The clean that decides your Romford deposit
Romford Market has run on the same patch of ground since 1247, when Henry III granted the town its weekly Wednesday market right, and the stalls still go up on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday in the Market Place. Most people moving out of a Romford flat are not thinking about a 13th-century charter. They are thinking about whether the inventory clerk will sign off the kitchen, and whether the agent will hand back the full deposit or carve a cleaning charge out of it. That second worry is the one this page is about.
An end of tenancy clean is the deep clean you do when you hand the keys back, scored against the check-in inventory rather than against how tidy the place feels. Get it right and the deposit comes back. Get it wrong and the agent books a cleaner, charges you their rate, and the gap lands in your final statement weeks after you have moved. We are a domestic cleaning firm that has worked Havering rentals since 2014, we are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and we clean to a 57-point agent-approved checklist that mirrors what those agents actually inspect.
Two Romfords, two cleans
There are two Romfords as far as cleaning goes, and they fail an inventory in different ways.
The first is the new Romford that has gone up around the station and The Brewery. That retail and leisure block on Waterloo Road sits on the old Star Brewery site, a brewery founded back in 1708 that became Ind Coope, employed something like a thousand people across twenty-odd acres, and finally shut in 1993; the leisure scheme opened on the cleared plot in 2001 and kept the old chimney as a landmark. When the Elizabeth line opened its central section in May 2022, and through trains from Romford began in the November, the town turned into a genuine commuter base for the City and Canary Wharf, and the towers followed. These are the flats with the smooth-front handleless kitchens, the engineered wood floors, the rainfall shower behind a single pane of glass. They look easy and they are not. An inventory clerk in a two-year-old flat marks against an almost-new baseline, so the scale spotting on that shower glass, the grease film on the extractor, and the scuff line where the sofa met the skirting all show up against a property that was photographed pristine at check-in.
The second Romford is the older one: the interwar semis and terraces that fan out through Rise Park, Collier Row and the edges of Gidea Park, where the 1910 Romford Garden Suburb left a band of Arts and Crafts houses that still set the tone. These places carry their age in the fabric. Painted sash boxes, picture rails, a pantry shelf nobody has wiped in a decade, an airing cupboard with a tank. Here the clerk is not measuring you against new-build perfection. They are measuring you against fair wear and tear, which means the argument is about what is grime and what is just an old house being old.
An inventory clerk in a two-year-old flat marks against an almost-new baseline, so the scale spotting on that shower glass shows up against a property that was photographed pristine at check-in.
We clean both, and we price both the same way, by the size of the property rather than by the hour. What changes is where we spend the time. In the new flats it is glass, chrome and the inside of integrated appliances. In the older houses it is the build-up in corners that a quick weekly tidy never reaches.
There is a third category that sits between the two, and it catches a lot of younger renters: the converted flat above a shop on or near the Market Place, or in the streets running off South Street. These are old buildings carved into modern lettings, so you get period quirks, an awkward stair, a single old window, paired with a landlord who expects a sharp modern finish. The inventory on those tends to be the most argumentative of the lot, because the line between an old building’s character and a tenant’s neglect is genuinely blurry, and a clerk who has had a bad morning will read it the strict way.
What Havering’s 2026 licensing changes for your move
This is the part most cleaning pages get wrong, because Havering’s rules changed this spring and a lot of older advice is now stale. So here is the current position, taken from the council.
From 18 March 2026, Havering runs a borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme that covers every ward, including Romford Town and Brooklands. It catches houses in multiple occupation let to three or four unrelated people who share a kitchen or bathroom, the smaller shared houses and bedsit set-ups that sit outside the older mandatory rules. The scheme runs to 17 March 2031. Alongside it sits a selective licensing scheme for ordinary lets to a single family or up to two sharers, but that one applies in only seven of the borough’s 20 wards: Beam Park, Harold Wood, Rainham and Wennington, Rush Green and Crowlands, Squirrels Heath, St Albans and St Edwards. You can read the detail on the council’s own private rented property licensing page.
Here is the catch that trips people up. The previous selective scheme covered Romford Town and Brooklands wards, the town centre itself, and it lapsed in January 2026. The new seven-ward scheme does not bring them back. So a normal family let in the middle of Romford, near the market or South Street, now sits outside selective licensing entirely. The same flat does fall under the additional HMO scheme the moment it is shared by three unrelated tenants. A house out in Rush Green, by contrast, is inside selective licensing under the Rush Green and Crowlands designation, and Harold Wood is in too.
Why does a cleaner care about any of this? Because licensing drives inspections, and inspections drive standards. A licensed landlord has the council looking over the property’s condition between tenancies, which means the check-out has to stand up to more than one pair of eyes. In a licensed ward the agent is often more cautious about handing the deposit back, because they know the council can ask to see the property and they do not want a complaint on file. We see that caution come through in the inventories. A check-out in Harold Wood or Rush Green tends to be longer and more itemised than one on a town-centre flat that sits outside selective licensing, and the cleaning notes within it are correspondingly fussier. The deposit rules themselves did not move. Your landlord still has to protect the deposit in a government scheme within 30 days of taking it, a duty set out on GOV.UK, and the wider reform under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 is tightening how tenancies end across England. None of that changes the one thing a clean has to do. Hand the property back at the standard it was given to you.
Where deposits leak in a Romford rental
Cleaning is the single most common deposit deduction in England, and it is also the easiest one to beat, because the rule is simpler than landlords sometimes make it sound. You return the property in the condition you got it, allowing for fair wear and tear. That is the whole test.
An agent cannot demand a professional clean as a blanket condition. Shelter is blunt about it: requiring a tenant to clean to a professional standard is only fair if the property was cleaned to that standard before they moved in, and a tenant cannot be charged a separate professional cleaning fee as a tenancy term. Their guidance on cleaning and gardening charges walks through where the line sits. Citizens Advice puts the practical side the same way: clean the place to the condition it was in when you moved in, keep the evidence, and use the scheme’s free dispute service if a charge looks wrong, as their page on getting your deposit back explains.
So why do so many tenants still lose money? Because the check-in inventory is detailed and the move-out rush is not. The clerk noted the oven was spotless on day one. They noted the extractor filter was clean, the window tracks were clear, the inside of the kitchen units had been wiped. Eighteen months later you are loading a van and you give the visible surfaces a once-over, and the deduction lands on the parts you never thought to look at. In Romford the recurring culprits are predictable once you have done a few hundred of these.
Hard water is the first. Havering sits in a hard-water belt, and limescale builds fast on shower screens, taps, kettles and the base of mixer showers in the newer station-side flats. A clerk will run a thumbnail across a tap base and write down what they find. The second is the oven. Few rentals come with a self-cleaning oven, and baked-on carbon at the back of the cavity is one of the most reliable charges an agent can make stick, partly because it photographs so clearly in a check-out report. Third is anything that needs moving: under the hob, behind the fridge, the floor beneath a washing machine. Tenants clean what they can see and forget that the clerk pulled the appliances out on day one and will do it again on the way out. Fourth, in the older houses, is the stuff that hides in period detail, the dust on top of picture rails and the inside of a built-in airing cupboard.
The clerical fix is to clean to the inventory, not to the eye. That is exactly what the 57-point checklist is for.
- Check-in inventory
- The dated, often photographed report a clerk makes at the start of a tenancy recording the condition of every room. Your move-out clean is judged against this document, so it is the thing to clean toward.
- Fair wear and tear
- The gradual decline a property suffers from normal living, which a landlord cannot deduct for. A worn carpet in a hallway is wear and tear; a curry stain ground into it is not.
- Deposit protection scheme
- One of the three government-approved schemes a landlord must use to hold your deposit within 30 days. Each runs a free dispute service if you and the landlord disagree over a cleaning charge.
- Additional HMO licence
- Havering’s borough-wide licence, in force from 18 March 2026, for smaller shared houses let to three or four unrelated people sharing a kitchen or bathroom.
- Selective licence
- Havering’s licence for ordinary single-family lets, but only in seven named wards. Romford Town and Brooklands are not among them since the older scheme lapsed in January 2026.
What the 57-point clean covers, room by room
The checklist is built from what Havering agents and inventory clerks actually flag, refined over more than a decade of jobs in RM postcodes. It is not a tick-box for show. Every line maps to a place a deduction has come from before.
In the kitchen we clean the oven inside and out, including the door glass and the racks, degrease the hob and the extractor and its filter, wipe inside and on top of every cupboard, descale the sink and taps, and pull out the freestanding appliances to clean the sides and the floor underneath. Integrated fridges and freezers get defrosted and wiped if they are empty and switched off. In the new-build flats the handleless units hide grease in the finger gaps along the top edge, and that is precisely where a careful clerk runs a finger.
Bathrooms are a scale job first and a hygiene job second. We descale the shower screen, the taps, the head and the tiles, scrub the grout, clean behind and around the toilet, polish the mirrors and the chrome, and clear the extractor vent. The rainfall showers in the station-side towers scale up around the fixed head, which a quick wipe never touches.
Bedrooms and living areas are about dust in the places nobody dusts, plus the floors. We wipe skirtings, door frames, picture rails and the tops of doors, clean inside fitted wardrobes, do windows inside, glass, sill and track, and deal with cobwebs in the high corners of the older houses with their taller ceilings. Carpets are vacuumed thoroughly, and if they need more than that we will say so and quote the carpet work separately rather than pretend a hoover will fix a stain. In the engineered-wood floors common in the new flats we work with the grain and keep the water off the joints, because a swollen board edge is itself a deduction waiting to happen.
Halls, stairs and the bits in between get the same attention, because clerks read a property top to bottom. Bannisters, light switches, sockets, radiators, the inside of the front door. We work to the 57-point checklist on every job, and because that list is the one the agents recognise, our work clears inspection first time on 97% of jobs. The few that do not are usually a property handed to us mid-renovation, with dust still settling, and even those we put right.
That checklist is the reason we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. And if an inventory clerk or agent ever challenges our work, our 48-hour re-clean guarantee means we come back and put it right inside three days, free.
What an end of tenancy clean costs in Romford
We price by the size of the property, not by the hour, so the figure you are quoted is the figure you pay. No clock running while a cleaner goes slow. For an end of tenancy clean in Romford the prices are: a studio flat at £156, a one-bedroom at £207, a two-bedroom at £243, a three-bedroom at £339 and a four-bedroom at £425. Those are full, undiscounted prices and they include the kitchen and bathroom deep work described above.
If you would rather pay for hands on the clock, perhaps because the place is in good shape and only needs a light touch, we also clean by the hour at £30 per cleaner. For a full move-out though, fixed pricing nearly always works out better, because end of tenancy work is slow and detailed and an hourly rate punishes you for the property being thorough.
A quick word on why we do not run a permanent discount. Cheap end of tenancy cleaning is usually a single cleaner given three hours and a checklist they cannot finish. When the clean fails, the tenant pays twice: once for the cheap clean, once for the agent’s re-clean. We would rather quote the real number and clear the inventory the first time. The prices above are what it costs to do that.
One Romford-specific cost to factor in is parking. The town centre around South Street, the market and The Liberty is tight, and a flat in one of the newer blocks may only have permit bays or a barriered car park. Tell us the parking situation when you book and we will plan the team and the kit around it. It is not a hidden charge, it is just the kind of thing that slows a job down if nobody mentions it.
It is also worth being honest with us about the state of the property. A flat that has been kept on top of needs less time than one where the oven has not been touched in a year, and while the fixed price holds for a normal end of tenancy clean, a property left in a genuinely heavy state is the one case where we will flag extra work before we start rather than after. We would always rather have that conversation up front than surprise you. For most Romford moves, though, the size-based price is the whole story, and the studio at £156 or the two-bedroom at £243 is exactly what lands on the invoice.
Add-ons most Romford movers book
The standard end of tenancy clean covers everything an inventory checks. Two extras come up often enough in Romford that they are worth planning for, and both are things an agent will deduct for if the inventory flagged them at check-in.
Carpets are the first. If your tenancy started with professionally cleaned carpets, the inventory will say so, and a vacuum will not match that baseline. Our carpet cleaning is hot-water extraction, which lifts the ground-in dirt a domestic machine leaves behind, and it is priced at £36 per bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bedroom flat done together. Booked with the end of tenancy clean it is one visit, one team, one less thing to chase.
The oven is the second, and it is the deduction we see most. A neglected oven is hard to bring back with a sponge and supermarket spray, so we run a separate oven cleaning service that strips the cavity, the door glass and the racks back to clean. A single oven is £77, a double is £110, and a range cooker is £114. If you only fix one thing before the clerk arrives, fix the oven, because baked-on carbon is the charge that sticks most reliably.
Tell us what you need when you book and we fold the extras into the same appointment. There is no premium for combining them, and doing the carpets and the oven on the same day as the main clean is how most movers keep the whole handover to a single morning.
How a clean with us runs
Booking is meant to be quick, because you have a move to run. You call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected], tell us the size of the property, the postcode and your check-out date, and we give you a fixed price on the spot. No survey visit, no vague estimate that creeps up later. We are based at 255 Upper Richmond Road West, SW14 8QS, and we run teams across east London and Havering seven days a week.
Then we ask three things to make the day run clean. Is the property empty, because we clean far better around no furniture. Is the power and hot water still on, because we need both. And what is the parking like, which in central Romford is the question that matters most. On the day, a team that knows the checklist works the property room by room, kitchen and bathroom first because they take longest.
If you are moving on a market day, give the timing a thought. The town centre fills up around the Market Place on a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, the streets off South Street get busy, and a removals van plus a cleaning team trying to load and unload on the same morning is how a smooth move turns slow. We can work around it, we have done it plenty of times, but it helps to know in advance so we send the team early or park the kit somewhere sensible. None of this changes the price. It just changes how the morning goes.
If anything is flagged afterwards, you are covered. Our 48-hour re-clean guarantee means that if the inventory clerk or the agent challenges any part of the work, we return within 48 hours and redo it at no charge. We can do that, and price the clean honestly, because we are not guessing at what agents want. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across the area, so the standard we clean to is the standard they inspect to.
We can do that, and price the clean honestly, because we are not guessing at what agents want. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across the area.
Timing matters more than people expect. Book the clean for after the van has gone and before the final inspection, ideally the same day you hand the keys back. An empty, freshly cleaned flat photographs well at check-out, and a good check-out report is your best defence if a deduction is ever proposed.
Romford and the rest of Havering we cover
Romford is the centre of the patch, but the rounds run right across the borough, and the housing stock shifts as you go. We cover the whole of Havering for end of tenancy work, and the neighbouring areas all have their own quirks.
Out east, Hornchurch and Upminster are mostly the leafier interwar and post-war semis, where the work is fabric and floors rather than new-build glass. Gidea Park, with its Garden Suburb houses, throws up the most period detail, picture rails and original features that need a careful hand. Harold Wood sits inside Havering’s selective licensing scheme, so lets there often face a sharper inspection between tenancies. Rush Green is licensed too, under the Rush Green and Crowlands designation, and runs to a lot of family lets. Chadwell Heath, on the Redbridge boundary, is a steady mix of the two Romfords in miniature.
Wherever the property sits, the job is the same one. Clean it back to the inventory so the deposit comes back whole.
Romford end of tenancy questions, answered
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Romford?
It depends on the size of the property, not the hours worked. In Romford a studio is £156, a one-bedroom flat is £207, a two-bedroom is £243, a three-bedroom is £339 and a four-bedroom is £425. The price is fixed when you book and includes the kitchen and bathroom deep clean.
Do I need a professional clean to get my deposit back?
Not as an automatic rule. You have to return the property in the condition it was given to you, allowing for fair wear and tear. If the inventory says it was professionally cleaned at check-in, you need to match that, but a landlord cannot impose a professional cleaning fee as a tenancy condition.
What does the 48-hour re-clean guarantee mean?
If the inventory clerk or the letting agent challenges any part of our work, we come back and put it right within 48 hours, free of charge. It is there because we clean to the standard agents inspect to and we stand behind it.
Is my Romford flat covered by selective licensing?
Probably not, if it is in the town centre. Romford Town and Brooklands wards are not in Havering’s seven-ward selective scheme, because the older scheme that covered them lapsed in January 2026. A single-family let there needs no selective licence, though a shared HMO of three or four people falls under the borough-wide additional HMO scheme from 18 March 2026.
Does selective licensing apply in Rush Green or Harold Wood?
Yes. Both sit inside Havering’s selective licensing scheme that started on 18 March 2026, Rush Green under the Rush Green and Crowlands ward and Harold Wood under its own ward. Lets there need a selective licence and tend to face closer inspection between tenancies.
How long does an end of tenancy clean take?
A studio or one-bedroom flat is usually a few hours; a three or four-bedroom house can take most of a working day. We send a team sized to the property so it is done in one visit, and we always start with the kitchen and bathroom because those take longest.
Can you clean carpets and the oven at the same time?
Yes, and most Romford movers do. Carpet cleaning is £36 per bedroom, £43 for a living room or £115 for a whole two-bedroom flat, and oven cleaning is £77 for a single, £110 for a double or £114 for a range. Booked together with the main clean it is one appointment with no combining premium.
What can a landlord legally deduct for cleaning?
Only the cost of returning the property to its check-in condition, and only with evidence such as the check-in and check-out reports. A landlord cannot charge for fair wear and tear, and any deduction must reflect real money lost. If you disagree, the deposit scheme’s free dispute service can rule on it.
Do you work with Romford letting agents?
We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across Havering and east London, and we clean to a 57-point checklist built from what those agents and their inventory clerks actually flag. That is why the work clears inspection first time on 97% of jobs.
Should I book before or after I move my furniture out?
After. An empty property gets a far better clean because we can reach floors, skirtings and the backs of rooms, and an empty, freshly cleaned flat photographs better at the check-out inspection. Ideally book the clean for the day you hand the keys back.
Does hard water make Romford cleans harder?
It does. Havering is in a hard-water area, so limescale builds quickly on shower screens, taps and kettles, and it is one of the things inventory clerks notice fastest. Descaling the bathroom and kitchen properly is built into the standard clean.
What do you need from me on the day?
An empty property if possible, with the electricity and hot water still connected, and a heads-up about parking, which in central Romford near South Street and the market is the thing most likely to slow a job down. Tell us the access arrangements when you book.
Do you cover the rest of Havering as well as Romford?
Yes. We cover the whole borough, including Hornchurch, Upminster, Gidea Park, Harold Wood, Rush Green and Chadwell Heath, with the same fixed pricing and the same 57-point checklist on every job.