End of tenancy cleaning in New Eltham

The first thing the clerk opens in a New Eltham semi is the airing cupboard, because the immersion tank in these 1930s houses sheds lint and lets scale creep down the slats, and a rushed clean always skips it. So a hand-back clean out here has to be the thorough sort: built around the check-out report, room by room, £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the clerk’s own sheet. We have run end of tenancy work across SE9 since 2014, on the Footscray Road semis and the bungalows backing Avery Hill Park. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.

Last updated June 2026. We cover SE9 across New Eltham, the Footscray Road and Sidcup Road corridor, the streets backing onto Avery Hill Park, the Southwood Road semis and the closes built out toward Mottingham, plus the slices that tip over into Bexley. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Greenwich.

How a report from your first day decides your last

Start with the mechanism, because it is the whole game and almost nobody reads it that way. The day you moved in, a clerk walked the house and wrote a report describing every surface, usually with photos, usually with "clean" or "as new" against the kitchen and bathroom. Those words were honest on the day, because the place had just been cleaned to a professional standard for you. At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares line by line. Anything materially worse than the move-in entry, past fair wear and tear, comes off your deposit. You are being marked against a professional clean, which is exactly why a borrowed Henry and a free weekend rarely gets a family hand-back over the line.

The money is not abstract. On the New Eltham DIY check-outs we get called in to rescue, the deductions land in a pattern: the oven and the grease baked onto the back of the cooker-hood canopy, the fridge seal, scale on the bathroom taps and shower screen, darkened grout, dust on the original picture rail and the stairwell dado, and carpet wear or a pet patch along the gripper. Each line is a re-attendance charge, and they add up faster than people expect against a two or three-bed deposit. Most tenants only run that sum after they have tried, failed the check-out, and lost the first round.

Two bits of law sit behind this and pull opposite ways. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 means your landlord cannot make professional cleaning a contract condition, so nobody can force you to book us. Damp and mould, though, are a landlord obligation under the Homes Act 2018, not a tenant cleaning failure. The cold north-facing bathrooms in some of these interwar houses grow mould in the corners, and where it is structural we photograph it so the charge sits where it belongs instead of on you.

The 1 May 2026 change, and what it left alone

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone. Every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic one, and a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any time of year rather than waiting for a fixed term to end.

Here is the part people get the wrong way round. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. The Tenant Fees Act still applies. The check-in benchmark still applies. The deposit maths is what it was the week before. What changed is timing.

New Eltham is a settled commuter suburb, long lets and families who stay put for years, so it never had the brutal month-end clustering of a central borough. Let tenancies run on a rolling two months instead of fixed end dates, though, and hand-back dates scatter across the calendar more unpredictably than they used to. The takeaway is dull but it pays for itself: ring as soon as you have a date, because the slot you want is easier to lose now.

The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all.

The 57 things, room by room in a New Eltham semi

Every booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist built over a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what SE9 clerks actually flag. The full sheet comes with the job, signed, or we walk you through it before we start. Here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where most of the deposit is won or lost

The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks go in a soaking tank, the door glass is split apart so the brown film between the panels comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals all get done. On these semis the cooker hood is the sleeper: years of family roasts cake the back of the canopy and up into the duct, and a clerk who knows the stock pulls the filter and looks. We take the hood off the wall to clean behind it. Hob rings and burners off, control knobs off and washed. Every cupboard inside and out, drawers out and back. Fridge and freezer through once you have defrosted them, seals included. The fridge, the dishwasher and the washing machine get pulled out so the gaps behind and under them are cleaned, then put back. The washing-machine drum, the detergent drawer and the door seal. Dishwasher filter, seals and spray arms. Microwave inside, out and underneath. Sink, taps, drainer and plughole descaled, because the hard water never misses those. Tiles and grout scrubbed. On a glazed rear extension we do the internal frame and the threshold seal, where a New Eltham kitchen collects a year of crumbs and garden grit. Floor pulled back where it lifts, hoovered and mopped.

The bathroom, the other place it goes wrong

Scale comes off the taps, shower head, screen and tiles first. Grout is scrubbed back as far as honest effort takes it, and photographed first where it is plainly past saving. Then the rest, in plain order.

• Toilet done properly: inside, under the rim, base, cistern, hinges, and behind the pedestal where only the clerk looks
• Shower screen both sides, the tracks and the sealant bead
• Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, overflow and plughole, and the calcium tide line off the enamel
• Mirrors and cabinets, and behind them where they come away from the wall
• Heated towel rail dusted between the rungs
• Extractor grille wiped and the airing cupboard around the immersion tank cleared of lint, slat shelves wiped
• Floor into the corners, behind the loo and under the basin

Bedrooms, the hallway and the rest

Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard, the under-stair store included, because the previous tenants always used it and it is always last on their own list. Skirting, door frames, doors, handles and finger plates. Light fittings, lampshades, switches and ceiling roses. Window sills, reveals and frames cleaned on the inside, the half-landing window on the stairs too. The original picture rail in the hallway and the dado at handrail height up the stairwell hold years of dust in these houses and always get checked. Radiators behind, under and on top. 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. Upholstery hoovered through. Then the brick-and-render lintel above the back door, where dust packs into the lip, the loft hatch, cobwebs out of the ceiling corners, and a final photographed walk-through, every room, before and after. That photo set is the evidence you keep.

Two jobs often need their own pass. Hot-water extraction on carpets is written into a fair few SE9 tenancies as a hard requirement, which is what the carpet cleaning add-on covers on the same visit. A hard-used family sofa sometimes needs full upholstery cleaning rather than a hoover.

Hard water, and what it does to an SE9 bathroom

New Eltham sits in Thames Water‘s hard-water zone, and that one fact loses more deposits here than almost anything bar the oven. The supply runs around 290 milligrams of calcium carbonate a litre on the south London grid, the chalk picked up off the aquifer the water travels through. Calcium builds on taps, shower heads, screens and tile joints faster than tenants expect, and a wipe with a cloth does nothing to it. The clerk checks for exactly this. They run a thumbnail down the tap, tilt the shower screen against the light, pull the shower head in close. Scale that has set into the chrome is slow work, not a spray-and-go job.

Grout is the other one. Kitchen and bathroom grout is the line between a pass and a deduction in this suburb more often than anything to do with carpets. We scrub it rather than wipe it. Where it is genuinely past saving, which happens on a long family let, we photograph the state before we start, so the clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already there at check-in. That dated photo has settled more disputes than any argument has.

That dated photo has settled more disputes than any argument has.

Floors sit just outside the scrub-and-go work. The original parquet you still find in some of these hallways, a glazed-extension tile, an engineered board in a refitted kitchen: each takes its own product, which is what the floor cleaning add-on is for. Exterior glass on a bay-fronted semi is a separate job too, folded into the same visit when the inventory asks for it.

New Eltham street by street: the stock barely changes, the wear does

New Eltham is unusual among the areas we work because the housing is so consistent. It went up in one long burst after the railway arrived, and most of what stands is interwar. The station opened in 1878 as Pope Street, took the name New Eltham in 1886, and the semis fanned out either side of Footscray Road and Sidcup Road in the building boom that followed. So you are mostly dealing with one archetype: the 1930s bay-windowed, mock-Tudor or rendered semi, three beds up, two reception rooms down, a kitchen extended into a glazed rear at some point, a refitted bathroom, and a strip of garden with a path to a back gate. What varies is not the house, it is how hard four years of family life has worn it.

The Footscray Road and Sidcup Road spine

This is the heart of it: long runs of 1930s semis, with the larger ones set back behind front gardens on the Sidcup Road frontage, which is the A20. Southwood Road runs the same profile a touch quieter. These are honest houses to clean if you know the weak points, and they are always the same ones: the cooker hood, the hallway picture rail, the stairwell dado, the airing cupboard, and the lintel lip above the back door. Anyone who has cleaned one knows the order. Top down, hallway last, back gate left open for the bin run.

Avery Hill, the bungalows and the campus edge

North of the railway the houses thin into bungalow strips backing onto Avery Hill Park, the green space wrapped around the University of Greenwich’s Avery Hill campus and its Grade II* listed Winter Garden, the second-largest Victorian glasshouse in the country after the one at Kew. The bungalows share the interwar idiom but put everything on one floor with a bigger garden, which changes the order of the clean more than the content of it. Avery Hill Road and Bexley Road run the strips. The University also brings a thread of student and staff lets through the area on a tighter academic cycle.

Post-war infill, the closes and the parade flats

Fill in the gaps and you get the rest: post-war three-bed semis on roads like Greenvale Road and Beechhill Road, 1990s and 2000s detached and semi-detached on small private closes off the main road, and one and two-bed flats above the New Eltham station parade and along Southwood Road. The closes need a day’s notice for the residents’ parking. The parade flats we can usually reach next day. Charlton Athletic even keep their training ground down Sparrows Lane, on the eastern edge of the area, which surprises people who think the club is all Valley-side.

New Eltham straddles a boundary, and people guess wrong. Most of it is the Royal Borough of Greenwich, but the eastern edge tips into Bexley, and the lines toward Sidcup and Mottingham are not where you would draw them. Not sure which side you are on? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the postcode and we will tell you in about ten seconds.

What it costs, and the sum nobody runs until it is too late

New Eltham runs at our base pricing: £30 per hour per cleaner, with kit, products and travel inside the area included. Those figures assume a house in normal lived-in shape. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household, or somewhere that has not had a proper clean in three or four years takes longer, and we say so on the phone rather than after. No surprise lines on the invoice. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed’s worth. The oven add-on is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a 90cm range.

Run the maths the way the deposit makes you. A three-bed semi at £339 to protect a deposit pushing £2,000 is not really a decision. Every booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the clerk flags any cleanliness issue inside 48 hours, we come back and put it right free, provided you tell us inside that window and the place is still as we left it, with nobody moved in. Our pass rate across local jobs sits near 97%, but the guarantee is the point. There is a reason the agents here know us. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. That figure is really the whole job: money that stays with the tenant instead of the landlord.

One distinction worth getting right before you book, because the three jobs get muddled and the wrong one wastes money.

Check-in inventory report

The document the clerk writes on day one, describing every surface with photos. It is the benchmark your check-out is judged against, which is why we clean to it, not to a vague idea of "clean".

End of tenancy clean

Built to pass that inventory and get the deposit back, against the letting-agent benchmark, with the place empty and the 48-hour guarantee on it, at £30 an hour per cleaner.

Deep clean

A deep clean resets a home you are keeping, with no formal standard to hit, also from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

A regular domestic clean is ongoing upkeep, from £22 an hour on a weekly visit.

A Footscray Road job from the spring

"We handed back a 3-bed pebbledash semi just off Footscray Road after four years. Two kids who started school while we were there, and a soft old lurcher who owned the back room. The check-in photos had the lounge carpet looking showroom-fresh, and there was an obvious darker patch along the edge where the dog slept, plus an oven extractor that had taken a battering from four years of Sunday roasts. Monster sent three cleaners for the full day, lifted the dog patch on the second pass with an enzyme treatment, took the cooker hood right off the wall to clean behind the canopy, and did the stair carpet on top. The Robinson Jackson clerk came round on the Tuesday and signed it off the same afternoon. We had £1,820 of the £1,950 deposit back by the Friday. The £130 was a fence panel the February wind had cracked, nothing to do with the clean."
The Owusu family, New Eltham SE9, April 2026

That job is a fair example of the local pattern: a long family tenancy, an oven and hood nobody had dealt with for years, a carpet the move-in photos held to a high bar, and an agent who checks. The clean cost a fraction of what was at stake. It usually does. What turned it was not the scrubbing alone but the dated photo set that went out with the invoice, the part most DIY hand-backs simply do not have when the clerk pushes back.

Questions we get asked

Do I actually need a professional end of tenancy clean in New Eltham?

Nobody can force you. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 stopped landlords writing professional cleaning in as a contract condition. The snag is the benchmark. Your check-in report was written on a flat that had just been cleaned to a professional finish, and the check-out clerk marks you against that. On a 1930s semi off Footscray Road with four years of family living in it, a mop on a free Sunday rarely closes the gap.

What did the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change for New Eltham move-outs?

It went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, and every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic one, so a tenant can give two months’ notice at any point. The cleaning side did not move at all. The check-in benchmark, the deposit maths and the deductions a clerk can make are all the same as the week before. What shifts is timing, and in a settled suburb like this the effect is that hand-back dates are less predictable, so book sooner.

Does New Eltham need a landlord licence?

Most family semis here do not. The Royal Borough of Greenwich runs a borough-wide additional HMO licence (1 January 2024 to 31 December 2028) that catches houses shared by three or more people in separate households, plus a selective scheme that only covers central Woolwich and Plumstead, not SE9. A standard let on Southwood Road or Footscray Road sits outside both. A shared house split into rooms may need the HMO licence, so check the council lookup if that is you.

Why is the limescale so stubborn here?

Thames Water supplies SE9 and the water is hard, around 290 milligrams of calcium carbonate a litre on the south London grid. Chalk picks up off the aquifer and settles on taps, the kettle, the shower head and the bath as a white crust a household spray will not touch after a few years. We descale it properly rather than smear it about, which is the difference the clerk looks for when they run a thumbnail down the mixer tap.

How far ahead should I book?

A week is comfortable. We can usually manage 48 hours on a two or three-bed semi at a push, and the station-parade flats we can often reach next day. Hand-back dates in New Eltham spread across the month rather than piling onto the last three days the way central London does, so you have a bit more room. Even so, ring as soon as you have your date.

Is carpet shampooing worth adding?

On a long family let, almost always. The lounge and the stairs take the brunt of it, and a pet, a buggy in the hall or four winters of muddy school shoes leave a mark the vacuum cannot lift. If your tenancy writes in professional carpet cleaning with a receipt, skipping it is a near-certain deduction. Same crew, same visit, just a separate machine and a separate line on the quote.

Can you deal with pet stains and pet hair?

Yes. We carry an enzyme treatment for pet stains and a brush head cut down to get into the carpet gripper along the skirting, where the hair packs in. Tell us at the quote so the right kit is on the van. Pets are common in these gardens-and-families streets, and a darker patch where the dog slept is one of the first things a clerk photographs against the move-in pictures.

Do you clean the loft and the garage?

The loft hatch and the boards just inside it, yes. A fully boarded loft stacked with a family’s storage we quote on its own. The single-skin garage you find on a lot of these plots gets its internal floor swept and wiped on the standard brief, along with the path down to the back gate where the bins live.

What about the glazed rear extension?

The internal frame, the threshold seal and the floor are on the standard brief, and that threshold matters in SE9 kitchens because it collects a year of crumbs and garden grit. A glass roof that needs a long pole and access kit from outside we price separately.

Will the clean help if my deposit goes to dispute?

It is built to. You get a dated, photographed report against the 57-point list, room by room. If the case goes to a deposit scheme such as the TDS, mydeposits or the DPS, that report is what you submit alongside the check-out, and an adjudicator weighs documented evidence over a clerk’s say-so. Shelter’s deposit guidance sets out the steps.

Furnished or unfurnished, does it change the price?

It does. Furnished is more work, because every drawer, cupboard interior and the underside of the furniture comes into the spec, so we charge the time honestly rather than quote a flat figure and grumble on the day. An empty flat is quicker and cleaner, which is also the state your clerk expects to inspect.

Which letting agents do you work with around here?

We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across our patch. In New Eltham and Eltham that means regular work with Robinson Jackson, the Acorn group through its John Payne office, and Oakwood Estates, whose branch sits on the corner of Avery Hill Road and Footscray Road opposite the station. Where an agent has its own inventory quirks, the crew is briefed on them before the job.

Do you cover Eltham, Mottingham and Sidcup too?

Yes, the whole SE9 corridor and over the edges into Bexley. New Eltham borders Avery Hill to the north, Mottingham to the west, Eltham to the north-west and Sidcup to the east, and we work all of them. Pick your area from the End of Tenancy Cleaning Greenwich hub, or ring with the postcode and we will tell you which side of the boundary you are on.

What if the place still has furniture in it when you arrive?

We can work around a few bits left behind, but the result is never as complete and the price reflects the extra handling. The clean a clerk grades best is on an empty flat, because that is what they assume when they inspect, so clear what you can before we get there.

Other Monster Cleaning services in New Eltham

Staying put rather than moving out, or sorting the place you are moving into? We also offer carpet cleaning in New Eltham, oven cleaning in New Eltham and domestic cleaning in New Eltham. If you want the move and the clean on one booking, our removals team works the same diary. We cover the SE9 neighbours as well, from Eltham and Mottingham to Avery Hill and Kidbrooke, all under the End of Tenancy Cleaning Greenwich hub.