Tooting Broadway’s end of tenancy cleaning team

The first thing a clerk does in a Tooting Broadway flat is tilt the shower screen against the window light and look for the milky film Thames Water leaves on glass. In the terraces off Mitcham Road, split into flats and shared lets years ago, that film is the deduction that turns up on more check-out reports around here than anything else. So an end-of-tenancy clean in SW17 has to be built for the person writing the report, not for how the place looks to you. We charge £30 per hour per cleaner on part jobs, run a fixed price on the whole flat, and put a 48-hour re-clean guarantee behind it. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover SW17 across Tooting Broadway, Tooting Bec, Furzedown and the Balham and Earlsfield edges, plus the SW16 fringe toward Streatham. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Wandsworth.

The short list a Tooting clerk works from

Start with how the money actually goes, because almost nobody does until it is too late. When you moved in, an inventory clerk walked the flat and wrote a check-in report describing every surface, nearly always with photos, and the kitchen and bathroom were logged as clean because the place had just been done. On the way out, a clerk walks it again and compares line by line. Anything worse than the check-in entry, past fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit. You are measured against a professional clean from day one, which is exactly why a mop and a spare Sunday rarely clears the bar in SW17.

The deductions are not the dramatic ones tenants lie awake over. They are small, they repeat, and they photograph well on a clipboard. Three years of running move-outs between Mitcham Road, Garratt Lane and Tooting High Street have given us a narrow shortlist, and the top of it is always the bathroom. Then the cooker hood. Then the edge where carpet meets skirting. Get those three right and most SW17 check-outs are quiet.

The money is real. On the DIY hand-backs we get called in to rescue after they have gone wrong, the deductions land in a familiar band: £80 to £150 on limescale and grout, £75 to £120 on the oven, £50 to £100 for the gaps behind the fridge and washing machine, more if the carpets are written into the tenancy. Put that against a deposit of a month and a bit of rent and the sum makes itself. Most people only run it after they have failed the first check-out, which is a shame, because the first round is the cheap one to win.

What 1 July 2025 changed on this side of Wandsworth

Two things moved the goalposts for Tooting move-outs, and they pull in different directions. Take the local one first, because it is the one most tenants have not heard about.

On 1 July 2025 Wandsworth Council brought in selective licensing across four wards: Tooting Broadway, Tooting Bec, Furzedown and South Balham. It runs for five years. On the same day the council also switched on borough-wide additional HMO licensing, which pulls in shared houses and flats let to three or four unrelated people, on top of the existing mandatory scheme for five sharers or more. You can check a specific address on the Wandsworth property licence pages. Wandsworth also runs an Article 4 direction across the borough, so turning a family house into a shared HMO needs planning permission rather than happening quietly.

Why does that matter to your clean? Because a licensed landlord in SW17 now signs up to written property-condition standards, and the agent who manages the flat inspects against a tighter checklist than they bothered with three years ago. The cleanliness bar has crept up half a notch since the scheme started. We have felt it in our own re-cleans off Selkirk Road and Vant Road, where a report now flags a grout line that would have passed in 2023.

The cleanliness bar has crept up half a notch since the licensing scheme started.

The national change is the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone, and every assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic one, so a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point rather than waiting for a fixed term to end. Here is the part people get wrong: the cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. The deposit cap is still five weeks of rent, six above £50,000 a year, and the check-in benchmark is exactly what it was. What changed is timing. In a high-churn corner like Tooting, full of one-year sharer lets, rolling notice means move-outs land less predictably, so the smart move is to book the clean earlier than you used to.

The 57 things we work through, room by room

Every booking runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, scaled to the size of the flat. It is the list the local agents have signed off over the years, and we do not quietly drop items to shave the price. Either the whole list gets done or we do not take the job. Here is the shape of it.

Kitchen

The oven is stripped, not wiped over. Racks go into a soaking tank, the door glass is split apart so the brown haze between the panels comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals all get done. That between-the-glass film is the single most flagged oven fault we see in Tooting kitchens. Hob off, burners and control knobs washed, splash panel done both sides. The extractor canopy over the back-extension hob is unhooked, the filter degreased in a hot bath, and the grease that climbs the wall behind it comes off, because a clerk runs a finger along that hood lip on nearly every check-out. Fridge and freezer pulled out, defrosted and wiped through once you have switched them off. Every cupboard emptied of crumbs and wiped inside. Sink, tap and drainer descaled. Then the floor, mopped twice into the corners.

Bathrooms

This is the SW17 chapter, so it gets the most time. The milky scale comes off the shower screen with a proper descaler, not a wipe. The grout line is worked by hand with a soft brush, particularly under the bath tap and around the basin where the hard water always shows. Chrome fittings polished dry. Toilet done inside, under the rim, around the base, cistern and hinges. The extractor grille is pulled and washed. Tile edges above the basin gone over twice. If the silicone seal has gone black past saving, we tell you whether it can be brought back or needs a fresh bead, and we carry white silicone for the second case.

Bedrooms and living rooms

Picture rails dusted top and underside. Window sills, reveals and the joinery rebates on the older terrace fronts vacuumed and wiped, and the tall bay windows in the split terraces need slow work because dust hides in the frame beading. Skirting wiped along its full run. Switches and sockets cleaned. Wardrobe interiors emptied and wiped. Carpets vacuumed twice, with the edge against the skirting detailed by hand, because that line is the one a clerk inspects. Hard floors mopped with the right product. Radiators done front and as far behind as the brush reaches.

Throughout

Hallways, stairs, internal doors both faces, handles and hinges. Light fittings and lampshades dusted. Cobwebs cleared from the ceiling corners. Letterbox interior and the front door, inside and out. If it is a small converted house and you share the entrance hall with the flat below, we do the shared bit outside your door too.

Why the bathroom loses more SW17 deposits than the oven

Tooting sits in London’s hard-water belt. Thames Water draws off chalk and limestone, and the supply into SW17 runs very hard, in the region of 270 to 300 mg of calcium carbonate per litre, which you can read on the Thames Water hard-water page. Set that against the tenant habits in a busy sharer flat, showers running twice a day for years, and the scale builds on glass, taps and tile joints faster than most people expect. A cloth does nothing to it once it has set.

The clerk knows this and checks for it directly. They tilt the screen to the light, run a thumbnail down the tap, pull the shower head in close. Scale that has bonded into chrome is slow, careful work, and in the older Tooting bathrooms the fittings are sometimes original, which rules out the aggressive descalers a new-build would shrug off. We use a proper scale remover and a soft brush and take the time, rather than reaching for bleach. Bleach whitens the look of a grout line for a day and the clerk photographs the grey coming back through the next morning. Scale that is removed is gone; scale that is bleached is still there.

“Two of us shared a converted flat on Selkirk Road for three years, right by the market. We are both nurses at St George’s and honestly did not have the weekends to fight the bathroom, and by the end the shower glass had gone properly cloudy and the grout under the taps was grey. The agent had warned us this block always gets pulled on limescale. Monster sent two cleaners on the Thursday before our Saturday check-out, worked the chrome and the glass with a real descaler, and sat on the grout with a brush for the best part of an hour. It came back clear. We got the full deposit back nine days later.”
Aisha, Selkirk Road SW17 9, March 2026

Grout is the other half of it. Kitchen and bathroom grout is the line between a pass and a charge here more often than anything to do with carpets. We scrub it rather than wipe it, and where it is genuinely past saving after a long tenancy we photograph the state before we start, so a clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already in the check-in pictures. A dated, timestamped photo has settled more Tooting disputes than any argument on the doorstep.

Tooting Broadway, market end to hospital end

SW17 is not one kind of flat, and the clean changes with the stock. We work it as three rough zones, because the report a clerk fills in on a market-end conversion reads nothing like the one on a purpose-built block near the hospital.

The market end and the Broadway

The centre of it all is Tooting Broadway station on the Northern line, with Tooting Market and the covered Broadway Market either side of the High Street, both full of food stalls and South Asian traders and both a genuine reason people want to live here. The flats around them, along Mitcham Road and the streets running south, are mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraces long since carved into flats and shared lets. High churn, young professionals and sharers, and a lot of tired kitchens in back extensions. This is where the bathroom-and-hood pattern bites hardest. Streets we are on constantly around here: Selkirk Road, Vant Road, Lessingham Avenue, Steerforth Street, and the terraces off Trinity Road toward Wandsworth Common.

The hospital end and the sharer HMOs

St George’s Hospital, off Blackshaw Road, is one of the largest hospitals in the country and a huge local employer, which puts a steady stream of nurses, junior doctors and NHS staff into rented rooms right across SW17. A lot of those are HMOs, three or four to a house, and Garratt Terrace and the streets near the hospital have plenty of six-bed shares. HMO check-outs are their own job: more bathrooms, more kitchens in use, and a licensing standard behind them since last July. We price them by the room where a whole-flat rate does not fit.

Toward Tooting Bec and the interwar semis

Head north toward Tooting Bec and the common and the housing shifts to 1930s semis and mansion-block flats, quieter and often longer tenancies, with original tiled bathrooms that scale up hard. It is a different feel from the market churn, and worth saying plainly: we are the Tooting Broadway page, not Balham up the road or Earlsfield one stop north. If your flat straddles a boundary, ring with the postcode and we will tell you which patch you are on in about ten seconds.

On a street we have not named? We almost certainly cover it. Ring 0333 555 2076 with the SW17 postcode and the property size.

What it costs, and the sum worth doing first

Tooting runs at our standard pricing. A market-end conversion, an HMO room near the hospital and an interwar semi toward the common all sit in the same band, and agency-side cleans booked through the letting agents are billed the same way.

Carpet shampoo comes on as an add-on: £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed. Oven add-ons run £77 single, £110 double, £114 for a 90cm range. We bring our own kit and products, and there is no line bolted on at the end for parking or extra hours unless the flat is genuinely outside the brief and we agree it with you on the phone first. A long sharer tenancy in heavy shape, or a flat nobody has deep-cleaned in three or four years, costs more, and we say so up front rather than after.

Now the sum. A two-bed at £243 to protect a deposit of well over £2,000 is not really a decision. Every Tooting booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the agent flags anything on the checklist inside 48 hours, we come back and redo that item free, as long as you tell us in the window and nobody has moved in. Our first-time pass rate on agent walk-throughs sits at 97%, and the guarantee covers the rest. There is a reason the agents keep sending us work.

Those numbers are the whole point. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years the work has helped tenants hold on to £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. Three jobs get muddled on the phone almost every week, so here is the short version of which is which.

End of tenancy clean

Built to pass the check-out inventory and get your deposit back, done to the agent benchmark with the flat empty, and carrying the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Priced per property size, or £30 an hour on a part job.

Deep clean

A top-to-bottom reset of a home you are keeping, lived in, with no formal standard to hit and no inventory behind it. Priced the same way, from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

Ongoing weekly or fortnightly upkeep with the same cleaner kept on, from £22 an hour, a maintenance job rather than a hand-back.

Check-in inventory report

The document the clerk writes on day one, with photos, describing every surface. It is the benchmark your check-out is judged against, which is why we clean to it and not to a vague idea of tidy.

A three-year sharer let off Mitcham Road

“Three of us had a converted flat just off Mitcham Road for three years, one bathroom between us and a tiny galley kitchen in the back extension. When we handed notice in we knew the oven was a state, years of grease none of us had touched, and the extractor hood over the hob was worse. The agent handles a lot of the market-end flats and does not miss much. Monster came for six hours, stripped the oven completely, got the hood and the wall behind it back to bare, and did the bathroom scale on top. Report came back clean. Best £243 we could have spent between three broke tenants.”
Tom, Mitcham Road SW17 8, February 2026

That is a fair example of the market-end pattern: a long sharer tenancy, a kitchen nobody had dealt with, and an agent who inspects properly. The clean cost a fraction of what was on the line. What turned it was not only the scrubbing but the dated photo set that went out with the invoice, which is the thing most DIY check-outs simply do not have when the agent pushes back.

Booking it around a Saturday hand-back

Most agents around Tooting do their check-outs on a Saturday morning, so Friday is our busiest day in SW17 and the Friday slots in the last week of the month go first. Book early for those. The steps are simple.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with the SW17 postcode, the property size, the hand-back date and the agent’s name. We quote a fixed price in about ten minutes during office hours, with no site visit and no survey fee.
2. You confirm and we hold the slot. Allow three working days for a mid-month clean and more for a month-end Friday. Payment is on completion, by card or bank transfer.
3. Flat empty when we arrive. Furniture out, belongings gone, rubbish cleared, so we can reach every surface the clerk will check.
4. We clean. Two cleaners on a one or two-bed, three on the bigger houses and HMOs. Five to seven hours on a two-bed.
5. Proof the same evening. A dated 57-point completion sheet by email, room by room, which is your evidence pack if the check-out tries to deduct. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back and fix it free.

You do not need to be there. We collect keys from the agent or a key safe, do the clean and drop them back, which the SW17 agents are happy to arrange on a job sheet. And if your check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway and we will do what we can.

Questions we get asked

How much is end of tenancy cleaning in Tooting Broadway for a two-bed flat?

£243 as a fixed price. That covers a two-bed anywhere in SW17, whether it is a converted Victorian or Edwardian terrace flat off Mitcham Road, a shared HMO near St George’s, or an interwar flat toward Tooting Bec. No site visit fee. The price includes the full 57-point checklist and the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. A studio is £156, a one-bed £207.

Why is bathroom limescale such a big deal in Tooting?

Thames Water into SW17 is very hard, roughly 270 to 300 mg of calcium carbonate per litre, drawn off chalk and limestone. In a busy sharer flat with showers running twice a day, scale builds on the glass, taps and tile joints within a couple of years, and a clerk photographs it on nearly every check-out we have shadowed. It needs a proper descaler and time, not a wipe, which is why it is the first thing we plan the job around.

Does the Wandsworth licensing scheme affect my clean?

Indirectly, and it is worth knowing. Since 1 July 2025 Tooting Broadway, Tooting Bec, Furzedown and South Balham have been under selective licensing, and the whole borough has additional HMO licensing on top of the mandatory scheme. Licensed landlords sign up to written property-condition standards, so their agents inspect to a tighter checklist than they did before. The cleanliness bar has moved up a little, and the 57-point checklist clears it comfortably.

Do you clean HMO house shares near St George’s Hospital?

Yes, constantly. St George’s puts a lot of NHS staff into shared houses across SW17, and streets near the hospital have plenty of five and six-bed HMOs. Those check-outs mean more bathrooms and kitchens in use, so we price them by the room where a single whole-flat rate does not fit. Tell us how many bedrooms and bathrooms at the booking stage and we quote accordingly.

Will you do a re-clean if my agent flags something?

Yes. The 48-hour re-clean guarantee covers any item on the 57-point checklist that the agent flags within 48 hours of the original clean. You forward the email or photo, we come back and redo that item free, usually the next day, as long as the flat is still in the state we left it and nobody has moved in.

How long does a two-bed Tooting clean take?

Five to seven hours with two cleaners. A converted terrace flat with tall bay windows and a scaled-up original bathroom takes the long end because of the careful joinery and grout work. A newer flat with easy fittings takes the short end. We start early enough that a same-day check-out clerk can walk through from mid-afternoon.

Can you fit a clean in on Friday before a Saturday check-out?

Usually, if you book at least three working days ahead. Friday is our busiest day in SW17 because most agents run Saturday-morning check-outs, and the Friday slot in the last week of the month fills first. Book early for month-end and it is rarely a problem.

Do I need to be at the property?

No. We collect keys from the agent or a key safe, do the clean and drop them back. The letting agents around Tooting Broadway are happy to release keys to us on a job sheet, so you can be at your new place or at work while we are in.

Does the Renters’ Rights Act change what I have to do at the end of the tenancy?

Not the clean itself. From 1 May 2026, Section 21 evictions are abolished and assured shorthold tenancies have become periodic, so notice is more flexible. The deposit cap and the check-in benchmark are unchanged, so your cleaning obligation at hand-back is exactly what it was. The practical effect in a high-churn area like Tooting is that move-outs are less predictable, so book the clean earlier than you might have.

What products do you use in the bathrooms?

A proper scale remover for the chrome and tile descaling, a neutral detergent on painted surfaces, and a soft brush on the grout. We do not default to bleach, because it whitens the look of a grout line for a day and the staining photographs back through the next morning. A real descaler removes the scale rather than hiding it, which is what a clerk is checking for.

Do you handle the deposit-dispute paperwork?

Not as a service, but the dated 57-point completion sheet we send the same evening is exactly what an adjudicator at the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, mydeposits or the Deposit Protection Service wants to see. Tenants have come back and told us it tipped a decision their way. Across the firm we have helped recover £1.2m in deposits, and Shelter’s guidance walks through the dispute steps.

Are you actually agent-approved?

Yes. 300+ letting agents across south-west and central London send us work, and that includes the brands and independents active around SW17. Our 97% first-time pass rate on agent walk-throughs is the number they care about, and the other 3% gets the 48-hour re-clean. Ask any Tooting agent what the job is like on the day.

Do you cover the rest of Wandsworth as well?

Yes, the whole borough. We work Tooting Broadway, Balham, Earlsfield, Wandsworth Town, Battersea and Putney off the same rates, and the flat-price structure is the same across all of them. The Wandsworth borough hub linked at the top of this page has the wider picture if your next flat is one over.