line by line against the check-in record. It is the document your cleaning is judged against, so the clean has to match the condition you moved into.
- Fair wear and tear
- Normal deterioration from everyday living, which a landlord cannot deduct for. Dirt and grime you could have cleaned are not wear and tear, which is the line most cleaning disputes turn on.
- Hot-water extraction
- A deep-clean method that injects hot water and solution into a carpet or sofa and draws it back out with the dirt, used where a domestic vacuum cannot reach the embedded grime.
Does end of tenancy cleaning in Lee cost more on the Greenwich side or the Lewisham side?
No. Our pricing is by property size and is the same wherever the flat sits, so a two-bedroom is £243 whether it falls under Greenwich or Lewisham. The borough line affects licensing, not what we charge you for the clean.
How do I find out which council my SE12 property is in?
Check your council tax bill, which names the billing authority, or enter your postcode on either council’s website. The split runs roughly along Lee High Road and the Quaggy, so addresses very close to Lee Green can sit either side and are worth checking rather than guessing.
How much is an end of tenancy clean for a flat in Lee?
A studio is £156, a one-bedroom flat is £207, a two-bedroom is £243, a three-bedroom is £339, and a four-bedroom house is £425. The price is fixed by size, not by the hour, and we confirm it before we start.
Do you charge by the hour?
Not for a standard end-of-tenancy clean, which is priced by property size. If you only need part of a property done or a top-up, we can work by the hour at £30 per cleaner instead.
What is your 48-hour guarantee?
If the inventory clerk or agent flags any part of our clean within 48 hours, we come back and re-clean the issue free of charge. It is why we keep a 97% first-time pass rate on Lee check-outs.
Will I get my full deposit back if I book you?
Cleaning is one of the most common reasons for deductions, so a proper end-of-tenancy clean removes that risk. We cannot speak for damage or unpaid rent, but on the cleaning side we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits over the years.
Do I need to provide cleaning products or equipment?
No. Our cleaners bring all the products and equipment with them. You only need the electricity and hot water on and the fridge defrosted.
Does the property need to be empty before you clean?
Yes, ideally. Personal belongings should be cleared so we can reach every surface, and an empty flat cleans faster and to a higher standard, which is what the check-out is measured against.
Can you clean the oven and carpets at the same visit?
Yes. Deep oven cleaning runs from £77 for a single oven, and carpet cleaning by hot-water extraction is £36 per bedroom or £115 for a whole two-bedroom flat. Booking them with the end-of-tenancy clean saves arranging a second appointment.
Do you clean the windows?
The inside of the windows and the sills are part of the standard clean. Exterior window cleaning is a separate add-on, useful if your tenancy agreement asks for the outside glass to be done too.
How does the hard water in SE12 affect the clean?
Lee sits on a chalk water supply, so limescale builds quickly on taps, shower heads and the toilet. We descale all of it as part of the standard clean, because furred fittings are an easy thing for a clerk to mark down.
Can you handle the garden on a Lee terrace let?
An end-of-tenancy clean does not include gardening or clearing rubbish from a shed. If the check-in inventory recorded a tidy garden, sort that separately before your inspection, as a landlord can fairly deduct for it otherwise.
Do you work weekends in Lee?
Yes, we clean seven days a week, weekends included. A Saturday or Sunday check-out is common around here and we book those slots as normal.
How far in advance should I book?
As early as you can once your move date is set, especially for end-of-month and weekend slots which fill fastest. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] and we will hold a time.