The matchday clean nobody warns you about
End of tenancy cleaning
from £156
For a studio, fixed by property size, agreed before we start.
Get your price0333 555 2076 · 8am to 7pm
Check your move-out date against Crystal Palace’s fixtures before you book anything. Selhurst Park has stood on Holmesdale Road since 1924, and on a match day the streets around it stop working like normal streets.
Roads close about two hours before kick-off and stay shut until an hour or so after the final whistle. A removals van and a cleaning crew arriving at the same time on a Saturday afternoon is a problem you can avoid by reading a fixture list.
We learned that the hard way on a flat near Holmesdale Road, years back. The team got in fine at nine; the van that was meant to clear the last of the furniture sat three streets away until gone five because of a home game. The clean stalled while we worked around boxes.
Now the first question we ask a Selhurst tenant is which weekend they are moving, and whether Palace are at home.
The football is only half of it:
- The Healthy Neighbourhood Scheme keeps Holmesdale Road and Elm Park Road permit-only every day of the week, so even a midweek move needs a thought about where a van can actually stop.
- Wider permit zones run across the residential streets.
Add those together, and access is the single most practical thing to sort before a clean. We would rather know in advance and bring the kit in on foot than have the team turn up and find nowhere legal to park.
This page is the long version of that conversation. It covers:
- what an end of tenancy clean in Selhurst actually involves
- what it costs by the size of the property
- how the deposit rules decide a cleaning dispute
- the local quirks that change how a move runs around here: the depot shift patterns, the matchday closures, the new licensing scheme
We have cleaned the terraces off Whitehorse Lane and the converted flats near Selhurst station, and SE25 has its own rhythm.
Why Selhurst tenancies turn over so fast
Selhurst sits in a thin strip of terraced housing between Thornton Heath and South Norwood, and most of it is rented. These are working homes for working people, and they change hands often.
- The stock
- Late-Victorian and Edwardian: bay-fronted two-up-two-downs on Whitehorse Lane, longer terraces running off Selhurst Road, a good number cut into upstairs and downstairs flats.
- The depot
- Selhurst Depot sits just east of the station, on a triangle of land wedged between the Victoria lines and the London Bridge lines. It is one of Southern’s main train-care depots, where Electrostar units get serviced, cleaned and stabled, and the Selhurst traincrew depot bases a lot of drivers and conductors.
- The sidings
- They even carry their own names, Chalk, AC and North, a leftover from the electrification days when this spot was picked as the carriage works back in 1912.
Part of the churn is that railway. Shift work brings a steady flow of tenants who move in for a posting and move out again.
A property that turns over every year or two gets cleaned for check-out far more than a family home that sits for a decade.
That pattern shapes the work. A tenant on rotating shifts books late, moves fast, and often hands back a flat that has had no deep clean in the whole tenancy because there was never a quiet weekend to fit one in.
We get the call on a Wednesday for a Friday check-out more often in Selhurst than almost anywhere else we cover. No grumble there; it is the shape of the place, and we keep our week loose enough to take short-notice SE25 bookings.
Old features, known misses
The other thing about these terraces is that they are unforgiving to clean badly. Original features hold dirt, and an inventory clerk knows exactly where to look, because the same houses throw up the same misses:
- picture rails
- deep skirting
- the gap behind a Victorian radiator
- the grout in a tiled hallway
- sash boxes on the older fronts
A cleaner who has only ever done new-builds will miss them. We have not.
Shared walls and the demise
There is also the matter of who lived there last. A terrace cut into two or three flats means each unit shares walls, a hallway, sometimes a meter cupboard, and a check-out clean has to leave the let itself spotless while the communal parts stay as they were.
We clean the demise, the part you actually rent, and we are careful about the boundary because charging a departing tenant for a shared stairwell is exactly the sort of thing a good adjudicator throws out.
Parking
And the parking is the worst part. Even off a match day, a lot of these streets are permit-controlled, and the residential roads nearest the ground are tighter still.
We plan kit around it. On a job near Holmesdale Road we will sometimes carry the extraction gear further than we would like, because the alternative is a ticket.
The selective licence that landed in September 2026
If you let out a home in Selhurst, the rules are about to change.
- Start date
- From 1 September 2026.
- Coverage
- Croydon’s selective licensing scheme covers 14 of its 28 wards, and Selhurst is one of them.
- Length
- The scheme runs for five years.
- Applications
- The council has said the online application portal opens in July 2026.
This is the licensing fact that matters most for SE25, because plenty of the borough’s southern wards sit outside it; Selhurst does not.
What that means in practice: a landlord renting a single-household property in Selhurst needs a selective licence, and the licence comes with standards on the property’s condition, safety and management.
Croydon has been clear that this sits alongside a separate additional licensing scheme for smaller HMOs across the whole borough. You can read the council’s own wording on the Croydon selective licensing scheme page.
Why a cleaning company cares
Licensing raises the bar on condition, and a licensed property is one a council can inspect.
Landlords who want the licence renewed without trouble keep the place in good order between tenancies, and a documented professional end of tenancy clean is part of how they show that.
We are seeing more Selhurst landlords book the clean themselves rather than leave it to a departing tenant, precisely because the paperwork now matters.
There is a contrast worth drawing here. The affluent wards further south in the borough sit outside the selective scheme entirely, so a landlord in those parts has no licence to worry about. Selhurst is squarely inside it.
If you let property across the borough, the SE25 corner is one where the new rules apply, and where keeping a place in good order between tenancies has just become part of staying compliant rather than simply good practice.
For tenants, the upshot is simpler. The condition you leave the property in still decides your deposit, licence or no licence. The deposit rules below are the ones that actually bite.
What the 57-point clean puts right
An end of tenancy clean is a top-to-bottom reset of the property against the standard in the check-in inventory, far more than a tidy-up. Our crew works to a 57-point agent-approved checklist so nothing on the clerk’s list gets skipped.
The list is long on purpose. It is built from the deductions that real reports throw up.
Kitchen
The kitchen is where most of the time goes. On a Selhurst terrace it is often the smallest room and the dirtiest, because it has been cooked in hard.
- The oven gets the racks out, the door glass split where the design allows and degreased, the racks and trays soaked.
- The extractor filter cleaned.
- The hob and splashback brought back.
- Cupboards wiped inside and out.
- The sink and taps descaled.
- The floor washed into the corners.
Behind the appliances is where the marks hide. We pull out the washing machine and the fridge where access allows, because clerks know to look there and tenants almost never clean it.
A greasy seal on a dishwasher, the floor under a cooker, the wall behind a kettle: small things, but each one is a line on a report, and a report is a running total of small things.
Bathrooms
Bathrooms are the other battleground.
- Tiles and grout scrubbed
- The scale taken off taps and the shower screen
- The toilet done properly
- Mirrors and chrome polished
- Extractor vent cleared
In a hard-water pocket like this, scale on a chrome tap is the single most common thing a clerk circles, so we give it real attention.
The rest of the home
Through the rest of the home the work is methodical:
- dusting and wiping from the picture rail down
- skirting and switches cleaned
- the insides of windows done
- doors and frames wiped
- cobwebs cleared from the high corners these old ceilings hide
- hoovering throughout
- fitted wardrobes cleaned inside, where a property has them
The aim is a place that matches its check-in photos, room for room.
The detail is the whole point. A clerk inspecting one of these terraces will do all of this, and we have already done it by the time they arrive:
- pull the kitchen drawers out and check the runners
- lift the hob
- run a cloth along the top edge of a door where dust settles and nobody ever looks
- open the window to check the frame and the catch
That is the difference between a clean that looks done from the doorway and a clean that survives a clerk with a clipboard. It is slow work in an old house. We would rather take the extra hour than have you lose a deposit over a missed extractor filter.
One honest note. We do not do exterior decorating, garden clearance, or anything structural. We clean. If a wall needs repainting that is between you and the landlord, though a proper clean often reveals that what looked like a mark was just dirt.
What an end of tenancy clean costs in SE25
We price by the size of the property, not by the hour. That matters, because a check-out clean cannot be rushed to beat a clock, and our team stays as long as the property needs.
Here is what an end of tenancy clean costs in Selhurst:
- Studio flat: £156
- One-bedroom: £207
- Two-bedroom: £243
- Three-bedroom: £339
- Four-bedroom: £425
Those are full prices, with no weekend surcharge; a Saturday clean costs the same as a Tuesday one, which helps when your only free move-out day collides with the working week. Many of the converted flats off Selhurst Road fall into the one or two-bedroom bands.
- Labour by the hour
- £30 per cleaner per hour for a part-job, though for a deposit-driven check-out the fixed-price clean is the safer bet because it is the whole property to a standard, not a set number of hours.
- Add-ons
- Carpets or a deep oven clean are priced on top, and we have set those out further down.
- Getting the figure
- Tell us the postcode and the number of bedrooms when you call, and we will give you the figure on the phone with no survey.
Why a fixed price beats the clock
People sometimes ask why a fixed price beats paying by the hour for a check-out. The reason is simple. An hourly job ends when the hours run out, whether the property is finished or not, and a half-finished bathroom fails the inventory just as surely as an untouched one.
The fixed price ties the cost to the result, which is what the deposit hangs on. For a smaller side job, say a single room or a one-off oven, the hourly rate is fine, and that is what it is there for.
The deposit rules a Croydon landlord leans on
Your deposit is protected by law, and that law is on your side more than most tenants realise.
- Protection
- If you rented after April 2007 on an assured shorthold tenancy, the landlord had to put your deposit in a government-approved scheme within 30 days.
- The three schemes
- The Deposit Protection Service, MyDeposits and the Tenancy Deposit Scheme. You can confirm how they work on the government’s tenancy deposit protection guidance.
The wear and tear line
The rule that decides a cleaning dispute is the wear and tear line.
- A landlord cannot charge you for the ordinary ageing of a place: faded paint, a carpet worn thin by years of feet, a tired bit of furniture.
- They can charge for dirt you left behind that goes beyond fair wear.
Citizens Advice explains the difference plainly, and it is worth a read before any check-out. Cleaning is not wear and tear, which makes it the one deduction you can wipe out entirely with a proper clean.
If there is a row over the money
You do not simply hand it over. Every scheme runs a free alternative dispute resolution service, and you put your evidence to an adjudicator.
This is exactly why a documented professional clean carries weight: an invoice plus before-and-after photos is hard for a landlord to argue past. The adjudicator was not in the property, so they decide on paper, and the side with the clearer paper trail tends to win.
The cleanest way to avoid the whole argument is to remove the reason for it. A landlord who can see the property was professionally cleaned, with a receipt to match, has very little to take a cleaning deduction over.
Shelter has a clear guide to challenging unfair deductions, and the protections are being widened further under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which began reshaping tenancy rules through 2026.
Our numbers come from doing this a long time:
- We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across south London.
- We have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions.
- If a clerk does challenge our work, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee means we are back to put it right within 48 hours, free.
The agents are worth a word, because they are the other side of this. Many of the letting agents handling Selhurst and the wider Croydon lettings market book us directly on behalf of their landlords, which tells you the work clears their own inventory checks.
An agent who has watched our cleans pass their clerks for years is not going to flag the same work when a tenant books it. That track record is quietly the most useful thing we bring to a check-out in SE25.
Extras that earn back a deposit on a terrace
Some jobs sit outside the standard clean and are worth adding, especially in these older houses where carpets and ovens take a beating. They are charged on top of the fixed price.
Carpets
Carpets first, because they are the usual flashpoint. We use hot water extraction, which pushes hot solution deep into the pile and pulls the dirt back out, the method that lifts ground-in grime a vacuum will never touch.
- A bedroom carpet
- £36
- A living room
- £43
- A whole two-bedroom flat done together
- £94
On a Selhurst flat near the depot, where shift workers track in a year of grime, this is often the line that decides whether the carpet reads as worn or as dirty, and only one of those is your problem to fix.
The oven
The deep oven clean is the other one. Our team removes the shelves and runners to soak and degreases the door glass and cavity by hand, so the appliance comes back clean rather than just wiped.
- A single oven
- £31
- A double or a range
- £62
A neglected oven is one of the easiest deductions for a clerk to justify, so it usually pays for itself.
Upholstery and windows
- We also clean upholstery by the same extraction method for sofas and armchairs, which matters where a furnished let lists the sofa on the inventory and the clerk will check it.
- Exterior windows we do with a water-fed pole that reaches the upper floors of a terrace safely from the ground, no ladders against a hundred-year-old bay.
On a furnished flat near the station, the carpets, the oven and the sofa together are often what the difference between a full and a part deposit comes down to.
If the property needs more than a check-out clean, our deep cleaning service covers the heavier work, the kind of build-up that one tenancy of neglect leaves behind.
Tell us what is in the property and we will fold the extras into one quote rather than adding charges room by room. One price, one visit, one receipt for the file.
Booking a clean around the fixture list
Booking is meant to be quick. Call 0333 555 2076 or email office@monstercleaning.com with:
- your Selhurst postcode
- the number of bedrooms
- your check-out date
We will give you a fixed price there and then. No home survey, no waiting around.
Around the football
We clean seven days a week, and as we said the weekend rate is the same as the weekday one. The only real scheduling catch in SE25 is the football, so we check the date against home fixtures and pick an arrival time that avoids the road closures around Selhurst Park.
If you are moving on a match day we will usually start early, before the streets lock down.
Before we arrive
Two things to have ready before we arrive:
- Electricity and running hot water, because no one cleans a kitchen or bathroom properly without them.
- The property empty of your belongings, with any fridge or freezer defrosted in advance, so the team can clean every surface rather than work around your boxes.
Once that is sorted, we do the rest.
Keys and paperwork
If the keys are with a letting agent we are happy to collect and drop them, which suits tenants who have already moved out of the area and cannot be in SE25 on the day.
We will send a receipt and, if you ask, the before-and-after photos that matter so much when a deposit is in question. That paperwork is yours to keep, and it is the thing that settles most disputes before they start.
We work right across the borough. If you are moving between areas you can read about our cleans in nearby South Norwood and Thornton Heath, both of which share Selhurst’s terraced stock, or see the full Croydon end of tenancy cleaning hub for the wider area.
Terms on the check-out inventory
Check-out paperwork comes with its own vocabulary. Here are the terms that actually decide the money, in plain English.
- Check-in inventory
- The report and photos taken at the start of your tenancy that record the condition of the property. Your check-out is judged against it, so it is the document that matters most.
- Wear and tear
- The normal ageing of a property over time, which a landlord cannot deduct for. Worn carpet and faded paint count; built-up dirt does not, which is why cleaning is treated differently from wear.
- Deposit protection scheme
- A government-approved scheme that holds your deposit safely during the tenancy. Each one runs a free dispute service if you and the landlord cannot agree, as the gov.uk guidance sets out.
- Selective licence
- The permit a Selhurst landlord has needed since 25 September 2026 to let a single-household home, under Croydon’s new scheme covering 14 wards.
- Inventory clerk
- The independent person who inspects the property at check-out and writes the report the deposit decision rests on. They check the details a quick clean misses.
Selhurst end of tenancy cleaning questions
How much does an end of tenancy clean cost in Selhurst?
We price by property size, not by the hour. A studio is £156, a one-bedroom £207, a two-bedroom £243, a three-bedroom £339 and a four-bedroom £425. Carpets and oven cleans are extra. Give us your postcode and bedroom count and we will confirm the price on the phone.
Do you charge more for a weekend clean in SE25?
No. Our prices are the same every day of the week, so a Saturday or Sunday clean in Selhurst costs exactly what a weekday clean costs. We clean seven days a week.
Will my move-out clash with a Crystal Palace match?
It can. Roads around Selhurst Park close about two hours before kick-off and reopen an hour or so after the whistle. We check your date against the fixture list and arrive early on match days so the clean is done before the streets shut.
What is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee?
If the inventory clerk or your landlord flags our work within 48 hours of the clean, we come back and put it right at no extra charge. It is rarely needed, but the guarantee is there.
Do you bring your own cleaning equipment and products?
Yes. Our team arrives with all the professional equipment and detergents needed, including the hot water extraction machine for carpets. You only need to make sure the property has electricity and running hot water.
Does Selhurst need a selective licence to rent out a property?
Yes, from 25 September 2026. Selhurst is one of 14 Croydon wards in the council’s new selective licensing scheme, which runs for five years. A landlord letting a single-household home in the ward needs the licence.
How does a professional clean help me get my deposit back?
Cleaning is not wear and tear, so it is a deduction you can avoid entirely. A documented clean with an invoice and photos is strong evidence if your landlord tries to hold money back, and the deposit scheme’s adjudicator will weigh it.
Do I need to be there when you clean?
No. Plenty of Selhurst tenants leave a key or arrange access through the letting agent. We just need the property empty of belongings, with any fridge or freezer defrosted, and the power and hot water on.
Can you clean a flat near Selhurst station or the depot?
Yes, we cover all of SE25, including the converted flats around Selhurst Road and the terraces near the station and depot. Parking is tight on some of those streets, so we plan our kit around it.
What is included in the end of tenancy clean?
Every room top to bottom against a 57-point checklist: the kitchen (the oven is an add-on), bathrooms descaled, all surfaces and skirting dusted and wiped, insides of windows, cupboards and wardrobes inside and out, cobwebs cleared and carpets hoovered throughout.
Are carpet and oven cleaning included or extra?
They are extra, charged on top of the fixed price. Carpets are £29 a bedroom, £36 a living room or £94 for two bedrooms and a living room. Ovens are £31 single, £62 double or a range.
How far in advance should I book a Selhurst clean?
The sooner the better, especially around home-match weekends when the area is busy. A few days’ notice is usually fine, but if your check-out date is fixed it is worth calling as soon as you know it.
Do you clean houses in multiple occupation in Selhurst?
Yes. Shared houses near the depot are common, and we clean them room by room for check-out. Many smaller HMOs in the borough also fall under Croydon’s additional licensing scheme, separate from selective licensing.