The clean behind the Hoover Building
The white art-deco block on the A40 with the green tiled doorway is in Perivale, not Greenford, whatever the satnav says. The Hoover Building went up on Western Avenue at the start of the 1930s, designed by Wallis, Gilbert and Partners as Hoover’s British headquarters and factory, and it is Grade II* listed. John Betjeman called it a sort of art-deco Wentworth Woodhouse. Tesco took part of the site for a superstore in the 1990s, and the front block has since been turned into flats and maisonettes with full-height Crittall windows.
Those flats matter to us, because we clean a fair few of them at the end of a tenancy. A converted listed building is its own kind of job. The windows are tall steel-framed Crittall units that show every smear, the ceilings are high, and some of the layouts are double-height maisonettes with a mezzanine, so a clerk inspecting one expects it to look close to the finish it had when it was sold. You cannot rush the glass in a place like that.
This page is about one job only. Getting a Perivale property through its final inspection so the deposit comes back whole. Perivale has its own quirks, the A40 splitting it, the hard water, a whole-ward licensing rule that the suburb next door does not share, and the rest of this explains how we approach them and where a UB6 inventory clerk actually looks.
A suburb the A40 cut in half
Perivale is the smallest of Ealing’s seven towns, and the road runs straight through the middle of it. Western Avenue, the A40, was driven through the fields here in the late 1920s and 1930s, and the housing followed the road. Street after street of bay-fronted semis went up either side of it, the standard interwar Metroland type, three bedrooms, a hall, a kitchen pushed out into the side return. That is the bread and butter of what we clean in UB6.
The A40 still shapes the working day. It is fast and loud, the side roads off it can be a nuisance to turn into at the wrong time, and the houses nearest the carriageway carry more road grime on the window frames than the quieter streets back towards Horsenden Lane. None of that is a complaint about the place. It just means a semi on the main drag and a flat tucked behind the station fail their inspections in slightly different spots, and we plan the time for each.
Newer blocks have filled in around Perivale station and the old industrial strip by Perivale Park, so the mix is broader than it looks from the dual carriageway. You get the 1930s semis, the Hoover Building conversions, a band of flats near the tube, and the odd terrace. The kind of home decides the clean. A semi let to one family for six years carries a deeper, more honest layer of wear than a flat that turns over every twelve months.
The green edge: Perivale Wood and Horsenden Hill
For a suburb cut by a dual carriageway, Perivale keeps a surprising amount of green at its edges. Perivale Wood, off Sunley Gardens, is one of the oldest local nature reserves in Britain, about 27 acres of ancient oak woodland that turns blue with bluebells every spring. It is owned and run by the Selborne Society, founded in 1885 to honour the naturalist Gilbert White, and access is mostly limited to members and the open day, so it has stayed genuinely wild.
North of the houses the ground rises to Horsenden Hill, one of the higher points in this part of west London, with the Grand Union Canal’s Paddington branch running along its foot and the River Brent winding through Perivale Park. I mention all this because it places the housing. The streets near the wood and the hill are quieter and a little older in feel; the ones hard by the A40 are not. A clerk does not care about the view, but the damp that sits in the lower ground near the Brent shows up on the walls, and that they do mark.
St Mary’s, the little church off Perivale Lane, dates to at least the early thirteenth century and is one of the oldest things for miles. Most tenants here never go in. It is a useful reminder, though, that Perivale was a hamlet long before the A40, and the older corners of it behave like older housing when you come to clean them.
What a UB6 deposit is really worth
Under the Tenant Fees Act, the deposit on most tenancies is capped at five weeks rent, and on a typical Perivale let that is a serious sum. For a family in a three-bedroom semi it runs well into four figures. It is your money. The landlord only holds it, and the law says it has to sit in one of three government-backed schemes within thirty days of you paying it, where neither side can spend it until you both agree how it is divided.
That last part is the catch, because agreement is exactly what a cleaning deduction destroys. The pattern is the same one we see right across UB6. The tenant cleans as best they can on the last night, the clerk does the check-out the next morning, and a few days later an email arrives proposing a deduction for cleaning, sometimes carpets on top. The figure is rarely outrageous, which is the whole trick of it. It is pitched low enough that arguing feels like more bother than the money is worth, so most people swallow it. That quiet shrug is where tenants lose the most. We have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions, and a good chunk of that was money people had already written off.
The figure is rarely outrageous, which is the whole trick of it.
The licensing rule that covers all of Perivale
Here is where Perivale differs from the suburb next door, and it is worth understanding before the keys change hands. The whole of Perivale ward sits inside Ealing’s selective licensing scheme. Not part of it, not one side of a line, the whole ward. That is not true everywhere in the borough, so a Perivale let carries a licensing position that an otherwise identical home a mile away may not.
The detail is this. Ealing made its second selective licensing designation on 7 September 2022. It came into force on 3 January 2023 and runs until 2 January 2028, and Perivale is one of the twelve wards named in it, alongside the two Greenford wards, Northolt, Hanger Hill and others. So an ordinary private let in Perivale now needs a selective licence, where a few years ago only the bigger shared houses needed any licence at all. You can check your own address against the council’s private rented property licensing page.
On top of that, the whole borough sits under an additional HMO licensing scheme that started on 1 April 2022 and runs to 31 March 2027. That one bites everywhere in Perivale. If a house is let room by room to three or four unrelated people, it needs an HMO licence on top of anything else. A selective licence costs a landlord several hundred pounds across its term and the HMO licence costs more again, so neither is a box ticked lightly.
Why does any of this reach your deposit? Because a landlord who has paid for a licence, and who can be inspected against its conditions, tends to keep better records and hold the property to a clearer standard at check-out. The licence pushes them towards a proper check-in inventory, and that inventory is the same document the clerk marks you against on the way out. Get the clean right and the paperwork licensing encourages works in your favour, not against you.
The deposit rules in plain English
The rules behind a cleaning dispute are not complicated, but they decide who wins one, so they are worth a read before you hand the keys over. A handful of terms come up again and again.
- Deposit protection
- Your deposit has to sit in a government-approved scheme within thirty days of you paying it. The three schemes are the Deposit Protection Service, mydeposits and the Tenancy Deposit Scheme. Gov.uk sets out the deposit protection rules and the deadlines.
- Check-in inventory
- The report and photos taken at the start of your tenancy, recording the condition and cleanliness of every room. The check-out is judged against it, which makes it the single most important document in any argument.
- Fair wear and tear
- The gradual wear a landlord cannot charge you for, like a faded carpet or a scuffed wall. Dirt is not wear and tear, and cleaning can always be deducted, which is why it is the most common deduction of the lot. Citizens Advice explains how to get your deposit back.
- Selective licence
- Across the whole of Perivale ward, the council permit a private landlord needs to let an ordinary home, separate from any HMO licence. Shelter sets out your wider rights on tenancy deposits.
The bigger change on the horizon is the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which got Royal Assent on 27 October 2025. It abolishes fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies and reworks how tenancies end, but it does not change the basic deal on deposits. You still pay one, it still has to be protected, and cleaning is still the deduction a landlord reaches for first. If anything, with the notice rules tightening, a clean final inspection matters more.
Our figures, and what the guarantee covers
We would rather show you the numbers than describe ourselves in adjectives. Across our end of tenancy work we run a 97% first-time pass rate, which means the large majority of cleans are signed off by the agent or the clerk without a single thing sent back. The work follows a 57-point checklist built around what west London agents actually inspect, and it is the same list whether we are in a studio near the station or a four-bed semi off Medway Drive. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, which is part of why we know how a Perivale check-out is scored before we walk through the door.
The guarantee is the bit that counts when something does go wrong, because now and then it does. If the inventory clerk or the agent challenges any part of our work, we come back and put it right under our 48-hour re-clean guarantee, at no extra cost to you. There is one condition we cannot get round. The property has to have electricity, running hot water and no belongings left in it when we clean, because the team cannot do the job properly without power, hot water or empty rooms. Strip the place first, then call us.
The 57-point clean, room by room
An end of tenancy clean is not a normal clean done harder. It is a different job. A normal clean keeps a lived-in home tidy. This one returns an empty property to the condition recorded when you moved in, top to bottom, including the bits nobody has touched in years. Here is roughly how it runs in a Perivale semi.
The kitchen takes the longest, every single time, and in a UB6 house that has cooked proper food for years it takes longer still. The oven comes apart, racks and door glass out, and gets degreased inside until the enamel shows again. We do the hob, the extractor and its filter, the splashback, and the tops and insides of every cupboard and drawer. The fridge and freezer are cleaned and defrosted if they are staying. Behind and beside the appliances, where the grease and the crumbs gather, gets done too, because that is the first place a clerk looks. The bathroom is next, with the scale taken off the taps, the shower screen and the tiles, the toilet descaled and the grout scrubbed. The water out this way is hard and leaves a dull film on everything, and it is usually the first thing an inspection picks up.
Then the rest of it. Walls and skirting wiped down, switches and sockets, doors and frames, the tops of the doors. Windows cleaned inside, sills and frames included. Carpets hoovered thoroughly and spot-treated, hard floors washed. Light fittings, radiators, the dust on top of the picture rails in the older houses, the insides of the fitted wardrobes. The bits people forget are the bits that get marked. The checklist exists so nothing is missed, and the team lead works through it before the job is signed off. We do not rush the kitchen to free up time for a tidy lounge.
The 1930s Perivale semis throw up jobs the newer flats never do, and they catch people out. Metal-framed windows with painted-over runners that need easing and wiping. Picture rails and coving holding dust since the last tenant left. Original tiled hearths that go grey without a proper clean. The awkward gap beside a side-return kitchen, and the airing cupboard nobody empties. We have done enough of these houses to know where the dirt hides, so we plan the time for it instead of finding it at the end. A Hoover Building flat is quicker on most of that but stricter on finish, because the agent expects it near enough showroom.
The bits people forget are the bits that get marked.
Where a UB6 inventory clerk marks you down
After enough Perivale check-outs you learn where the marks land. It is the same short list nearly every time, and almost none of it is the rooms a tenant scrubs on the last night.
- Oven glass and the runners inside the door. Clerks open the oven and hold the glass to the light.
- The extractor filter, which most tenants have never taken down, let alone washed.
- Scale on the shower screen, the taps and around the plugholes, courtesy of the hard chalk water.
- Skirting and the carpet edges where a sofa or a bed stood for two years.
- Window sills, the runners and the inside of the frames, worst of all in the older semis near the A40.
There is one more thing clerks check that catches tenants out. Mould and condensation marks around the windows and in the corners of bathrooms, which build up in the older Perivale houses and in the lower streets near the Brent because the damp sits in this valley and the houses were never built for the way we heat and seal homes now. A clean lifts the surface marks, and a clerk can tell the difference between a wiped frame and one that has just been left alone. We treat those spots as part of the standard job, not an extra, because in this housing stock they are close to a given.
None of that is hard to clean if you know it is coming and you have the time and the right products. The trouble is that on the last night of a move you have none of those things. You are tired, the van is loaded, and the cream cleaner ran out two boxes ago. That is the gap we fill. We turn up with the kit, we know the list the clerk is working from, and we start on the oven and the bathroom because that is where the deposit is decided.
Getting a van to your door around Perivale
Perivale is easy to reach and occasionally awkward to park, and the A40 is the reason for both. The dual carriageway gets you here fast, but turning off it onto the side roads at the morning and evening peak can hold you up, and we build that into our timings rather than promise an arrival we cannot make. The stretch of Bilton Road through the industrial estate is the other slow point when the units are loading.
Once you are off the main roads, access is mostly straightforward. The semis on the residential streets off Horsenden Lane and Medway Drive have the usual on-street parking that is rarely a problem outside the busy hours. The flats near Perivale station and the Hoover Building conversions often mean a permit or a visitor bay and sometimes a lift, so tell us the access when you book. Perivale tube on the Central line, the Hoover Building and Horsenden Hill are all easy landmarks if you are talking us in.
Perivale sits in the middle of a run of areas we already cover, which helps if your move is a local one. Greenford is the next stop west along the A40, Alperton is over towards the canal to the east, and the parent for both is our Ealing end of tenancy hub. If you are moving from one to another, the same team and the same van can clean the old place and, if you want it, sort the new one.
The point of all this is timing. A clerk books a check-out slot and expects the property clean when they arrive. We plan the route so the clean is finished and checked before that slot.
What it costs
We price by the property, not by the hour, and there is a reason for that. An hourly rate rewards a cleaner for working slowly. A fixed price for the property means the team stays until the checklist is finished, however long that takes, and you know the cost before anyone turns up.
Our end of tenancy prices start at £156 for a studio and £207 for a one-bed flat. A two-bed is £243, a three-bed £339, and a four-bed £425. What moves the figure is the size of the place, the number of bathrooms, and the state it is in when we arrive, because a home that has been kept reasonably is quicker than one where the oven has not been touched in two years. If you would rather have a cleaner by the hour for a smaller job, that is £30 per cleaner, though for a full move-out the fixed price almost always works out better for you.
Carpets that need hot-water extraction are priced on top, because that is a separate machine and a separate job. We charge £36 a bedroom and £43 for a living room, or £115 to do the carpets through a whole two-bed flat. Oven cleaning, if you want it taken further than the end of tenancy clean covers, is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a range cooker. There are no surprise charges at the end. The number we quote when you book is the number you pay.
Give us the postcode and the bedroom count and we will quote you over the phone in a couple of minutes. The quote is free and there is no pressure to book on the spot.
Booking, and the 48-hour re-clean
Booking is meant to be quick. Moving is stressful enough without it. Call us, tell us the address and the size, and we will give you a price and a slot. We work seven days a week, which matters when your tenancy ends on a Sunday and the check-out is first thing Monday. Most people book us for the day after the van leaves, once the property is empty.
On the day, the team arrives with everything needed, the machines, the products and the cloths, so you do not have to leave anything behind. The property has to be empty, with the electricity and the running hot water on. We work through the 57-point checklist room by room, and the team lead checks it before they leave. If the inventory clerk later challenges anything, we return under the 48-hour re-clean guarantee and fix it free, as long as the property is still empty and we can get in. In practice the guarantee is rarely called on, but it is why agents are happy to put our name forward.
If you want to talk it through first, just ring. We would rather answer your questions before you book than have you guess. Reach us on 0333 555 2076, email [email protected], or use our contact page.
Carpets, ovens and the other jobs we bring
The end of tenancy clean covers the property, but a few jobs are big enough to be their own service, and a Perivale move-out often needs one or two on top. We bring them on the same visit. That means one team and one bill rather than chasing separate contractors.
The most common add-on is carpet cleaning with hot-water extraction, because a hoover does not lift two years of ground-in dirt and a clerk can tell at a glance. If the oven is in a real state, our oven cleaning takes it apart and degreases every piece rather than wiping the front. We do upholstery cleaning for sofas and mattresses staying with the property, and exterior window cleaning by water-fed pole where the landlord wants the outside of the glass done too, which comes up a lot on the Hoover Building Crittall units. Worn vinyl and tired tiles are common in these older houses, so we also handle hard floor cleaning. For a furnished place that has been let go, a full deep clean can sit alongside the end of tenancy work.
Plenty of our Perivale customers are moving locally, so it is worth saying we also handle removals and ongoing domestic cleaning once you are in the new place. There is a full list of the areas we cover on our end of tenancy hub, and the same checklist and the same guarantee apply wherever you are.
Perivale end of tenancy FAQs
Will an end of tenancy clean get my full deposit back in Perivale?
It gives you the best chance, because cleaning is the most common reason deposits get cut and a proper clean removes that reason. We run a 97% first-time pass rate and back the work with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee, so if a clerk challenges anything we put it right free. Damage and genuine wear we cannot control, but the cleaning we can.
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in UB6?
It depends on the size of the property, the number of bathrooms and the state it is in, because we price by the property rather than by the hour. A studio starts at £156 and a one-bed at £207, with a two-bed at £243, a three-bed at £339 and a four-bed at £425. Tell us the postcode and bedroom count on 0333 555 2076 for a free fixed quote.
Does my Perivale rental need a selective or HMO licence?
Most likely yes. The whole of Perivale ward sits inside Ealing’s selective licensing scheme, so an ordinary private let here needs a selective licence. On top of that the borough-wide additional HMO scheme means any house shared by three or four unrelated people needs an HMO licence as well. You can check your address on the council’s licensing pages.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the inventory clerk or the letting agent flags any part of our work, we return within the guarantee period and re-clean the affected areas at no charge. The only conditions are that the property is still empty and we can get access. It means a deduction for our cleaning should never land on you.
Do you cover all of Perivale and the rest of UB6?
Yes, we clean across the whole of Perivale, from the 1930s semis along the side roads off the A40 to the flats in the converted Hoover Building and the newer blocks near the station. We also cover neighbouring Greenford, Alperton and the wider Ealing area if your move is a local one.
Does the property need to be empty when you clean?
Yes. We need the flat or house emptied of all belongings, with the electricity and running hot water still on, before we clean. The team cannot reach behind furniture or clean a kitchen properly with things in the way, and they need power and hot water to finish the job to the standard an inspection expects.
Is carpet cleaning included or is it extra?
It is a separate job, priced on top, because it needs a hot-water extraction machine rather than a hoover. We charge £36 a bedroom and £43 for a living room, or £115 for the carpets through a whole two-bed flat. We will tell you honestly whether yours need it, and if they do we do it on the same visit. See our carpet cleaning service.
Can you clean around a same-day move-out and check-out?
Often, yes, though it is tight and a clear run is better. The property has to be empty before we start, so when the removal van and the check-out fall on the same day the timing needs care. Book the clean for the day after the move if you possibly can, and we will fit the slot around your check-out.
Why is the water so hard on Perivale taps and screens?
West London sits on chalk, so the mains water is hard and leaves a chalky film on taps, shower screens and tiles. It is the single most common thing an inventory clerk picks up in a UB6 bathroom. Taking that scale off properly is part of our standard end of tenancy clean, not an add-on you pay extra for.
How quickly can you come out in Perivale?
Usually within a day or two, and often sooner, because we work seven days a week and a lot of Perivale moves are booked at short notice. Ring us on 0333 555 2076 with your date and we will tell you straight away what we can do.
Do you bring your own products and machines?
Yes. The team turns up with all the products, cloths and machines, including the hot-water extraction kit if you have booked carpets. You do not need to leave anything behind or buy supplies in. All we ask is that the power and the hot water are still on when we arrive.
Do you clean the flats inside the Hoover Building?
Yes. The converted Hoover Building holds maisonettes and flats with full-height Crittall windows and unusual layouts, and we clean them at the end of a tenancy like any other UB6 home. The finish an agent expects there tends to be high, so we plan the time around the glass, the frames and the original detailing.
What makes an end of tenancy clean different from a regular clean?
A regular clean keeps a lived-in home tidy week to week. An end of tenancy clean returns an empty property to its check-in condition, top to bottom, including the oven inside, the extractor filter, the window runners and the spots behind the appliances a normal clean never touches. It is judged against the inventory, which is why it follows our 57-point checklist.