End of tenancy cleaning in Tooting Graveney, from £156

In a split Edwardian house off Mitcham Road, the metal grease filter behind the extractor hood is the first thing that loses a deposit. The hood gets wiped, the filter gets forgotten, and the check-out clerk lifts it out and writes the deduction. That is the shape of end-of-tenancy cleaning in Tooting Graveney: upper and lower flats carved out of period terraces, hard Thames Water on every tap, and clerks who have walked the same SW17 conversions hundreds of times. We are Monster Cleaning Ltd, working south-west London since 2014, and we clean to the report, at £30 per hour per cleaner with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price.

Last updated June 2026. We cover the SW17 streets of Tooting Graveney, from the grid off Mitcham Road and Garratt Lane down to Amen Corner and across toward Tooting Bec Common. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Wandsworth.

The benchmark you are cleaned against was set on day one

Almost nobody starts with the mechanism, and the mechanism is the whole thing. When you moved in, a clerk walked the flat and wrote an inventory: every surface described, photographed, usually marked “clean to a professional standard” against the kitchen and bathroom. That was true on the day, because the flat had just been cleaned by a crew like ours. 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, comes off your deposit. You are marked against a professional clean. A mop and a borrowed Sunday afternoon rarely reaches that line.

The money is concrete. On the DIY Tooting Graveney check-outs we get called to rescue, the deductions fall in a familiar order: £85 to £130 on the oven, £70 to £150 on grout and bathroom scale, £60 to £110 for the gaps behind appliances, £150 to £300 on carpets, £80 to £180 for marks on walls and skirting. Set that against a flat carrying a five-week deposit on an SW17 rent and the sum makes itself. Most tenants only run it after they have tried, failed the check-out, and lost the first round. That order is almost always backwards, which is a pity, because the first round is the cheap one to win.

Why is the clerk so exacting in this part of Wandsworth? Because the deposit is real money somebody has to protect, held in a government-backed scheme, and the agent is on the hook for it. The inspection is genuinely adversarial: the clerk is paid to find faults, not to wave you through. That is not unfair. It means you turn up with evidence rather than optimism.

Two things sit behind all of this in law, pulling in opposite directions. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 means your landlord cannot make professional cleaning a contractual condition, so nobody can force you to book us. Damp and mould, though, are a landlord obligation under the Homes Act 2018, not a tenant cleaning failure. Where we find structural damp in a cold bathroom corner or behind a wardrobe, we photograph it so the charge sits where it belongs and not on you.

What Wandsworth licensing changed for SW17 landlords in 2025

This is the local twist most pages miss. On 1 July 2025 Wandsworth Council brought in a borough-wide additional licensing scheme for houses in multiple occupation, plus a selective licensing scheme covering ordinary private lets in four wards: Tooting Broadway, Furzedown, South Balham and Tooting Bec. Tooting Graveney sits squarely inside that net. An additional HMO licence runs to £1,450 per property and a selective licence to £850, and the council inspects against management and condition standards to grant them.

What that does to your check-out is simple. If you have rented a room in a licensed shared house off Mitcham Road or Garratt Lane, your landlord is under council scrutiny on standards, and a poor hand-back reflects straight back on the licence they paid for. Licensed HMO landlords in SW17 push check-out cleaning harder than a one-off private landlord would, so the cleaning bar here is set higher than the flat’s age suggests. The detail is on the council site at wandsworth.gov.uk.

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026 and sits on top of all this. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone. Every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic tenancy, and a tenant can 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 Tenant Fees Act still applies, the check-in benchmark still applies, the deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before. What changed is timing, and timing is what bites in a high-churn corner like this one.

The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all.

The 57 things we work through, room by room

Every Tooting Graveney 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. The full list comes with the job, or we walk you through it before we start. Here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, where most SW17 deposits go

The oven is stripped, not wiped. Racks go in a soaking tank, the door glass is split apart so the brown film between the panels comes out, and the interior, fan, element and seals are all done. That film is the single most-flagged oven fault in these conversions. If the oven is the only thing your agent pulled you up on, standalone oven cleaning covers it on its own.

Then the rest of the room. The extractor hood is degreased inside and out and the metal filter behind it soaked or swapped, because on an upper-floor flat with a year of late-shift cooking the filter is where the grease ends up, and it is the second-most-common flag after the oven. Hob rings and burners come off, knobs off and washed; induction in the newer infill, gas in the period flats. Every cupboard inside and out, including the deep awkward-cornered ones in the older terrace kitchens. Fridge and freezer cleaned through once you have defrosted them. Appliances pulled out so the gaps behind and under them are done, then put back, because that gap is exactly where an SW17 clerk looks. The washing machine drum, detergent drawer and door seal. Dishwasher filter, seals and spray arms. Microwave inside, out and underneath. Sink, taps, drainer and plughole descaled. Tiles and grout scrubbed. Bins washed. Floor pulled back where it lifts, hoovered and mopped.

Bathrooms, the other place it goes wrong

Scale comes off the taps, shower head, screen and tiles first. Grout is scrubbed back as far as honest effort takes it, and photographed first where it is clearly past saving. Then the rest, in plain order.

• Toilet done properly: inside, under the rim, base, cistern, hinges, and behind the pedestal where nobody looks but the clerk
• Shower screen both sides, tracks and the sealant bead included
• Bath, taps, the underside of the taps, overflow and plughole
• Mirrors and cabinets, and behind them where they come away from the wall
• Extractor vent wiped and the silicone cleaned to a usable state, with mould spotting along the seals cleared, which in these weak-extraction interior bathrooms is a routine flag
• Floor into the corners, behind the loo and under the basin pedestal

Bedrooms, living rooms and everything between

Inside every wardrobe, drawer and built-in cupboard. Skirting, door frames, doors, handles and finger plates. Light fittings, lampshades, switches, and the ceiling roses, which in a period Tooting flat hold years of dust and always get checked. Window sills, reveals and frames inside, with the original sash windows in the conservation-area terraces needing slow, careful work. Radiators behind, under and on top. Walls spot-wiped for marks, with a realistic line drawn, because nail holes and scuffs are a decorator’s bill and not yours to scrub away. Hard floors washed with the right product. Upholstery hoovered through.

Two of these often need their own pass. Professional hot-water extraction on carpets is written into a lot of Tooting tenancies as a hard requirement, which is what the carpet cleaning add-on covers on the same visit. Hard-used sofas in shared professional lets sometimes want full upholstery cleaning rather than a hoover.

Then everything else: switches, sockets, thermostats and entryphones; internal doors both sides with handles and hinges; the stairs and bannister where the flat has them. Cobwebs out of the high coving and the tops of the tall Edwardian door frames. Then a final walk-through, photographed before and after, every room. That photo set is the evidence you keep.

What Thames Water leaves on a Tooting bathroom

Tooting Graveney sits in London’s hard-water zone, and that one detail loses more deposits here than almost anything except the oven. Thames Water draws from chalk aquifers, so the supply runs around 300 milligrams of calcium carbonate a litre, which the official scale classes as hard. Limescale builds on taps, shower heads, screens and tile joints faster than tenants expect, and a wipe with a cloth does nothing to it. The clerk checks for it: a thumbnail down the tap, the shower screen viewed edge-on against the light, the shower head pulled in close. Set-in scale on chrome is not a quick job, and a dull white film on the glass reads as a flat that was never properly cleaned, even when it is only water chemistry doing its slow work over a tenancy. We treat descaling as a standard part of every SW17 bathroom and kitchen, not an optional extra.

Grout is the other one. Kitchen and bathroom grout is the line between a pass and a deduction in this borough more often than anything to do with carpets. We scrub it rather than wipe it. Where it is genuinely past saving, which happens in long shared-house tenancies, we photograph the state before we start so the clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already there at check-in. That photo has settled more disputes than any argument has. It is dated, it is timestamped, and a clerk cannot charge a tenant for grout that was already grey in the check-in pictures.

That photo has settled more disputes than any argument has.

Specialist surfaces sit outside the scrub-and-go work. Original parquet in a Heaver Estate flat, encaustic tile in a Totterdown hallway, engineered board in the newer infill near the station: each takes its own product, which is what the floor cleaning add-on is for. Exterior glass on an upper-floor flat is a separate job too; that is window cleaning, folded into the same visit when the inventory asks for it.

Tooting Graveney street by street: the stock is not one thing

Tooting Graveney is the southern half of Tooting, the SW17 streets running down below Tooting Common toward Tooting Broadway and Amen Corner. It looks uniform from the top deck of a bus along Mitcham Road. It is not. A bedsit room in a six-way HMO off Garratt Lane and a double-fronted house on the Heaver Estate share a postcode and almost nothing else, so one method does not pass all of it. We work the area in three kinds of stock.

The conversions: upper and lower flats in split terraces

This is the bulk of the work. Late-Victorian and Edwardian terraces, a great many bay-fronted, carved into upper and lower flats and shared houses. The kitchens are the giveaway: grease above the hob and behind the units, an extractor filter nobody has touched, an interior bathroom with weak ventilation that grows mould in the same two or three corners. Long shared tenancies mean build-up in places nobody cleaned between tenants. We win these check-outs on the dull, slow work, not on anything clever. Pick your patch: the streets off Tooting Bec, the grid toward Balham, and the run across to Streatham.

The conservation stock: Totterdown Fields and the Heaver Estate

Some of this housing is listed history. Totterdown Fields, off the south end, was the London County Council’s first cottage estate, 1,244 houses built between 1901 and 1911 and made a conservation area in 1978. The Heaver Estate, up toward Tooting Bec Common, is Alfred Heaver’s handsome terraces from the 1880s, several double-fronted and overlooking the green. The inventory report on a flat like these names the period detail individually, plaster cornices, ceiling roses, original boards, sash windows with working shutters, which means the check-out clean has to match it individually, and nothing aggressive goes near original paint or plaster. We do the detail by hand and we are careful with it.

The rest: mansion blocks, ex-council and new infill

Closer to Tooting Broadway there are purpose-built mansion blocks and flats above the Mitcham Road and Tooting High Street shops, a scatter of ex-local-authority estates, and newer infill near the station. The flats over the shops bring narrow stair access and tight loading by the markets; the new-builds bring integrated appliances and engineered floors that each clean their own way. Tooting Broadway station, the one with the bronze Edward VII statue on its granite plinth out front, is the centre of gravity for the whole patch.

Tooting boundaries blur and people guess wrong about whether they are in Tooting Graveney, Tooting Bec or the edge of Balham. Not sure which side of the line you are on? Ring 0333 555 2076 with the postcode and we will tell you in about ten seconds.

What it costs, and the sum nobody runs in time

Tooting Graveney runs at our standard south-west London pricing: £30 per hour per cleaner, with kit, products and travel included, and no SW17 surcharge. A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339, a four-bed £425. Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long tenancy with heavy wear, a pet household, a smoker’s flat, or somewhere that has not had a deep clean in years costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than after. Carpets run £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed carpeted area; ovens are £77 single, £110 double, £114 for a 90cm range. We tell you which add-ons your flat actually needs rather than selling you the lot.

Run the sum the way the deposit makes you. A one-bed at £207 to protect a five-week deposit on a Tooting rent is barely a decision. Every booking carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the agent flags any cleanliness issue inside 48 hours, we come back and redo it free, provided you tell us inside that window and the flat is still as we left it, with nobody moved in. Our work here holds a 97% first-time pass rate, but the guarantee is the point, because a failed check-out is not a small thing to shrug off. There is a reason agents on this patch know us. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years that work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. That number is really the whole job: money that stays with the tenant instead of the landlord.

A job off Mitcham Road in March

“Four of us shared an upper-floor flat off Mitcham Road for sixteen months, and one of us does nights at St George’s, so the kitchen took a year of late reheated meals. The check-in report had flagged the cooker and a mould patch creeping along the bathroom sealant, and we had braced ourselves to lose a chunk of the deposit over both. Monster put two cleaners on it for most of a day, stripped the grease off the hob and the run of units, pulled the filter, and got the sealant clean and the patch out. The agent’s clerk passed it. Full deposit back, split four ways. For a house of nurses on a budget that genuinely mattered.”
Priya, Tooting Graveney SW17, March 2026

That is a fair example of the pattern here: a long shared tenancy, a kitchen nobody had deep-cleaned, a damp spot in a weak-extraction bathroom, and an agent who checks against the report. The clean cost a fraction of what was at stake. It usually does. What turned it was not the scrubbing alone but the dated photo set that went out with the invoice, which is the part most DIY check-outs never have when the agent pushes back.

Booking it around the St George’s intake rush

Tooting has a churn rhythm most of London does not. St George’s Hospital, founded in 1733 and one of the country’s largest teaching hospitals, sits on Blackshaw Road on the edge of the area with its medical school attached, and between the hospital intake and the academic year a large slice of the shared-house stock turns over in late summer. Add the periodic-tenancy effect from the new Act and move-outs get more frequent and less predictable. Book early for the August and September windows. The steps are simple.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076. Price in about three minutes. Give us the postcode, property size, check-out date and any known problem areas, and mention anything the check-in report marked “clean” or “as new”.
2. We book you in, ideally the day before check-out with a buffer. Allow 7 to 10 days for a late-summer slot, 3 to 5 days the rest of the year.
3. Flat empty when we arrive. Furniture out, personal things gone, rubbish cleared. We also do removals if you want the move and the clean on one booking, which genuinely helps on Tooting Graveney’s permit-controlled streets where several van trips turn into a problem.
4. Photo proof at the end. Every room, before and after, with an itemised invoice on company-headed paper. That is your evidence pack if the check-out tries to deduct.
5. Check-out happens. Anything flagged inside 48 hours, we come back and fix it free.

One honest note on parking. Most of the residential grid is in a Wandsworth controlled-parking zone, the bays are tight, and the streets by the markets and the Broadway are busy all day. The parking is the worst part of a move-out day here, so tell us the arrangement when you book, and confirm how we get in: key safe, mansion-block concierge, or an agent drop-off.

Add-ons, the jargon, and the areas next door

A Tooting move-out often pulls in more than the core clean. Carpet cleaning is the common one, frequently a contractual line in local tenancies rather than an optional extra. Oven cleaning is in every end-of-tenancy job as standard, and stands alone from £77 if that is all the agent flagged. Removals puts the move and the clean on one booking. Upholstery cleaning covers furnished lets, and window cleaning handles exterior glass an inventory sometimes asks for.

Four different jobs get muddled here, and it is worth booking the right one.

Check-in inventory report

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

End-of-tenancy clean

Built to pass that inventory and get a deposit back, against the letting-agent benchmark, with the flat empty and the 48-hour guarantee on it, at £30 an hour per cleaner.

Deep clean

A deep clean resets a home you are keeping, lived-in, with no formal standard to hit, also from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

A regular domestic clean is ongoing maintenance, from £22 an hour weekly or £24 fortnightly.

We work the areas around Tooting Graveney too, which matters when a tenancy straddles a boundary or your next flat is one over: End of Tenancy Cleaning Tooting Bec, End of Tenancy Cleaning Balham, End of Tenancy Cleaning Earlsfield and End of Tenancy Cleaning Streatham.

Questions we get asked

Do I really need professional end-of-tenancy cleaning in Tooting Graveney?

You are allowed to do it yourself; the Tenant Fees Act 2019 stops a landlord making it a contractual condition. The catch is the benchmark. The check-in standard was set by a professional clean, and the SW17 inventory clerks compare against it line by line. Matching that without professional kit is hard, and against a five-week deposit the sum usually points one way.

Does the new Wandsworth licensing affect my deposit?

Indirectly, and it works against a sloppy clean. Since 1 July 2025 Wandsworth has run borough-wide additional HMO licensing plus selective licensing in the Tooting Broadway, Furzedown, South Balham and Tooting Bec wards. Licensed landlords are inspected on standards, so they push check-out cleaning harder than an unlicensed private landlord would, and a borderline hand-back is more likely to draw a deduction here than the flat’s age suggests.

Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 change cleaning obligations?

No. From 1 May 2026 Section 21 evictions are abolished and every assured shorthold tenancy in England converts to a periodic tenancy, with two months’ notice available at any point. The cleaning obligations at end of tenancy do not change. The real effect in Tooting Graveney is more frequent and less predictable move-outs, so book as early as you can.

Is the hard water in SW17 really a problem at check-out?

Yes. Tooting Graveney is on hard Thames Water, around 300 milligrams of calcium carbonate a litre off the chalk, and scale builds visibly on taps, screens and tiles within a tenancy. To a clerk that white film reads as a poor clean, so we descale every bathroom and kitchen as standard rather than as an extra.

Can you clean a single room in a shared HMO rather than the whole flat?

Yes. A lot of Tooting Graveney stock is HMO rooms off Mitcham Road and Garratt Lane. For a single room or a part-clean we usually work hourly at £30 per cleaner, and we tell you honestly how long your room will take.

How long before check-out should I book?

Late-summer check-outs, around the St George’s and academic intake, want 7 to 10 days’ notice because the shared-house stock all turns over at once. The rest of the year is usually 3 to 5 days. We ideally clean the day before your inventory so the 48-hour guarantee window covers the appointment.

Which letting agents do you work with in Tooting Graveney?

We are on the books of 300+ letting agents across London, and on the Tooting and wider Wandsworth patch that means regular work with Rampton Baseley, Marsh & Parsons, Hamptons, Foxtons and Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward, plus many local independents. Agent-specific inventory requirements are briefed to the cleaners where they apply.

What is the most common reason tenants here lose cleaning money?

In these conversions it is the kitchen, specifically the extractor grease filter and the gap behind pulled-out appliances, followed by mould spotting in the bathroom sealant. Those three are the points clerks check first and tenants miss most.

Do you handle the period conversions with original features?

Yes. The Totterdown Fields and Heaver Estate streets, and many of the older terraces, carry original cornicing, ceiling roses, plasterwork, sash windows and stripped or original floorboards. We use appropriate products on those features and we put nothing aggressive where the inventory report lists original detail.

What happens if my landlord disputes the clean after a re-clean?

Escalate to your deposit scheme’s free adjudication, whether that is the Tenancy Deposit Scheme, the Deposit Protection Service or mydeposits. Our invoice, dated photo report and re-clean record are admissible evidence, and a tenant with a complete professional-clean paper trail very rarely loses. Shelter’s housing-advice pages walk through the steps if you want them.

What happens with parking and building access?

Most of Tooting Graveney is in a controlled-parking zone. We confirm the arrangement at booking, whether that is a visitor permit, a meter or a CPZ bay. Building access for the mansion-block concierge, a key safe or an agent drop-off is confirmed in advance too.

Get a price

Call 0333 555 2076 and we price the job in about three minutes. Postcode, property size, check-out date, any known problem areas, that is the lot. Out of hours, send us a message and someone calls you back first thing. A couple of WhatsApp photos of the kitchen and bathroom sharpen the quote, which helps most on the bigger Heaver and Totterdown places. And if your check-out is tomorrow, ring anyway and we will do what we can.

Other Monster Cleaning services in Tooting Graveney

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