End of tenancy cleaning in North Cray, booked in minutes

The first thing a Bexley inventory clerk does on a North Cray house is run a thumbnail down the shower screen, checking it against the cloudy mineral film the chalk water leaves on every glass in DA14. That one check tells you what the whole hand-back clean is built around: not a tidy, but a documented job that answers the check-out report line by line, at £30 per hour per cleaner with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. We are Monster Cleaning, and we have done this work along the River Cray since 2014. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover North Cray and the surrounding DA14 and DA5 streets: North Cray Road, Water Lane, Rectory Lane, the Maidstone Road side and the roads backing onto Foots Cray Meadows, plus Old Bexley, Bexley village and Joydens Wood. This page sits inside the Bexley directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Bexley.

How the clean and the agent hand-back actually fit together

Start with the mechanism, because almost nobody explains it and it is the whole game. When you moved in, a clerk walked the property and wrote a check-in report, usually with photos, describing every surface. The kitchen and bathroom were typically marked clean or as new, because the place had just been turned round between tenancies. That report is the benchmark. At the end of the tenancy a clerk walks it again, compares each line against the photographs, and marks anything materially worse than the check-in entry, beyond fair wear and tear. Whatever they mark is what your landlord or agent can hold back.

So the clean is not really about making the house look nice. It is about getting every item the clerk will compare back to the condition the check-in report recorded. Cleaning is the single most common reason deposits get clipped, and it is the one almost entirely in your control, because it is not wear. A carpet worn thin by four years of walking on it is wear. A carpet with a ground-in mark the clerk photographed fresh at check-out is a deduction. That line is where the money sits, and a clean built to the report puts you on the right side of it.

Your deposit is protected money. By law it sits in one of the three government-backed schemes, and the agent can only keep part of it for genuine, evidenced reasons. If you need to read your rights, Shelter sets them out well. We avoid the cleaning deduction by working to a written list, not to a feeling about what looks done.

That list is a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of check-outs in this part of south-east London and tuned to what the local clerks actually flag. The hand-back works like this. We clean the property against the checklist, ideally empty and as close to your check-out date as we can sensibly get, and leave it aired, photographed and ready for the inventory. The clerk inspects. If they raise any cleaning issue inside 48 hours, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee brings us back to put it right at no charge, provided nobody has moved in meanwhile. That is the loop, and it is why our work passes: it is measured against the same document the clerk is holding.

It works. Across our end-of-tenancy jobs we run a 97% first-time pass rate, and the small number that get a callback are nearly always timing problems rather than missed work. The checklist is the point, and it is the same list for a tenant chasing a deposit back or a landlord turning a house round, because the standard is set by the clerk, not by who pays us.

The clean is not about making the house look nice. It is about getting every item the clerk compares back to what the check-in report recorded.

The 57 things we work through, room by room

Here is the shape of the checklist. The full version comes with the job, or we walk you through it before we start, but this is what the bulk of a North Cray clean covers and roughly where the deposit risk concentrates.

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

The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks come out and soak, the door glass is split apart so the brown film between the panes is cleaned out, and the interior, fan, element and seals all get done. Baked-on grease is one of the most reliable deductions on a family house, and a sponge will not touch it. Then the rest of the room. Hob, control knobs and the extractor canopy degreased, the metal filter soaked rather than swiped over. The cooker pulled out where it slides so the grease trap down the side is done. Every cupboard and drawer emptied and wiped inside and out, fronts, handles and kickboards included. Sink and taps descaled, splashback and grout scrubbed. Fridge and freezer cleaned through, seals included, defrosted if you have left them running.

Bathrooms and en-suites, the other deduction magnet

This is where the chalk water bites, so it gets the slow treatment. The glass shower screen is brought back to clear glass with a proper acid descaler and the right dwell time, and the chrome taps, shower mixer and spray head are descaled the same way. The toilet is cleaned inside, under the rim, around the base and behind the pan, with the hard ring at the waterline taken off rather than bleached and left. Bath, basin, tiles and grout scrubbed, sealant lines cleaned, the extractor vent dusted, mirrors polished to no streaks.

Bedrooms, living rooms and the bits people forget

Inside every fitted wardrobe and built-in cupboard, because the clerk opens them. Skirting, picture rails, door tops, frames and handles, dusted and wiped. Carpets vacuumed right into the edges and under where furniture stood, hard floors mopped. Light switches, sockets, radiators and the gap behind them. Then everything that runs through the whole house: internal windows, sills, reveals and catches; cobwebs out of every ceiling corner; both faces of every door plus the top edge; the staircase, banister, spindles and the stair nosings where carpet wears and clerks always look; the hallway, the meter cupboard and the airing cupboard. Bins emptied, and the place left aired so it does not reek of product when the clerk walks in.

Two things deserve their own word. Where the clerk itemised a carpet at check-in, a vacuum will not clear it and you want the carpet shampoo add-on. Where the oven has months of baked-on grease, the deep oven add-on is often the difference between a pass and a charge. We tell you on the phone which your property genuinely needs. I am not going to talk you into a carpet machine for a house with laminate throughout.

What the clerk does on the day, in order

If you have never watched a check-out, here is roughly how it goes on a North Cray house, so you can see what the clean aims at.

1. They arrive with the check-in report and the in-going photos and work room by room, comparing line against line.
2. Kitchen first, usually. Oven door open, racks looked at, extractor filter checked, cupboards opened one by one, behind the cooker if it pulls out.
3. Bathrooms next. Shower screen held to the light, taps and chrome checked for scale, toilet under the rim and at the waterline, grout and sealant.
4. Each bedroom and reception room: a run along the skirting, the window reveals, inside the fitted wardrobes, the carpet edges, the patches where furniture stood.
5. Circulation space: the stairs and nosings, the banister, door tops, the hallway, the airing cupboard, the meter cupboard.
6. Photographs of anything that has changed, cross-referenced to the check-in image and written up with a suggested deduction.

Nothing exotic in that. No trick. Just a methodical person looking in every place ordinary life never makes you look, and a clean that passes is one that reached all of those places first. That is what the checklist encodes, and it is why we photograph the property before and after.

A dated set of before-and-after photographs settles a dispute far faster than any argument does.

What 302 ppm of chalk water does to a North Cray bathroom

Bexley sits on chalk, and the River Cray that gives these villages their name runs over the same aquifer. The supply here from Thames Water is classed as very hard, about 302 parts per million of calcium carbonate. In daily life that is a furred kettle. At a check-out it is a deposit problem, and a big one.

Every glass shower screen in DA14 builds a cloudy film that a cloth does nothing to. Chrome taps scale at the base. Mixer showers fur inside and the spray pattern scatters. Toilet pans grow a hard ring at the waterline that bleach leaves behind. The clerk checks for all of it specifically, because limescale is one of the most common bathroom deductions in this borough. We take it off with an acid-based bathroom treatment and a proper dwell time, not a quick wipe, because the screen has to come back to clear glass. A fair share of the bathroom deductions we get called in to fix were scale the outgoing tenant genuinely could not shift with what was under the sink.

One honest note on order of operations. If the bathroom keeps getting used for a couple of days after we have descaled it, the hard water starts re-depositing on the screen. That is the single most common reason a North Cray clean gets a callback, which is why we ask you to book us close to the check-out, not a week before.

North Cray itself: the smallest of the Cray villages

North Cray is the smallest and most rural of the Cray villages, and it is worth being precise, because people blur them. It is not Foots Cray, St Mary Cray, St Paul’s Cray or Crayford. North Cray is the green one, strung along the River Cray on the south-east fringe of Sidcup and bounded on its open side by Foots Cray Meadows. The Meadows are the largest open space in the borough, a local nature reserve of nearly 250 acres made from two old manor estates, with the eighteenth-century Five Arches bridge crossing the Cray near the middle and a waterfall below the weir.

The history is genuinely here and not brochure filler. St James’ Church, rebuilt in 1852 and Grade II listed, stands in the Meadows themselves. Loring Hall, a Grade II listed house of around 1760, is where Viscount Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, died in August 1822, briefly making this quiet corner the centre of international news, and a little way along the Cray sits Vale Mascal of 1746 with its restored Gothic bath house. North Cray Place, the mansion on the eastern estate, was demolished in 1962, with a council housing scheme built on part of the ground. None of that changes how you degrease an oven, but it tells you what the housing is, and the housing is what the clean has to match.

The stock, street by street

The mix here is detached and large semi-detached houses, some genuinely old cottages near the church, and pockets of post-war estate. That matters for a hand-back clean: it is mostly family houses with more bathrooms, more carpet and more oven than a flat. The roads we are most often on:

• North Cray Road (the A223), the spine of the place, carrying the larger interwar houses and the post-war estate either side of a fast road.
• Water Lane and Rectory Lane, the older lanes down towards St James’ Church and Loring Hall, where the housing is mixed and some of it is properly old.
• The Maidstone Road side, the Sidcup-facing edge, mostly 1930s semis and detached family houses.
• The streets backing onto the Meadows, gardens running down towards the Cray.
• The wider DA14 and DA5 roads around Old Bexley, Bexley village and Joydens Wood.

If your road is not on that short list, it does not mean we are not on it. Ring with the postcode and we will tell you. We are over here most weeks for Sidcup work, and there is a separate page for end-of-tenancy cleaning in Longlands just up the road. Local agents along this stretch include Village Estates on Main Road and Drewery, the independents who know exactly which house has the awkward range cooker.

The Bexley licence question landlords keep getting wrong

This one matters if you let property here, and people muddle it constantly. Bexley does run a selective licensing scheme, but it is narrow: it covers the Belvedere ward only and runs from 13 January 2025 to 13 January 2030. It does not cover North Cray, Foots Cray or Sidcup, so a landlord letting a single household in a North Cray semi does not need a selective licence the way a Belvedere landlord does. Across the rest of the borough, mandatory HMO licensing still applies on the national thresholds, so a larger shared house here can still need a licence, and Bexley runs no additional HMO scheme on top.

Confirm your own position with Bexley Council directly if you are unsure. Why does a cleaning company mention it? Because the licence and the deposit are handled by the same housing team, and a check-out only goes cleanly when the property is genuinely clean to the standard, not merely compliant on paper.

What 1 May 2026 changed, and what it did not

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 tenancy, and a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting for a fixed term to end.

Here is the part people get wrong. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. The benchmark is still the check-in report, and the deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before. What changed is timing. North Cray is steadier than the high-churn inner boroughs, but more move-outs now land on a rolling two months’ notice instead of a fixed end date, which makes them harder to plan. The takeaway is the same everywhere: book the clean a little earlier than you used to.

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

Straightforward pricing, no survey needed for a standard property. North Cray sits on our standard rates, not a premium-postcode loading, so you pay the base rate, the same as the rest of Bexley.

If you would rather book by time, it is £30 per hour per cleaner, though for a hand-back clean the fixed price is usually the better deal and removes the argument about how long it should have taken. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed. Oven deep-cleans are £77 single, £110 double and £114 for a 90cm range. Those figures assume a house in normal lived-in shape; a long tenancy with heavy wear or a pet household costs more, and we say so on the phone.

Then run the sum the deposit makes you run. A North Cray house carrying a deposit well into four figures, against a clean in the low hundreds, is not really a decision once you have seen how the oven and the shower screen alone get written up. The first round is the cheap one to win.

That price buys more than bodies and buckets. It buys a documented clean against the 57-point agent-approved checklist, from a company that works with 300+ letting agents across London and the South East and has helped tenants and landlords recover over £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.

Three jobs get muddled, and it is worth booking the right one.

End-of-tenancy clean

Built to pass the inventory and get a deposit back, measured against the check-in report, ideally with the property empty, and carrying the 48-hour re-clean guarantee.

Deep clean

A reset for a home you are keeping, with no formal standard to hit and nobody inspecting it afterwards.

Regular domestic clean

Ongoing weekly or fortnightly maintenance, a different service on a different rate, from £22 an hour.

A house off Water Lane, back in March

“We had a four-bed detached off Water Lane for nearly six years, two of us and three children by the end, so it had taken a battering. My worry was the two bathrooms. The hard water had fogged both shower screens and a chrome rail I had scrubbed for an hour was still furred at the joints, and the clerk had photographed the screens at check-in, so I knew they were coming back to bite. Monster sent three on a weekday, treated the screens and the chrome and left it long enough to actually work, did the range cooker and shampooed the stairs. Both screens went back to clear glass. The agent signed the check-out off that week and the full deposit came back, which after six years with three kids I had quietly written off.”
Dawn, ex-tenant, Water Lane DA14, March 2026

That is a fair example of the North Cray pattern: a long family tenancy, more than one bathroom carrying chalk-water scale, a range cooker and a carpeted staircase, and an agent who actually checks. The clean cost a fraction of what was at stake. It nearly always does. What turned it was not just the scrubbing but the dated photographs that went out with the invoice, the part most do-it-yourself check-outs never have.

Booking it, and why timing decides the result

It is not complicated, and we have kept it short on purpose.

1. Call or email. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the postcode, the number of bedrooms and your check-out date.
2. Get a fixed quote. We price it on that call against the rates above, including any carpet or oven add-on the property genuinely needs, and we tell you if it needs none.
3. We confirm a slot. Ideally the day before the check-out or the morning of it, so nothing gets re-soiled before the clerk arrives.
4. We clean to the 57-point list. A team works the checklist and leaves the property aired, photographed and ready.
5. If anything is flagged, we come back. The 48-hour re-clean guarantee covers any cleaning item raised within two days, at no extra charge.

Most North Cray jobs are booked, done and signed off inside a week. The one variable that genuinely changes the outcome is timing, so get us in as near the check-out as you can. A spotless bathroom used for two more days is no longer spotless when the clerk sees it. And if your check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway. We will do what we can.

Questions we get asked

How much is an end-of-tenancy clean in North Cray?

It runs from £156 for a studio to £425 for a four-bed, with a one-bed at £207, a two-bed at £243 and a three-bed at £339. North Cray is on our standard Bexley pricing, not a premium loading. Carpet and oven add-ons are extra, and we tell you on the phone whether your property actually needs them.

Do you guarantee the clean will pass the inventory check-out?

We work to a 57-point agent-approved checklist and run a 97% first-time pass rate on end-of-tenancy jobs. If your letting agent or the inventory clerk flags any cleaning issue within 48 hours of the clean, we come back and put it right at no charge, as long as nobody has moved in meanwhile. That is the re-clean guarantee in plain terms.

Why does the hard water in North Cray matter so much for my deposit?

Bexley is on chalk and Thames Water here is very hard, around 302 ppm of calcium carbonate. That leaves a cloudy film on shower screens and scale on chrome that a normal wipe cannot shift. Clerks photograph shower screens at check-in and check them again at check-out, so limescale is one of the most common bathroom deductions in DA14. We descale properly, with the right product and dwell time.

How quickly can you come out to a North Cray property?

Usually within a few days, and often sooner, because we are out in Sidcup and along the Cray most weeks anyway. For an end-of-tenancy clean we try to book you the day before your check-out or the morning of it, so nothing gets re-soiled before the clerk arrives. Ring with the date and we will tell you.

Do I need to be there when you clean?

No. Most people give us access through the letting agent or leave a key safely. We just need to know how we get in and whether the furniture has gone, because we plan the clean differently depending on that.

Is the clean the same standard for a landlord as for a tenant?

Yes, it is the same 57-point checklist either way. A landlord turning a North Cray house round between lets gets the same clean as a tenant protecting a deposit. The standard is set by what the inventory clerk checks, not by who pays us.

What if the oven or carpets are really bad?

Then you want the relevant add-on. The deep oven clean is £77 single, £110 double and £114 for a 90cm range. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room and £115 for a whole two-bed. If the clerk itemised the oven or a carpet at check-in, the add-on is almost always cheaper than the deduction.

Does the end-of-tenancy clean cover the garden or garage?

No, the standard clean is the inside of the property. If your tenancy agreement also makes you responsible for a garden tidy or clearing a garage, tell us up front and we will quote that separately. We would rather flag it before the check-out than have you caught out by it.

Do North Cray landlords need a selective licence from Bexley Council?

Generally no. Bexley’s selective licensing scheme covers the Belvedere ward only and runs from January 2025 to January 2030, not North Cray, Foots Cray or Sidcup. A single-household let here does not need a selective licence, though a larger shared house can still need a mandatory HMO licence on the national thresholds. Check your own position with Bexley Council if you are unsure.

How is your end-of-tenancy clean different from a normal deep clean?

A deep clean is for a home you are staying in. An end-of-tenancy clean has one job: getting the property back to its documented check-in condition so the deposit is not touched. It targets the exact things clerks check, the oven interior, the extractor filter, descaled bathrooms, carpet edges and cupboard interiors.

What areas around North Cray do you cover?

All of North Cray and the surrounding DA14 and DA5 streets: Sidcup, Foots Cray, Longlands, Old Bexley, Bexley village and Joydens Wood. We work with letting agents right across the borough, so wherever the property is in Bexley, ring with the postcode and we will confirm.

How do I actually book?

Call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the postcode, the number of bedrooms and your check-out date. You get a fixed quote on that call, we confirm a slot near the check-out, and if anything is flagged within 48 hours we come back free.

Other Monster Cleaning services in North Cray

Staying put rather than moving out? We also offer carpet cleaning in North Cray, oven cleaning in North Cray and domestic cleaning in North Cray.