Cleaning to the inventory on the Alton Estate
The five eleven-storey slab blocks on Highcliffe Drive, Binley, Winchfield, Dunbridge, Charcot and Denmead House, were finished in 1958 and listed Grade II* for the way they sit above Richmond Park like a built version of Le Corbusier. They are also full of ex-council flats and maisonettes that change hands on assured shorthold tenancies, and every one of those tenancies ends with a check-out clean. That is the job we do. We clean a Roehampton property back to the standard written on its check-in inventory so the deposit comes back, and we price it by the size of the place, not by the hour.
A studio here runs to £156, a one-bed to £207, a two-bed maisonette to £243, a three-bed house to £339, and a four-bed to £425. No discount, no per-hour meter ticking while the team works. The clerk who checks the flat is comparing it against the report you signed when you moved in, and our 57-point list is built to answer that report line by line.
We have cleaned in this part of SW15 since 2014, long enough to know where the local quirks bite. The Alton kitchens are older than the people renting them. The student houses near the Grove turn over in the same fortnight every July. The bigger places towards Putney Heath have more glass than anyone expects to clean. A check-out clean is not a generic tidy, and treating Roehampton like any other postcode is how tenants lose money they did not need to.
Three Roehampton homes, three different cleans
Roehampton is not one kind of housing, and that matters on a check-out. Walk from the Alton Estate towards Putney Heath and the stock changes under your feet. We meet three patterns again and again.
First, the ex-local-authority flats and maisonettes of Alton West and Alton East. These have hard-wearing surfaces, a lot of painted woodwork, and kitchens that have seen decades of use, so the grease on the extractor and the scale on the taps are usually the real work. The block stairwells are shared, which means our team carries kit up rather than parking at the door. The point blocks and the long slab blocks were designed for light and air, not for a cleaner hauling a machine to the eighth floor, and we plan the job around that. Anything heavy comes up once, and the team works top to bottom so nothing gets walked back over a floor that is already done.
Second, the student lets. The university leases and private landlords around the Grove fill houses near Medfield Street and Holybourne Avenue with three, four, sometimes five tenants, and those homes get a hard year. Hob, oven, fridge and a bathroom shared by five people are the pressure points. The deposit on a shared house is usually split, so a deduction the clerk makes for a filthy oven gets carved out of several people at once, and that is the charge a single professional clean is built to head off.
Third, the village houses and the larger homes towards Roehampton Lane and the Putney Heath fringe. Bigger kitchens, more glass, often a conservatory or a garden room, and owners who book the larger tiers because there is simply more floor to cover. These are also the homes most likely to want the windows done inside and out, because a wall of glass facing the heath shows every mark in the afternoon light.
Walk from the Alton Estate towards Putney Heath and the stock changes under your feet.
One service, priced three different ways. We send the right number of cleaners and the right kit for the home in front of us, because a two-bed maisonette on the Alton and a four-bed near the common are not the same afternoon.
Why Roehampton deposits get docked for cleaning
Cleaning is the most common reason a landlord keeps part of a deposit. It is also the most arguable, because “clean” is a judgement and a clerk needs evidence to hold a deduction. That evidence is the inventory.
The rule is narrower than most tenants think. You only have to return the flat to the condition recorded at check-in, allowing for fair wear and tear, and a blanket clause demanding professional cleaning is not enforceable on a modern tenancy. Shelter is blunt about it: a landlord cannot force you to pay for professional cleaning as a condition of the tenancy. What they can do is deduct for a genuine drop in cleanliness against the check-in, and that is where a Roehampton clean either saves your money or does not.
If you disagree with a charge, your deposit sits in one of the government-backed schemes and each runs a free dispute service. The GOV.UK overview sets out the three schemes and the timescales, and Citizens Advice walks through how to claim through alternative dispute resolution, usually within three months of moving out. The adjudicator weighs the check-in report against the check-out report. A clean that matches the inventory is the strongest card you can hold.
That is the whole logic behind our 97% first-time pass rate. We clean to the document the clerk will use, then back it with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. If the inventory clerk or the agent challenges anything we did within three days, we come back and put it right at no charge, provided the property had the power, hot water and a defrosted fridge we needed to finish the first time.
Keep your own evidence as well. Photograph the flat once we have finished and once you have handed back the keys, because that record sits alongside our work if a charge is ever raised. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, and a fair few of them work this side of the borough, so in plenty of cases the agent already knows our standard before the clerk has set foot in the flat. That trust is not luck. It is the £1.2m in deposits we have helped tenants hold on to over the years, one matched inventory at a time.
What the 57-point clean covers
The 57-point list is the agent-approved checklist clerks across Wandsworth recognise. It runs room by room, and the bulk of the time goes where deductions usually start.
Kitchens take the longest. We degrease the hob and the extractor, clean inside and behind the oven, wipe out cupboards and drawers, descale the taps and the sink, and clear the fridge once it is defrosted. In an Alton West flat the oven is often the single biggest job, which is why a lot of tenants add the deep oven clean rather than gamble on it.
Bathrooms are the other pressure point. Scale on the shower screen, soap scum on the tiles, grout that has gone grey, and the underside of the toilet are the spots a clerk checks without being asked.
Across the rest of the home the team handles:
- Dusting and wiping skirting boards, sills, doors, door frames and switches.
- Hoovering carpets and rugs, then mopping the hard floors.
- Interior glass, mirrors and the inside of the windows.
- Cobwebs off the ceilings and cornices, which the listed blocks have in odd corners.
The price already includes hoovering carpets and upholstery. When a carpet needs more than a hoover, say a student living room after a long let, that is the deep carpet cleaning add-on, charged at £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed done by hot water extraction. A heavily used oven is the deep oven cleaning service, £77 single, £110 double, £114 for a range, where the team strips the removable parts and the door glass and cleans each piece before it goes back. The same goes for tired sofas and armchairs: an inventory often records the upholstery condition, so when it needs reviving our upholstery cleaning handles it before the clerk arrives.
What we will not do is pretend a quick wipe equals an inventory clean. A clerk turns the oven door to check the glass, runs a finger along the top of a door, looks under the toilet rim, and checks the seal on the fridge. Those are the points the 57-point list exists to cover, and they are the points a rushed clean misses. We have spent years learning exactly where the deductions hide, which is why the list is built the way it is and why agents recognise it.
Licensing in Wandsworth, and why it touches your clean
Roehampton sits in the London Borough of Wandsworth, and the council changed its private-rented rules in 2025. Two things matter for a tenant moving out.
The first is additional HMO licensing, which Wandsworth brought in borough-wide from 1 July 2025 for five years. If your Roehampton house is shared by three or more people from more than one household, which describes a lot of the student lets near the Grove, it needs a licence, and a licensed HMO is held to a clear condition standard at the point a tenancy turns over. The second is selective licensing, which the council applied to named areas only, Furzedown, South Balham, Tooting Bec and Tooting Broadway from 1 July 2025, with a second scheme covering the East Putney, West Putney and Northcote wards from 1 April 2026. Roehampton is not in either selective area. You can confirm any address on the council property licence check, which carries the ward list and an interactive map.
Why does a tenant care about licensing on a clean? Because a licensed property turns over on tighter expectations, the agent leans harder on the check-out inventory, and a clean that matches the check-in is what keeps the deposit out of dispute.
The wider law has shifted too. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 ended fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies and moved England to periodic tenancies, so move-out dates are less predictable than they were and a check-out can come at shorter notice. Booking the clean early matters more than it used to.
There is a practical upside for tenants in all this. A licensed home and a documented check-in mean the standard is written down, not left to whoever inspects on the day, so you are not arguing about taste. You are matching a report. We have built our whole method around that simple fact, because a clean measured against paper is a clean we can guarantee, and a clean measured against someone’s mood is not.
The Richmond Park edge and the Priory Lane end
Roehampton runs right up to Richmond Park. The Roehampton Gate sits on the far side off Priory Lane, by the public golf course, and the homes on that western edge feel a world away from the Alton blocks a few minutes east. This is the quieter, greener end, and the housing reflects it.
The Priory itself, the Grade II listed hospital on Priory Lane, is the landmark everyone knows, and the streets around it hold larger detached and semi-detached houses on bigger plots. When one of these comes up for a check-out it is usually a four-bed, sometimes more, and the clean is a full day rather than an afternoon. There is more glass, more bathroom, and often a garden room or conservatory the inventory still lists.
Parking is easier out here than on the estate, which helps, but the homes are larger and the inventories longer. We price these on the four-bed tier or by arrangement when a house runs beyond it, and we will tell you honestly on the call whether a place needs a bigger team. The buses on this side are the 430 and, near the Priory, the 33 and 337, so even the green edge is bus country rather than tube country.
What it costs, and what pushes the price
The end of tenancy clean is fixed by property size, quoted before we arrive, and never billed by the hour. The team stays until every room on the list is done.
- Studio: £156.
- One-bed flat: £207.
- Two-bed: £243.
- Three-bed: £339.
- Four-bed: £425.
If you would rather buy time than a fixed package, say for a part-clean before a viewing, the by-the-hour rate is £30 per cleaner. The add-ons sit on top: deep carpet cleaning from £36 a room, deep oven cleaning from £77, and exterior window cleaning where the team brings water-fed poles to reach the glass safely, which the upper floors of the Highcliffe Drive blocks plainly need. For a fuller pre-tenancy refresh, our deep cleaning service goes beyond the inventory list.
A few honest caveats on what nudges a quote. A flat left full of belongings, a fridge still frozen on the morning, or a property with no working power or hot water cannot be finished in one visit, and the guarantee depends on those basics being sorted before we start. Here is what each term on your check-out actually means.
- Check-in inventory
- The report listing the condition and cleanliness of every room when you moved in, usually with photos. Your clean is judged against this, not against perfection.
- Check-out report
- The clerk’s inspection on the day you leave. Differences from the check-in, beyond fair wear and tear, are what a landlord can deduct for.
- Fair wear and tear
- The normal ageing of a home through ordinary use. A landlord cannot charge you to put it right, and Citizens Advice explains how to argue it.
- Additional HMO licence
- A Wandsworth licence required borough-wide since 1 July 2025 for homes shared by three or more people from different households.
- Re-clean guarantee
- Our promise to return within 48 hours and put right anything the clerk or agent challenges, free, when the property had power, hot water and a defrosted fridge.
Student move-out near Roehampton University
Roehampton University runs four historic colleges, Digby Stuart, Froebel, Southlands and Whitelands, with Froebel set around Grove House, a 1792 mansion on the Grove. The colleges and the private landlords around them put a lot of students into shared houses, and those tenancies tend to end in a cluster each summer.
That clustering is the problem. When a whole street empties in the same fortnight, agents and clerks are stretched, and a house where five people shared one kitchen and one bathroom is exactly where deductions pile up. We see the same hotspots every year: the oven nobody touched all year, the fridge seals, the grout in the shared bathroom, and carpets in the living room that need extraction rather than a hoover.
Split the cost and book early. A shared student house usually lands on the three-bed or four-bed tier, the deposit is split between housemates, and one professional clean against the check-in is far cheaper than a clerk’s cleaning charge split the same way. We work seven days, so a Saturday or a Sunday slot in peak move-out season is the norm, not a favour.
A word of advice we give every group of students who call. Book the slot before exams finish, not after, because by the time results are out the whole borough is moving and the good weekend slots have gone. Get one housemate to own the booking, defrost the fridge the night before, and clear every room so the team can reach the floors and the skirting. Do that and the clean lands in a single visit, the check-out matches the check-in, and the deposit goes back split the way it came in rather than carved up for cleaning.
Getting to you without a tube
Roehampton has no station of its own. The nearest tube is East Putney, a good walk or a bus ride away, and the nearest rail is Barnes, around fifteen minutes on foot from the university with frequent trains on to Putney, Clapham Junction and Waterloo. Day to day the area runs on buses: the 430 and the 85 along Roehampton Lane, the 265, 419 and 493 past the university entrance, and the 33, 337 and 430 near the Priory on Priory Lane.
None of that slows us down, because our cleaners arrive equipped for it. We bring our own kit and supplies, so a flat up several flights in a Highcliffe Drive block, or a house off Medfield Street with awkward parking, gets the same clean as a place with a drive. Our HQ is close by at 255 Upper Richmond Road West, SW14 8QS, which keeps us quick across the whole of this corner of SW15.
We clean right across the borough and the river-edge areas around it. If you are moving within reach, our end of tenancy cleaning in Putney and the team that covers Putney Heath work the same patch, and you can see the full borough picture on our Wandsworth end of tenancy hub. Across the park towards the bridge, we also cover Barnes.
Booking the clean
Booking is quick. Tell us the property size and the day your tenancy ends, and we quote a fixed price on the spot.
Call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the address, the number of bedrooms, and whether you want carpets or the oven done as an add-on. We will book the team, confirm the slot, and tell you the short list of things we need on the day: power on, hot water running, the fridge defrosted, and your belongings out so the cleaners can reach every surface. If you want to line up other jobs, our contact page takes the details in one go.
Then we clean to the inventory, and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee stands behind it. We work seven days a week, so book the day that fits your move, not ours.
We clean a Roehampton property back to the standard written on its check-in inventory so the deposit comes back.
End of tenancy questions Roehampton tenants ask
How much is end of tenancy cleaning in Roehampton?
It is fixed by property size, not by the hour. A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339, and a four-bed £425. We quote the price before we arrive and the team stays until the whole 57-point list is done.
Do you cover the Alton Estate flats and maisonettes?
Yes. We clean ex-local-authority flats and maisonettes across Alton West and Alton East, including the listed slab blocks on Highcliffe Drive. The team carries kit up the shared stairwells, so a flat several floors up gets the same clean as one at ground level.
Is professional cleaning a legal requirement to get my deposit back?
No. You only have to return the property to the condition recorded at check-in, allowing for fair wear and tear, and a clause forcing you to pay for professional cleaning is not enforceable on a modern tenancy. A professional clean simply makes it far easier to match the inventory and avoid a deduction.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the inventory clerk or letting agent challenges any part of the clean within 48 hours, we return and put it right at no charge. It applies when the property had working power, running hot water and a defrosted fridge so the team could finish properly on the first visit.
Does Roehampton need a selective or HMO licence in Wandsworth?
Roehampton is not in a selective licensing area. Wandsworth applied selective licensing to Furzedown, South Balham, Tooting Bec and Tooting Broadway from July 2025, and to East Putney, West Putney and Northcote from April 2026. Additional HMO licensing, however, applies borough-wide from 1 July 2025, so a shared Roehampton house with three or more people from different households does need a licence.
Do you clean student houses near Roehampton University?
Yes, and it is a big part of our summer work around the Grove, Medfield Street and Holybourne Avenue. Shared houses near Digby Stuart, Froebel, Southlands and Whitelands usually land on the three-bed or four-bed tier, and the cost splits between housemates.
How do you reach properties when Roehampton has no tube?
We bring our own transport, kit and supplies, so the lack of a station makes no difference. Our HQ is at 255 Upper Richmond Road West in SW14, a short hop away, and we cover the whole of this corner of SW15 seven days a week.
Is carpet cleaning included in the end of tenancy clean?
Hoovering all carpets and rugs is included. When a carpet needs more, such as a student living room after a long let, we add deep carpet cleaning by hot water extraction from £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed.
Can you deep clean the oven as well?
Yes. Deep oven cleaning is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a range cooker. The team strips the removable parts and the door glass and cleans each piece before reassembling, which is often the biggest single job in an older Alton flat.
Can you clean the outside of the windows on the upper-floor flats?
Yes. Our exterior window cleaning uses water-fed poles to reach the glass safely, which the upper floors of the Highcliffe Drive blocks need. It is booked as an add-on alongside the end of tenancy clean.
What do you need from me on the day of the clean?
Working power, running hot water, a defrosted fridge and your belongings cleared out so the cleaners can reach every surface. These four things let the team finish in one visit and keep the 48-hour guarantee valid.
How quickly can you book me in?
Usually within a few days, and often sooner in quieter weeks. We work seven days a week, so weekend slots in the busy summer move-out season are normal. Call 0333 555 2076 with your property size and move-out date for a fixed quote.
What if my landlord still tries to deduct for cleaning?
Your deposit is held in a government-backed scheme with a free dispute service, and the adjudicator compares the check-in report with the check-out. A clean that matches the inventory, plus your receipt, is strong evidence, and Citizens Advice explains how to claim through alternative dispute resolution.
Do you only clean Roehampton, or the rest of the borough too?
We cover Roehampton and the areas around it, including Putney, Putney Heath and Barnes, and the wider Wandsworth borough. It is the same team and the same 57-point standard wherever you are moving from.