The Korean suburb the railway made
Walk the length of New Malden High Street and you will pass more Korean signage than English in places. There are Korean supermarkets, barbecue restaurants, bakeries, hair salons and a couple of churches, with more spilling along Burlington Road, and the town holds the largest Korean population anywhere in Europe, somewhere around twenty thousand people. It started in the 1970s, when the South Korean ambassador lived on Coombe Lane West and people followed, and it has grown into its own quarter ever since. You will hear it called Little Korea or K-Town, and on a Saturday the car parks behind the High Street fill up with families who have driven in from half of south London to shop.
None of that is why you are reading this, but it tells you the kind of place New Malden is, and it shapes the lettings market more than you might think. A fair slice of the rental stock here turns over to that community, flats and houses let furnished, often through agents who know the patch inside out, and the check-out standard is taken seriously because demand for the next tenant is always there. We clean end-of-tenancy properties right across KT3, and New Malden has a particular shape to it that a deposit clean has to match.
The town itself is a railway town, plain and simple. There was almost nothing here before the line came through. The station opened on 1 December 1846 on the main line out of Waterloo, first as a stop called Coombe and Malden, and the houses followed the trains rather than the other way round. Building crept north of the station through the late Victorian years, gathered pace in the Edwardian decade, and then the inter-war boom filled in the rest with the bay-fronted semis you still see on street after street. Take the railway away and there is no reason for any of it.
The landmark everyone uses to point the place out is Apex Tower, the tall concrete office block right by the station on the High Street, put up in 1966 and impossible to miss whether you like it or not. It is the thing people mean when they say “by the tower”. So this page is about New Malden specifically, not a template with the name dropped in. If you would rather just talk to a person, ring 0333 555 2076 and we will price your property over the phone. Otherwise, read on.
The housing, and what it leaves behind
Most of what we clean in New Malden is older family housing. The spine of the place is Edwardian and inter-war: bay-fronted semis, longer Victorian terraces nearer the station, the odd detached house out towards Coombe where the streets get leafier and the gardens get bigger. These are houses with original features that hold dirt in ways a new-build never does. Picture rails, deep skirting, panelled doors, sash or steel-framed windows with tracks that collect grime, a tiled hall floor, sometimes a fireplace that may or may not still draw.
That age is the whole story of a deposit clean here. A flat that has been lived in for years leaves more behind than a glossy conversion, and the clerk knows exactly where to look. A team will spend a good morning on a three-bed semi, sometimes a full day if the kitchen and the bathroom have been let go.
There is a second strand to the housing too, and it matters near the High Street and Burlington Road. A lot of the bigger old houses around the centre have been carved into flats or let room by room, partly to serve the student trade and the Korean rental market, and a converted house comes with its own cleaning headaches. Shared kitchens that several people have used and nobody has deep-cleaned, communal stairs and hallways, bathrooms with limescale baked on from years of hard water. When one room in a shared house changes hands the clerk still checks it against the inventory, and the shared parts drag the whole thing down if they have been ignored.
The hard water is worth a word on its own. This corner of south-west London runs hard, and it shows on every tap, showerhead and glass screen in the borough. Limescale is one of the most common things a clerk pulls a tenant up on, because it builds quietly and a quick wipe does nothing to it. We descale it properly as part of the job, which a rushed end-of-tenancy effort almost never does.
What a deposit clean actually covers
A typical New Malden job is a two or three-bed flat or semi, and the work follows the age of the building. The kitchen is where most of the time goes. These older houses were not built with fitted kitchens, so what you have now is a later install squeezed into a smallish room, usually with the oven boxed into a run of units, an extractor over the hob nobody has touched in years, and a gap behind the freestanding appliances that is precisely where a careful clerk looks first.
We pull the oven and the fridge out where it is safe to, degrease the cupboard fronts inside and out, descale the sink, and take the oven apart properly rather than wiping the front and hoping. The oven is the single most disputed item in any check-out, so it gets done first and it gets done right. After years of roast dinners it is not a wipe-down job.
Then the bathroom, and this is where the hard water bites hardest. Limescale sits on the taps, the showerhead, the screen and the tile grout, and an older house often has tiling that has been over-painted or re-grouted more than once, with mould lurking in the seals. We scrub the grout, descale everything, sanitise behind and around the loo, and clean the extractor fan if there is one. Kitchens and bathrooms are where deposits are won and lost, because they are the rooms a clerk inspects hardest and the rooms tenants most often rush.
The rest of the property is detail work. Every room dusted top to bottom, the picture rails and the tops of the doors and the trickle vents people forget exist. Skirting boards, light switches and sockets wiped down. Internal glass and mirrors done. Carpets hoovered through, including the edges and corners a vacuum usually skips. Cobwebs out of the ceiling corners, which in a tall Edwardian room is more of a reach than it sounds. The window tracks get cleared, and they fill up fast on the streets that back onto the railway, where the grit comes off the line and settles in the runners.
The gardens are not our department. The inside is, right down to the under-stairs cupboard nobody has opened in months.
The 57-point list, and the re-clean
We clean to a 57-point checklist that the letting agents we work with have approved. It is not a number invented for a website. It is the actual list our team carries through the property, room by room, ticking items off on the way out, because a check-out clerk is working from a list of their own and we would rather hold the same one they do.
What it covers, in plain terms: every room dusted from the ceiling down, limescale off the taps and tiles and showerheads, grout scrubbed, the inside and outside of every kitchen cupboard, the oven stripped and cleaned, the hob and extractor degreased, the sink descaled, bathrooms sanitised including the seals and behind the loo, skirting and switches and sockets wiped, internal glass and mirrors cleaned, carpets hoovered through, and the cobwebs taken out of the corners. It is methodical and a bit dull, which is the point. A deposit is lost on the dull bits.
The part that matters more than the list is what happens if the clerk is not satisfied. We back every clean with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee, so if the inventory clerk or the agent flags our work within three days of us finishing, we come back and put it right at no charge. We do not argue over a smear on a pane or a missed shelf. We just return and sort it, because a re-clean costs us an hour and a deduction costs you a great deal more.
That guarantee is not a gamble on our part. We pass check-out first time on 97% of the properties we clean, so the re-clean rarely gets called in. Over the years we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions, and being on the books of 300+ letting agents across south-west London is the reason the agents around New Malden and Kingston recognise the name when you mention us. That recognition is the bit that actually helps you, because a clerk who has seen our work before tends to trust the next job too.
It is worth being clear about what the list is not. It is not a quick run round with a duster, and it is not the same as the regular clean some of these flats already have. A weekly or fortnightly cleaner keeps a lived-in home ticking over. An end-of-tenancy clean strips an empty property back to the condition it was let in, which means getting into the cupboards, the appliances and the corners a routine visit never touches. Different job, different list, different price.
Where the deposit money really goes
Cleaning is the single most common reason a landlord keeps part of a deposit. That is not our sales line. Shelter says the same, and so does every deposit scheme that publishes its dispute figures. On a New Malden flat or house the proposed charge tends to be priced to the size of the place, so a whole-property cleaning deduction is a meaningful sum rather than a token one.
You do not have to leave the place cleaner than you found it. You have to return it to the standard recorded on the check-in inventory, fair wear and tear aside.
Here is the bit tenants get wrong. You do not have to leave the place cleaner than you found it. You have to return it to the standard recorded on the check-in inventory, fair wear and tear aside. If the inventory said the oven was clean when you moved in, the oven needs to be clean when you leave. If the carpets were new, they need to be hoovered and stain-free, not replaced. Shelter is blunt about it: a landlord cannot force you to pay for professional cleaning, and a tenancy clause that demands it is a banned term. Their guidance on what a landlord can charge for cleaning, gardening or decorating is worth a read before you sign anything off.
So why pay us at all? Two reasons. First, doing a whole property to inventory standard during a move is a full weekend of work most people simply do not have. Second, an independent clean with a dated receipt is the strongest answer you can give a clerk who is minded to deduct. The receipt is the real product here. When an agent proposes a cleaning charge and you can show an invoice from a firm they already use, the conversation usually ends there.
The clerks round here are generally thorough, and that suits us. A clerk who photographs everything and runs a finger along the top of a door frame is a clerk who will sign off a clean done properly and move on. The trouble only starts when a tenant has rushed the job and a careful clerk has the time to find every miss. We would far rather clean for a fussy clerk than a lazy one.
Your deposit, the schemes and the new law
If you rented your New Malden home on an assured shorthold tenancy that started after April 2007, your deposit has to sit in a government-approved scheme. The agent or landlord has 30 days from taking it to protect it and to hand you the prescribed information. The three schemes are the Deposit Protection Service, MyDeposits and the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, and the rules are set out plainly on the government deposit protection page.
This matters for cleaning disputes more than people realise. Because the money is held by a scheme rather than by the landlord, you do not have to chase anyone for it. If you disagree with a cleaning deduction, you raise a dispute and an independent adjudicator decides, free of charge, on the evidence. The custodial schemes spell this out plainly; the Deposit Protection Service holds the money and runs a free adjudication if you and the landlord cannot agree. The check-in inventory, the check-out report and your cleaning receipt are that evidence. A clerk’s word against your memory goes nowhere. A clerk’s word against a dated invoice from a firm the agent already uses goes somewhere very different.
Keep everything. Photograph the property the day you hand the keys back, the oven and the bathroom and any carpet that was flagged at check-in especially. Keep our invoice. If a deduction does land, you have a couple of weeks in practice to dispute it before the agent pushes for the funds to be released, and the more you can hand the adjudicator the faster it goes your way. Most disputes that drag on do so because the tenant kept nothing and is arguing from memory.
The bigger change is the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which received Royal Assent in 2025 and is being brought in across England. It scraps the old assured shorthold tenancy and the fixed-term model behind it, which changes how and when a tenancy ends. The full text is on legislation.gov.uk if you want the detail. The thing that does not change is the standard at the end. You still hand the property back at inventory condition, and a clean to that standard still protects your deposit.
A few of the words agents use are worth pinning down, because half the arguments at check-out come from two people meaning different things by the same term.
- Check-in inventory
- The document recording the property’s condition and cleanliness on the day you moved in, usually with photos. It is the benchmark your check-out is judged against, so dig it out before you book anything.
- Check-out report
- The clerk’s assessment at the end, compared line by line against the check-in. Differences beyond fair wear and tear are where deductions come from.
- Fair wear and tear
- The normal wearing-down of a property from ordinary living. A landlord cannot deduct for it, and a carpet tired after five years is not the same as a stained one.
- End-of-tenancy clean
- A one-off deep clean of an empty property back to handover standard, priced by the size of the place rather than by the hour. Not the same as a regular domestic visit.
One borough, one set of licensing rules
New Malden is simpler than some of its neighbours on this front, and that is a relief. The whole town sits inside the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, on a KT3 postcode, so there is only one council and one set of housing rules to worry about. Compare that with Motspur Park a mile east, which the Beverley Brook splits between Kingston and Merton, and you can see why landlords there have a more confusing time of it.
For the great majority of lets in New Malden, ordinary flats and family houses, the licensing question does not arise at all. It only bites when a property is let as a house in multiple occupation, which is the larger shared houses, the room-by-room conversions, the student and shared lets clustered nearer the High Street and the station.
Kingston runs mandatory HMO licensing, which catches houses occupied by five or more people from two or more households sharing a kitchen or a bathroom. The borough ran an additional licensing scheme for five years, but it ended on 28 February 2023 and was not renewed, and there is no selective licensing covering ordinary single-family lets. For the time being it is mandatory HMO licensing only. The council sets out the current position on its HMO licensing pages, and it is worth checking there rather than trusting something you read about a different borough.
Why mention any of this on a cleaning page? Because if your property is one of the shared houses near the centre, an unlicensed let is a separate headache from the deposit, and a poor check-out clean only adds to the pile. For everyone else, which is most people in a town of family semis and self-contained flats, this is one thing you can cross off. The deposit and the clean are what you actually need to get right.
What it costs, and booking around the line
We do not charge by the hour. We never have. An hourly rate punishes you for having a bigger place and gives the cleaner a reason to slow down, neither of which is fair on you. We price the whole job by the size of the property: the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, whether the oven is a single or a double, whether the carpets need extraction rather than a hoover, and whether a loft conversion or a side return has added rooms.
That means a flat price, agreed before we turn up, and a team that stays until the 57-point list is done rather than until a clock runs out. You know the figure in advance, it does not creep, and if the clerk flags something the re-clean is already built in. A studio flat by Apex Tower is a different number from a four-bed semi out towards Coombe with a loft conversion, and the only way to get yours is to tell us the property. Ring 0333 555 2076 or use the contact form with the address and the room count, and we will quote it properly.
It is worth being honest about what pushes the price up. Carpets that need hot-water extraction rather than a hoover. An oven nobody has cleaned in years. Heavy limescale in the bathrooms, which the hard water round here all but guarantees. A converted house with shared parts that have been let go. None of these surprise us, and we would far rather you mentioned them on the phone so the quote is right first time. A price that changes when the team arrives is the thing people hate most about cleaners, and we do not work like that.
Booking is a phone call or a form, not an app and not a five-step portal. The trains shape the timing more than the cleaning does. New Malden station runs fast services to Waterloo through Raynes Park and Wimbledon, so the town is busy on a weekday and the streets near the station get tight. Removals vans have to get down residential roads lined with parked cars, and the area around the High Street and the Fountain roundabout clogs up at the wrong time of day. If your move lands on a busy morning, get the van in early and tell us, because nobody wants a lorry stuck on Coombe Road behind a queue.
We work seven days a week, and on a move we will usually clean the day the van leaves or the morning after, once the property is empty. Book a few days ahead if you can, especially around month-end. Tell us if there is off-street parking, because some of these semis have a driveway and that makes our life easier than circling the streets near the station for a space.
One last practical thing. We need the property empty, the electricity on, the hot water running and the fridge-freezer switched off and defrosted before we start. The defrosting is the one people forget, so turn it off the night before. If your check-out inspection is booked for a set time, tell us that too, and we will finish with enough margin before the clerk arrives rather than gambling on it.
The add-ons worth paying for
A standard end-of-tenancy clean covers far more than people expect, but a handful of add-ons genuinely earn their place on a property like this, and a couple do not. Here is the honest version.
Carpets are the big one. On a long tenancy in a family semi, hoovering will not lift the ground-in traffic marks down the hall and on the stairs, and the clerk knows the difference. If the inventory shows the carpets were clean or new, book our carpet cleaning with hot-water extraction so they come back to condition in one visit. The same goes for any sofa or armchair that came with the let; our upholstery cleaning deals with the marks and the smell a vacuum leaves behind.
The oven is the other reliable battleground. After years of use it is not a wipe-down job, and our oven cleaning strips the appliance down, takes the door glass apart and cleans each piece, which is exactly what a clerk expects to see. If you have a lot of glass or those older steel-framed windows, the inside gets done as standard but the outside does not, so add exterior window cleaning and we will bring the water-fed poles. For the whole property at handover, the full end-of-tenancy clean is the package most tenants here actually need.
What you usually do not need is a separate deep clean on top of the tenancy clean, because the end-of-tenancy service already cleans to that depth for handover. And our domestic cleaning is for people staying put, not moving out, so it is the wrong product at check-out. If you are shifting furniture between two places, our removals team can take that on, but it is a separate booking from the clean. We will tell you straight when an add-on is a waste of money on your particular property, because selling you something you do not need is a quick way never to hear from your agent again.
If you are moving within the area, we cover the streets all around you. There are dedicated pages for end-of-tenancy cleaning in Motspur Park just east, Old Malden and Malden Manor to the south, and Worcester Park a little further out. Towards Wimbledon there is Raynes Park and West Barnes right next door, and back towards the river we cover Kingston, Norbiton, the leafier streets of Coombe and, down the line, Tolworth.
If your move is in New Malden itself, the quickest way to a price is still the phone. Tell us the property, the rooms and the date the keys are due back, and we will give you a fixed figure and a slot. Ring 0333 555 2076 or send the details through the contact form, and we will sort the rest.
Questions New Malden tenants and landlords ask
How much does end-of-tenancy cleaning cost in New Malden?
It depends on the size of the property, because we price the whole job rather than charging by the hour. A studio flat near the station is a very different number from a four-bed semi out towards Coombe with a loft conversion. Tell us the bedrooms, the bathrooms and any extras like carpets or a double oven, and we will give you a fixed price on the phone before anything is booked.
Do you guarantee I will get my deposit back?
No honest firm can promise that, because a deposit can be docked for damage, unpaid rent or missing items that have nothing to do with cleaning. What we guarantee is the clean. We pass check-out first time on 97% of properties, and if the inventory clerk challenges our work within three days we return and fix it free under our 48-hour re-clean guarantee. A dated receipt and that re-clean are your strongest answer to a cleaning deduction.
What is the 57-point checklist?
It is the room-by-room list our team works through, and it is the one the letting agents we deal with have approved. It covers everything from the oven and the window tracks to the grout, the skirting and the insides of the kitchen cupboards. It exists so we clean to the same standard the check-out clerk inspects against, which is why the first-time pass rate is what it is.
Can my landlord force me to use a professional cleaner?
No. A tenancy clause that demands you pay for professional cleaning is not a fair term, and Shelter is clear on it. You only have to hand the property back at the standard recorded on your check-in inventory, fair wear and tear aside. Plenty of tenants still book a professional clean anyway, because doing a whole flat to inventory standard mid-move is a weekend of work and an independent receipt settles a dispute fast.
Is New Malden in Kingston or Merton?
New Malden sits wholly within the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, on a KT3 postcode, unlike Motspur Park just east of it which is split with Merton along the Beverley Brook. For the cleaning it makes no difference either way. It only matters for the council rules behind your tenancy, and in New Malden there is just the one council to deal with.
Do I need an HMO licence to let a property in New Malden?
Only if it is a larger shared house. Kingston runs mandatory HMO licensing, which catches properties occupied by five or more people from two or more households sharing a kitchen or bathroom. The borough had an additional licensing scheme until February 2023, but it was not renewed, and there is no selective licensing. So for an ordinary family let or a single-household flat, no licence is needed.
How soon can you clean after the removals van has gone?
Usually the same day or the morning after, once the property is empty. We work seven days a week and turn up by van with our own kit, so the timing is down to your move rather than ours. Around month-end it is worth booking a few days ahead, because that is when half of New Malden seems to move at once.
What do you need from me before you arrive?
An empty property with the electricity on, the hot water running and the fridge-freezer switched off and defrosted. The fridge-freezer is the one people forget, so turn it off the night before. If your check-out inspection is booked for a set time, tell us, and we will finish with a margin to spare before the clerk turns up.
Do you clean carpets and ovens as part of the service?
Ovens, yes, as standard, taken apart and cleaned properly rather than wiped over. Carpets are hoovered as part of the clean, but if they are marked from a long tenancy they need hot-water extraction, which is a separate add-on. In a family semi with fitted carpets throughout it is usually worth it, and we will tell you straight whether yours need it.