End of tenancy cleaning for South Bermondsey homes

On an ex-council maisonette off Galleywall Road, the inventory clerk opens the oven door before they take their coat off. A grill pan photographed clean and empty on the check-in report is the easiest deduction they will make all day, and on the Rennie Estate it is the one a rushed clean misses every time. So end of tenancy cleaning in South Bermondsey has to be built around the person writing that report: checklist-led, deposit-focused, billed at £30 per hour per cleaner if you want it by the hour, and carried by a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a fixed price in about three minutes.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the whole SE16 3 zone around South Bermondsey station and the SE15 1 edge towards the Old Kent Road. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Southwark.

What the clerk marks, and why your deposit hangs on it

Start with how the money actually moves, because almost nobody does. Your deposit is the landlord’s to claim against at the end, and in England it has to sit in one of the three government-backed schemes. When you moved in, a clerk walked the flat and wrote a check-in report describing every surface, nearly always with photos. At check-out a clerk walks it again and compares, line by line. Anything materially worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is chargeable. You are not being marked against a tidy flat. You are being marked against the photographs.

Cleaning is the single biggest category of deposit dispute in the schemes’ own published figures, ahead of damage and ahead of redecoration, and it is the one a tenant can fully control. The clerk does not judge whether the place is clean in any everyday sense. A maisonette handed back clean enough for the kids’ tea but plainly below the day-one standard gets written up, and an adjudicator reading the two reports months later sides with the documented account almost every time.

South Bermondsey adds a local squeeze on top. Demand around the station is hard, and the agents working SE16 and the Old Kent Road corridor, names like Oliver Jaques, Garrett Whitelock, Winkworth and Foxtons among them, usually have a replacement tenant lined up for an Ilderton Road flat before the keys are back. A two-bed near the station has been advertised around £2,000 a month, so the deposits in play are not small, and when an agent has a queue a borderline clean is not waved through. It is deducted, because someone else is already asking when they can move in.

One tenant put it plainly to us last winter.

I thought the flat looked spotless. The clerk thought the oven looked like evidence.

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026, and it has changed how tenancies in England end: Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, and existing assured shorthold tenancies have converted to periodic ones, so a tenant can give two months’ notice at any point. The cleaning bar did not move an inch. What changed is timing. Hand the flat back at or above the check-in standard and the deduction has nothing to grip; the new law just means more move-outs land at awkward, unpredictable points in the month.

The licence most South Bermondsey landlords now need

This is the part landlords here get wrong, and it is worth getting right, because it raises the cleaning bar between tenancies. South Bermondsey is now inside Southwark’s selective licensing scheme. The borough’s second designation came into force on 1 November 2023 and runs for five years, to 31 October 2028, and the ward list that came with it includes South Bermondsey alongside Old Kent Road, Rotherhithe, Surrey Docks and London Bridge and West Bermondsey. Selective licensing is the wide one: it does not just catch shared houses, it catches ordinary single-family privately rented homes too. If you let a flat on Verney Road or a maisonette off Galleywall Road, you very likely need a licence for it, and the application fee at the time of writing is £945.

That sits on top of Southwark’s borough-wide additional HMO scheme, which has run since 1 March 2022 and is currently set to end on 28 February 2027, with a fee of £1,365.10. That one covers smaller houses in multiple occupation, the kind let room by room to three or more people from two or more households, of which there are plenty in the converted houses and larger flats around the Old Kent Road end. So a room-by-room let here needs the HMO licence, and a standard family let needs the selective one.

Selective licence

Covers most ordinary privately rented homes in the ward, single family or couple, not just shared houses. South Bermondsey fell into this on 1 November 2023.

Additional HMO licence

Covers smaller HMOs let to three or more people in two or more households. Borough-wide across Southwark since March 2022.

Why a tenant should care

A licensed property is inspected, and a clean that fails between tenancies stops being only a deposit dispute. It becomes a compliance problem for the landlord, which is why the standard on these lets is not negotiable.

Southwark publishes the detail on its own site, though its pages tend to block automated readers, so check the council’s licensing section directly for the live ward maps and any fee changes. A tenant worried about a disputed deduction can get free, independent guidance from Shelter’s tenancy deposit advice, and the scheme holding your money will adjudicate for free if it comes to that.

Why the bathroom scales over faster than you scrub it

SE16 is on Thames Water, and the water here is hard. Thames Water puts hardness across south London at roughly 296 parts per million as calcium carbonate, which sits firmly in the very hard band. On the ground that means scale, and scale loses deposits here second only to the oven. Kettles fur in months. A shower screen in one of the newer Ilderton Road blocks clouds over, the chrome mixer in a Rennie maisonette dulls and crusts at its base, and the toilet grows a hard waterline ring that a sponge slides straight over.

Clerks in this corner of Southwark know exactly where to look. They run a thumbnail down the tap, tilt the shower screen against the light, pull the shower head in close. Scale set into chrome is not a wipe-and-go job, so we take it off with a proper descaler and a blade on the glass. A wipe puts it back within the week. The limescale on a long-empty flat can even return between the clean and the check-out if the place sits unused for days, which is one of the few honest reasons a clean comes back to us, and exactly what the re-clean guarantee is for.

South Bermondsey block by block: the clean changes by address

This is a small patch with very mixed stock, and the cleaning problems differ by block more than people expect. South Bermondsey station sits on Ilderton Road, a Southern train into London Bridge in a few minutes with Queens Road Peckham the next stop down. The Den, Millwall’s ground, is a short walk from the platform, so on a home Saturday the streets around Bramcote Grove fill and empty in a couple of hours. Around all that you get three kinds of home, and we send different kit to each.

The post-war estates

The Rennie Estate off Galleywall Road sets the tone: maisonettes and taller blocks, carpeted bedrooms, older fitted kitchens with tight gaps behind the appliances, and painted woodwork that scuffs. Add the older Southwark blocks along Rotherhithe New Road and you have the bulk of the local stock. These win on the dull, slow work. The clerk pulls the fridge and the washing machine out further than tenants expect, checks the gap behind, opens every built-in cupboard, runs a torch along the skirting. A clean that skips the bits nobody photographs daily is a clean that fails here.

The new-build flats

Along Ilderton Road and towards the Old Kent Road regeneration corridor near Verney Road, the newer apartment blocks are the opposite job: hard floors, big glass, a sleek fitted kitchen with an integrated hob and extractor. The work shifts to scale on the screens, smears on the glass, and the film of grease behind a hob that looks clean until it catches the light. Same checklist, different products.

The Victorian terraces

Threaded between the estates are the older terraced streets running towards The Den and Bridgehouse Meadows, some still single houses, many split into flats. These bring sash windows that need slow work, original skirting and door frames that mark easily, and the odd tiled hallway. We are careful with the period detail because a scratched original frame is a bigger deduction than a missed oven.

A landlord we work for sums up the patch well.

Two flats, same street, same agent. One is a new-build screen-and-glass job, the other is forty years of grease behind a Rennie cooker. They are not the same clean.

We work the whole SE16 3 zone and the SE15 1 edge: Ilderton Road, the Rennie Estate, Rotherhithe New Road, Verney Road, Bramcote Grove, Credon Road, Hornshay Street, Penarth Street, St James’s Road and the streets between the station and The Den. If your address is in SE16 3 or the SE15 1 fringe and is not on that list, we still cover it. The list is a sample, not a boundary.

The 57 things we work through, room by room

Every South Bermondsey booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what these clerks actually flag. One flat rate, the whole property, no hourly meter ticking while we work. Here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where most deposits go

The oven is stripped, not wiped: interior down to bare metal, racks and grill pan soaked and degreased, the door glass split where it comes apart so the brown film between the panels comes out, and the fan, element and seals all done. Hob and any gas burners lift off and get cleaned underneath. The extractor hood is degreased inside and out and the filter soaked or swapped. Every cupboard and drawer, emptied and wiped inside and out. Fridge and freezer defrosted, cleaned through, seals included, then switched off and propped open if the flat is sitting empty. Washing machine drawer, door rubber and filter, and the gap behind it reached where it pulls out. Sink, taps and drainer descaled, because the water never gives that a miss.

The bathroom, the other place it goes wrong

Hard scale comes off the shower screen, taps, mixer and tiles with a descaler and a blade, not a cloth. The toilet is cleaned and descaled, waterline ring and behind the pan included, where SE16 water builds a hard rim. Bath, basin and shower tray scrubbed, grout cleaned back as far as honest effort takes it, and any mould in the sealant lifted. Extractor vent dusted, mirror and cabinet cleaned, chrome polished out. Where grout or sealant is genuinely past saving, we photograph it before we start so a clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already there at check-in.

Bedrooms, living areas and the rest

Built-in wardrobes and drawers emptied and wiped inside. Carpets vacuumed along the edges and under where furniture stood, hard floors mopped. Skirting, sills, door tops and frames dusted down. In the living areas, every surface, shelf and radiator, behind them too, switches and sockets wiped, cobwebs out of the ceiling corners. Internal windows cleaned both sides where access is safe, sash windows worked slowly, frames and sills wiped. Every door and light fitting dusted, scuffs spot-cleaned off the paintwork. Then all floors vacuumed and mopped last, working back towards the door so nothing is walked over. Your own front door and frame, and any private hallway within the flat, finished off.

That is the hand-back clean, the one measured against the check-in report. It is not a deep clean, which is the reset you book when you are staying, and it is not a regular weekly clean. It is the one that gets a deposit back.

Why a clean occasionally comes back

When a flat does return to us under the guarantee, the cause is nearly always one of a short list, and it is worth knowing what they are. The oven, again, where a patch under the clerk’s torch was missed cold. Scale grown back on a long-empty bathroom. The gap behind an appliance in a tight Rennie kitchen that the clerk pulled out further than we did. A mould shadow left in old sealant that cleaned up but still reads grey, which is sometimes a landlord’s re-sealing job rather than a cleaning one. We come back and put right whatever is genuinely ours.

What it costs, and the sum nobody does until it is too late

Flat rates by property size, the standard SE16 pricing, kit and products included.

If you would rather we worked to a set number of hours than a whole-property clean, that is £30 per cleaner per hour. Carpet shampoo runs to £115 for a whole two-bed done together, and a 90cm range oven is £114 as a standalone. Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household, or somewhere that has not had a deep clean in years costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than after. No surprise lines on the invoice.

Now run the sum the deposit forces on you. On a post-war Rennie maisonette with bedroom carpets and a three-year-old oven, the two-bed rate at £243 plus a double oven and two bedroom carpets is the usual ticket, and it is still a fraction of the deposit it protects. A clerk’s deduction for a greasy oven and a scaled bathroom on the same flat will quietly run past what the whole clean cost. Most tenants only do that sum after they have tried, failed the check-out, and lost the first round.

Our 57-point agent-approved checklist is built around the exact run a South Bermondsey clerk uses. We hold a 97% first-time pass rate on these cleans, we have helped recover over £1.2m in deposits for tenants, and we are on the approved or trusted lists of 300+ letting agents across London, a good number of them working Southwark and the Old Kent Road corridor. Every booking carries the 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the clerk or agent flags anything cleaning-related within 48 hours, we come back and put it right at no charge, provided nobody has moved in.

“We had a two-bed maisonette on the Rennie Estate, three years in with two young kids, so the place had taken a kicking. The check-in report had the oven and grill pan photographed clean on day one and we had honestly never deep-cleaned it. Monster pulled the oven out, took the inside back to bare metal, did the grill and racks, cleaned the wall behind, then carried on through the rest. The clerk matched the oven against the report on the doorstep and signed it off. Full deposit, £1,850, back in nine days. Two cleaners, about six and a half hours, plus the double-oven add-on.”
Daniel R., Rennie Estate SE16, March 2026

Booking it around a month-end check-out

Booking is quick, and there is a timing trap worth dodging. Almost every check-out lands on the last two or three days of the month, the slots go, and the new periodic-tenancy notice rules have made the rush less predictable, not more. So book early for a month-end window. The steps are simple.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076. Give us the postcode, the bedroom count and your check-out date, plus any known problem areas. Price in about three minutes.
2. We give you a fixed price on the spot. No survey visit, no estimate that drifts upward later.
3. You book a slot, ideally the day before or the morning of your check-out, so the flat is handed over while it is still spotless. Allow more notice for the last few days of the month.
4. The flat should be empty when we arrive. Furniture out, personal things gone, rubbish cleared, so we can reach every surface the clerk will.
5. We clean to the full 57-point checklist, room by room, floors last, and leave it ready for the clerk.

You do not need to be there. Most South Bermondsey tenants leave us keys or set up a key safe and meet the clerk separately. Power and water at the flat is all we need; we bring the machines, descalers, oven products and cloths ourselves.

Add-ons, the right job for the job, and nearby areas

End of tenancy is one job we do. If the agent only flagged the worst item, our oven deep-cleaning service handles the single most-photographed thing in a South Bermondsey check-out on its own. For the post-war maisonettes around Galleywall Road where bedroom carpets carry years of wear, carpet cleaning can be added to the clean or booked alone, and a tired sofa a landlord keeps is covered by upholstery cleaning. Original glass on a sash-window terrace is a separate job too, folded in through window cleaning when the inventory asks for it.

Three different cleans get muddled, so it is worth booking the right one. We also work the streets around South Bermondsey, which matters when your next flat is one over: the river side of SE16 in Rotherhithe Village, and Bermondsey proper up towards the river.

End of tenancy clean

Built to pass the inventory and get a deposit back, against the letting-agent benchmark, with the flat empty and the 48-hour guarantee on it.

Deep clean

The reset you book when you are staying and want the home put right, with no formal standard to hit.

Regular domestic clean

Ongoing weekly or fortnightly maintenance, the same cleaner kept on the home, a different service entirely.

Questions we get asked

How much is end of tenancy cleaning in South Bermondsey?

It is a flat rate by size: £156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bed, £243 for a two-bed flat or maisonette, £339 for a three-bed and £425 for a four-bed. A typical Rennie Estate two-bed with a double oven and bedroom carpets comes to the two-bed rate plus those add-ons, fixed before we start.

Do you guarantee the clean passes the check-out?

Yes. If the inventory clerk or agent flags anything cleaning-related within 48 hours of the clean, we come back and put it right at no charge. That is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee, and our first-time pass rate on these cleans is 97%.

Can you clean a flat on the Rennie Estate at short notice?

Usually yes. South Bermondsey is core territory for us and we hold slots back for last-minute check-outs. Call 0333 555 2076 with your date and postcode and we will tell you straight away what we can do, often for the next day.

Is the oven really that important to the clerk?

It is the single most photographed item in a South Bermondsey check-out. The check-in report almost always has the oven recorded clean and empty, so a greasy oven at the end is the easiest deduction a clerk can justify. We clean it to bare metal as standard.

Why does the bathroom scale come back so fast here?

Because SE16 is on Thames Water and south London water is very hard, around 296 parts per million. We descale with a proper descaler and a blade rather than a wipe, but if a flat sits empty for days a faint bloom can return, which is exactly what the re-clean guarantee covers.

Do you move the fridge and washing machine to clean behind them?

Yes, where they pull out safely. Clerks in this part of Southwark routinely check the gap behind appliances in the tighter Rennie Estate and Rotherhithe New Road kitchens, so we reach those before they do.

My landlord lets the flat out. Does South Bermondsey need a licence now?

Most likely yes. South Bermondsey came under Southwark’s selective licensing scheme on 1 November 2023, which runs to 31 October 2028 and covers ordinary privately rented homes, not just shared houses. Smaller room-by-room HMOs need the separate borough-wide additional licence instead. A licensed property is inspected, so a clean that fails between tenancies is a compliance issue for the landlord, not just a deposit dispute.

Do I need to be there while you clean?

No. Most South Bermondsey tenants hand us keys or set up a key safe and meet the agent separately. We can clean an empty flat and you can do your check-out afterwards. Plenty of clients book us for the morning and meet the clerk in the afternoon.

How long does an end of tenancy clean take?

A one-bed is usually three to four hours. A two-bed maisonette with an oven and carpets is more like five to seven, often with two cleaners. We can give you a tighter window once we know the property and the add-ons you want.

Do you bring your own equipment and products?

Yes, everything: machines, descalers, oven products, cloths, the lot. You do not need to leave anything behind or have working utilities beyond power and water at the flat.

Can you also clean the carpets and a sofa left in the flat?

Yes. Carpet shampoo is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed. Upholstery left behind, like a sofa the landlord keeps, is priced on the piece. Booking it with the end of tenancy clean is the most efficient way.

Which streets and estates around South Bermondsey do you cover?

All of SE16 3 and the SE15 1 edge: Ilderton Road, the Rennie Estate off Galleywall Road, Rotherhithe New Road, Verney Road, Bramcote Grove, Hornshay Street and the Old Kent Road regeneration plots. If your address is nearby and not listed, we still cover it.

How do I get a fixed quote?

Call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with your postcode, bedroom count and check-out date. We give a fixed price immediately, with no survey visit and no figure that changes after we have started.

Other Monster Cleaning services in South Bermondsey

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