The Broadway, the markets, and your deposit
Outside Tooting Broadway station, under the dome, stands a bronze of Edward VII that has watched the junction since 1911, fifteen years before the Tube reached it. Walk a hundred yards down Tooting High Street and you reach the reason most people come: two covered markets, Tooting Market from 1930 and Broadway Market from 1936, sitting almost side by side and now packed with food stalls and small bars. This is the part of Tooting that Lonely Planet had in mind when it named the area one of the coolest neighbourhoods in the world, singling out the markets and the curry corridor along the high street. It is a busy, mixed corner of the London Borough of Wandsworth, and it churns renters constantly.
The two markets are worth knowing if you live around here, because they shape the streets. Tooting Market and Broadway Market kept the old covered layout while the stalls inside turned over from haberdashers and butchers to coffee, craft beer and food from half the world. That draw is part of why flats above and around the high street rent so quickly, and why they turn over so often.
That churn is where we come in. Most of our local work is end of tenancy cleaning: the deep clean a flat needs when a tenancy ends, booked to get a deposit back in full. It is a different job from a fortnightly tidy, and a different job from a builders’ clean, and the standard an agent inspects to is higher than most people expect.
This page sets out how a move-out clean works around Tooting Broadway, what it costs, and the one local rule that genuinely affects renters here: Wandsworth’s selective licensing, which covers the Tooting Broadway ward by name. If your flat is closer to the Common and the Lido, our separate Tooting Bec end of tenancy page is the better fit; this one stays on the Broadway, the markets and the streets around St George’s.
Who rents around Tooting Broadway
The housing around the Broadway is mostly flats, and mostly old houses cut into flats. The terraces running off Mitcham Road, Garratt Lane and Upper Tooting Road were built in the late Victorian and Edwardian decades, then split into two, three, sometimes four units over the years that followed. Streets like Selkirk Road, Longley Road and the grid between the high street and Tooting Bec Road are full of them. You also get purpose-built blocks near the station and a scatter of newer developments, but the converted flat is the type we clean most.
Sharers fill a lot of these. Three or four people to a converted house is normal here, often a year-long tenancy that ends when one person leaves and the whole group moves on. That arrangement is exactly what the licensing rules further down this page are aimed at, and it is why so many Tooting move-outs land in the same fortnight, right as the agents on Tooting High Street and Upper Tooting Road are turning flats around for the next group.
The agents matter for timing as much as for standard. A flat let through a high-street agent off the Broadway will usually have a proper check-in inventory with photographs, which means the move-out clean is measured against a documented baseline rather than a vague memory of how the place looked. That is good news if your clean is genuinely thorough, because a photographed baseline cuts both ways, and bad news if it is not.
There is a real spread of tenant types behind those front doors. Young professionals who want to be near a Northern line that gets them into the City and the West End in half an hour. Families settled out toward Furzedown and the quieter streets near Tooting Bec Road, often in a whole house rather than a flat. Hospital staff on short contracts, who move when the contract does. Each leaves a flat in a slightly different state, and each gets the same checklist when they go.
We clean the whole spread, from a studio above a shop on the high street to a four-bed house out toward Furzedown. The bigger the place and the more original detail it keeps, the longer the clean runs.
The St George’s factor in local lets
St George’s Hospital sets the rhythm of a lot of local lets. It is one of the largest teaching hospitals in the country, founded back in 1733, with around 1,300 beds and somewhere near 10,000 staff serving roughly 1.3 million people across south-west London. A workforce that size, much of it on rotations and fixed contracts, drives a steady stream of tenancies that start and end on the hospital calendar rather than the usual academic year.
That shows up in our diary. Junior doctors and nurses rotating between trusts, contract staff on six- or twelve-month placements, students at the medical school: a fair share of our Tooting move-outs are people leaving a flat because a hospital post has ended, not because they chose this particular August. They tend to book a clean at short notice, around a shift pattern, and they want a clean that passes first time because there is no slack in the week to argue a deduction.
The buses tell the same story. The 155, the 264 and the 280 all run past the hospital gates, and on a move-out day we are often working a flat on one of those routes between Tooting and the wards. If you are leaving a hospital-linked tenancy, you already know the area runs on its own timetable; we book around it.
It is worth being clear about geography here, because Tooting blurs at the edges. This page covers the streets around Tooting Broadway, the markets and St George’s. The green space most people picture, Tooting Bec Common and the Lido, sits over to the north-east, and the flats nearest those belong on our Tooting Bec page rather than this one. If your postcode sits between the two, a quick call sorts out which team and which round is the right fit.
A workforce that size, much of it on rotations and fixed contracts, drives a steady stream of tenancies that start and end on the hospital calendar rather than the usual academic year.
What the 57-point clean covers
Our move-out clean follows a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built from what local clerks and agents actually mark a flat against. This is no quick tidy. Every room gets taken back to a let-ready state, with the kitchen and bathroom doing most of the heavy lifting because that is where deductions cluster.
In the kitchen we degrease the hob, the splashback and the extractor, clean inside and behind the appliances you are leaving, wipe out cupboards and drawers inside and out, descale the sink and taps, and clean the floor to the edges. The oven is its own job, and most flats need it: trays, racks, glass and the cavity, scrubbed back rather than wiped over. In the bathroom we descale the shower screen, taps, tiles and the toilet, clean the extractor, polish the mirror and glass, and treat the grout where the hard water has left a film.
Across the rest of the flat we dust and wipe every reachable surface, including the tops of doors, the skirting and the picture rails the old conversions still have, clean the inside of the windows and the sills and frames, wipe switches and sockets and radiators, and vacuum and mop the floors throughout. Internal glass, light fittings and the insides of fitted wardrobes are all on the list. We need power and running hot water on site to do any of it, so keep both connected until after the clean.
This is the standard that earns our numbers: a 97% first-time pass rate on these cleans, and a 48-hour re-clean guarantee behind every one. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, and over the years we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. Those figures are the whole reason the checklist is as long as it is.
The jobs in an SW17 flat that take longest
Some jobs in a Tooting flat eat the clock, and they are worth knowing before you decide whether to clean it yourself or book us.
Limescale is the first. This is hard-water London, and a bathroom that has not been descaled in a year wears a dull film on the glass, the taps and the tiles that a normal spray will not shift. Getting it back to the shine a clerk expects takes time and the right product, and it is the single thing tenants most often underestimate.
Then there is the grease in a kitchen that has cooked properly. Tooting is a food place, the curry corridor along Tooting High Street and Upper Tooting Road is half the reason people move here, and a lot of that cooking happens at home too. A flat near the high street often has a fine film of cooking residue on the units, the wall behind the hob and the top of the extractor. It hides until the light catches it, which is exactly when the clerk catches it too. Spice-heavy cooking also stains, so an extractor filter and a splashback can need real work rather than a wipe.
The old conversions add their own traps. Picture rails, deep skirting, ceiling roses and the gaps behind freestanding furniture all collect dust that the previous tenant never reached, and a long family let out toward Furzedown will have a wardrobe that has not moved in years with a drift of dust and a lost sock behind it. Original timber sash windows are common in these houses, and the runners and the glazing bars hold grime that a modern window never gathers. None of it is hard once you know it is there. It just takes longer than people budget for.
Selective licensing in Tooting Broadway
Here is the local rule worth getting right, because it changes who is responsible for what at the end of a tenancy.
From 1 July 2025, Wandsworth Council requires a selective licence on ordinary private rented homes in four named wards, and Tooting Broadway is one of them, alongside Furzedown, Tooting Bec and South Balham. A selective licence covers the standard private let, a home occupied by a single household or by two unrelated sharers. If your Tooting Broadway tenancy is one of those, your landlord should hold that licence as of July 2025.
Additional HMO licensing is the second scheme, and it runs borough-wide from the same 1 July 2025 date, for five years. It covers houses shared by three or more people from different households, which is a common arrangement in these converted streets. So a single house off Mitcham Road might sit under selective licensing as a family let, or under additional HMO licensing as a sharer house, depending on how it is occupied. Wandsworth has launched both schemes with the stated aim of protecting private renters and cracking down on rogue landlords.
A second designation, approved later in 2025, brought East Putney, West Putney and Northcote into selective licensing from 1 April 2026, but those are separate wards from this one. Licensing is the landlord’s duty, not the cleaner’s and not really the tenant’s, but renters ask us about it on move-out all the time, so it is worth saying where you stand. You can check any address on the council’s property licence checker.
One thing licensing does not change: your deposit rights. Whatever scheme your house falls under, your deposit must still be protected, and the clean is judged the same way.
So a single house off Mitcham Road might sit under selective licensing as a family let, or under additional HMO licensing as a sharer house, depending on how it is occupied.
How cleaning deductions and disputes work
Worth saying plainly, because the worry behind every move-out clean is the deposit: cleaning is the single most common reason landlords try to keep money. The Tenancy Deposit Scheme, one of the three government-approved schemes, reports that cleaning comes up in over half of the disputes its adjudicators handle, more than damage or anything else. So a clean that actually meets the check-in standard is the most direct way to protect the money you put down.
The standard is the part people get wrong. You do not have to leave a Tooting flat cleaner than you found it. As Shelter sets out, you only need to return it as clean as it was at the start of the tenancy, fair wear and tear aside, and a landlord cannot force you to pay for professional cleaning as a blanket condition of the let. You can read the position on the Shelter cleaning and deductions guide. In practice that standard is high anyway, because most Tooting flats were professionally cleaned before the current tenant moved in, and the check-in report says so.
If a deduction does land and you think it is unfair, you do not have to accept it. Every deposit scheme runs a free dispute service, where an adjudicator weighs the check-in report, the check-out report and the photographs and decides. This is where a documented, thorough clean pays off twice: it gets you past the inspection first time, and if it ever comes to a dispute, the evidence is on your side. A clean that passes is far cheaper than a deduction you spend six weeks arguing back.
That is the reasoning behind the guarantee. If the clerk or agent flags our work, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee means we fix it before it ever becomes a dispute, so the question of adjudication never arises.
What an end of tenancy clean costs in Tooting
We price by the size of the property, not by the hour, so you know the figure before we start. These are our standard end of tenancy prices for an empty Tooting flat in fair condition.
- Studio flat: from £156
- One-bedroom flat: from £207
- Two-bedroom flat: from £243
- Three-bedroom property: from £339
- Four-bedroom property: from £425
If you would rather book by time than by property size, we also clean at £30 per cleaner per hour, which suits a part-clean or a flat that only needs certain rooms brought up to standard. For a full move-out though, the fixed per-property price is usually the better deal, and it is the one the guarantee sits behind.
A quick honest note on what moves a price. The list above assumes the flat is empty and in normal end-of-tenancy condition. A place left heavily soiled, or one still full of furniture and belongings, takes longer and we will say so when we quote rather than spring it on you afterwards. We would always rather give you the real number on the phone.
End of tenancy, deep clean or regular clean
People ask us the difference between an end of tenancy clean, a deep clean and a regular clean, usually when they are trying to work out which one they actually need. The short answer: for getting a deposit back, you want the end of tenancy clean, every time.
A regular clean is the fortnightly or weekly job that keeps a flat liveable. Surfaces wiped, floors done, bathroom and kitchen kept on top of. It is the right service for a flat you are staying in, and it is not what an inventory clerk is checking against.
A deep clean goes further, into the build-up a regular clean skips, and it overlaps a lot with what we do on a move-out. The difference is the target. An end of tenancy clean is a deep clean aimed squarely at the check-in report and the 57-point checklist, with the oven, the limescale, behind the appliances and the insides of cupboards all done to a let-ready standard, because those are the lines a clerk inspects. It is the version of a deep clean that has a deposit riding on it.
If you are mid-tenancy in a Tooting flat and just want it kept nice, our regular and one-off domestic cleaning covers that. If you are moving out, this is the page you want.
Carpets, ovens and the extras clerks flag
Two extras come up on almost every Tooting move-out, because they are the two things inventory clerks flag most: carpets and the oven.
Carpets first. A check-in report almost always logs carpet condition, and a year of foot traffic in a flat off the Broadway shows. We clean carpets by the room, at £36 a bedroom and £43 for a living room, or £115 to do a whole two-bed flat, using hot-water extraction that lifts the ground-in dirt a vacuum leaves behind. Our carpet cleaning service is the add-on tenants book most, and it pairs naturally with the move-out clean.
Then the oven. A clerk will open the oven door, every time, and a greasy cavity is an easy deduction to justify. Single oven cleaning is £77, a double is £110, and a range cooker is £114, all stripped and degreased by hand rather than wiped over. If you want only that one job done, our standalone oven cleaning covers it.
Upholstery is the third request, usually a sofa that came with the flat, and we treat that on the same visit so the whole job is signed off in one go. Bundling the extras into the move-out clean is cheaper than booking them separately, and it means one team, one visit, one set of keys.
Booking around the Broadway and the Northern line
Book the clean for the day the flat is empty and before the check-out inspection, not the morning the new tenants are due. Around the Broadway that window is tight, because agents turn these flats fast, so the earlier you give us a date the better the slot you get.
Parking is the honest sticking point. The streets off Mitcham Road and Garratt Lane are controlled, and a free meter bay near the Broadway is rare, so tell us the access situation when you book and we will sort the kit around it. For a top-floor conversion flat with no lift, which Tooting has plenty of, it helps to know in advance so the team brings the right gear up the stairs.
We work seven days a week, including weekends, which is when most tenancies actually change over. Tooting Broadway sits on the Northern line, so our cleaners reach it easily whether they are coming from Morden or from the city, and a clean rarely falls through on transport. The buses help too: the 44 and 77 run up toward Wandsworth and the river, the 219 and 270 link down to Colliers Wood and Mitcham, so wherever your flat sits around the Broadway we can get a team and the kit to the door.
To book, call 0333 555 2076 and tell us the postcode, the number of bedrooms, and the date. We give you a fixed price on the call, not a vague range, and you can email [email protected] if you would rather put it in writing. If you are moving across the wider borough we also cover Balham next door and Colliers Wood down the line, and we run over the boundary into Mitcham and Streatham on the same routes. The full picture is on our Wandsworth end of tenancy cleaning hub.
Words your inventory clerk will use
A few terms come up over and over when a Tooting tenancy ends. Here is what they actually mean.
- Check-in inventory
- The report, usually with photographs, that records a flat’s condition at the start of a tenancy. Your move-out clean is judged against it, which is why a documented baseline matters so much around the Broadway.
- End of tenancy clean
- A one-off deep clean to a let-ready standard, booked to get a deposit back. Deeper than a regular clean and measured against an agent’s checklist rather than your own eye.
- Selective licence
- The Wandsworth licence required on ordinary private lets in the Tooting Broadway ward from 1 July 2025, alongside Furzedown, Tooting Bec and South Balham.
- Additional HMO licence
- The borough-wide Wandsworth licence, also from 1 July 2025, that a landlord may need where a house is shared by three or more people from different households.
- Deposit protection scheme
- The government-approved scheme your deposit must sit in within 30 days. Disputes over cleaning deductions are settled through the scheme’s free adjudication, using the check-in report as evidence. The three schemes are explained on the government deposit protection page.
- 48-hour re-clean guarantee
- Our promise that if the clerk or agent challenges work we did, we return within three days and put it right at no charge.
Questions Tooting tenants ask
How much does end of tenancy cleaning cost in Tooting?
Our standard prices are from £156 for a studio, £207 for a one-bedroom flat, £243 for a two-bedroom flat, £339 for a three-bedroom property and £425 for a four-bedroom property. The flat needs to be empty and in fair condition; we confirm the exact figure on the phone.
Do you guarantee the clean will pass the check-out inspection?
Yes. Our cleans run off a 57-point agent-approved checklist and carry a 48-hour re-clean guarantee, so if the inventory clerk or agent challenges anything we covered, we come back within three days and put it right free of charge. Our first-time pass rate is 97%.
Is my Tooting Broadway rental covered by Wandsworth selective licensing?
Most likely yes, if it is an ordinary private let. Tooting Broadway is one of four wards, with Furzedown, Tooting Bec and South Balham, where Wandsworth selective licensing has applied since 1 July 2025.
Does my landlord need an HMO licence in Tooting?
They might. Wandsworth’s additional HMO licensing runs borough-wide from 1 July 2025 for five years and can apply to a Tooting house shared by three or more people from different households. You can check any address on the council’s property licence checker.
How far in advance should I book my Tooting move-out clean?
As early as you can. Agents around Tooting Broadway turn flats around quickly, so weekend and end-of-month slots fill fast. Booking a few days ahead of your check-out date gets you the time you want.
Do you clean ovens and carpets as part of the move-out clean?
Yes, and they are the two extras clerks flag most. Oven cleaning is £77 for a single, £110 for a double and £114 for a range. Carpets are £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed flat.
What is the difference between an end of tenancy clean and a regular clean?
A regular clean keeps a flat tidy week to week. An end of tenancy clean takes the whole property back to a let-ready standard against an agent’s checklist, including the oven, behind appliances, inside cupboards and the limescale a normal clean leaves.
Do I need to be there during the clean?
No. Most Tooting tenants drop keys or leave them with the agent and let us get on with it. We do need power and running hot water connected on site, so please leave both on until after the clean.
Will the clean help me get my full deposit back?
It removes the most common reason for a deduction, which is cleaning. We are on the books of 300+ letting agents and have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning charges. Other deductions, like damage or unpaid rent, are separate.
Do you cover the streets around St George’s Hospital?
Yes. A lot of our Tooting work is hospital-linked tenancies on the 155, 264 and 280 bus routes, and we book around shift patterns and short notice because the area runs on the hospital calendar.
Can you clean a top-floor conversion flat with no lift?
Yes, that is most of Tooting. Tell us when you book that there is no lift so the team brings the right kit up the stairs and allows for it in the time.
What areas near Tooting do you cover?
We work right across the borough. Next door we cover Balham and Tooting Bec, down the line we cover Colliers Wood, and the full list is on our Wandsworth end of tenancy cleaning hub.
How do I get a quote and book?
Call 0333 555 2076 with your postcode, the number of bedrooms and the date, and we give you a fixed price on the call. You can also email [email protected] to put it in writing.
Do you charge more for a flat left in poor condition?
Sometimes. The standard price assumes an empty flat in fair condition. A heavily soiled property, or one still full of belongings, takes longer, and we will tell you that when we quote rather than after the clean.