The arterial road and your deposit
Bellegrove Road and Park View Road, the A207 spine through Welling, sit on the line of the Roman Watling Street, the old road from London into Kent. Welling grew up as a coaching stop on it. That history matters to a tenant for one flat reason: most of the lettings stock here was thrown up along that arterial route between the wars, after the Bexleyheath railway line opened in 1895, and the bay-fronted semi built for a 1930s clerk is now the rented flat whose deposit you are trying to get back.
An end of tenancy clean is the deep, top-to-bottom clean a landlord or letting agent expects when a tenancy ends, measured against the check-in inventory rather than against everyday tidiness. It is the single biggest reason DA16 deposits get docked. Get it right and the deposit comes back in full; get it wrong and the agent has grounds to hold part of it.
This page is the long version. What we clean, what it costs, how Bexley’s licensing actually works around here, and how to argue a cleaning charge if one ever lands on you.
Who we clean for across DA16
Most of our Welling work sits in a band either side of the A207, from the parade of shops on Welling High Street out towards Danson Park on one side and Falconwood on the other. The jobs split three ways. Tenants leaving a let and chasing the full deposit are the bulk of it. Then landlords turning a property round between tenancies, often through one of the agents on the High Street. And a steady trickle of people who have already started a job, run out of road, and rung us at 8pm the night before a check-out.
We are on the books of 300+ letting agents, several of them local, and that shapes how we work. We clean to what the clerk grades, not to what looks tidy in passing. When an agent recommends us, they are staking their own relationship with the landlord on the result, so the checklist gets followed to the letter.
Welling is not central London and the stock reflects that. You get fewer converted Victorian flats than you would in, say, Greenwich, and far more interwar houses split into one or two flats, plus a fair number of whole houses let to families. Danson Lane and the streets off it run to larger semis and detached houses; closer to the station the homes are smaller and the turnover quicker. We size the clean to the actual home, which is why the price is banded by bedrooms rather than charged by the hour.
The transport sets the rhythm of the moves we do here. Welling station is on the Bexleyheath line, eleven miles out from Charing Cross, with Southeastern trains running into Charing Cross, Cannon Street and Victoria, and out the other way to Barnehurst and Dartford. A lot of the tenants we clean for commute on that line, so their tenancies tend to end on a Friday and the check-out lands first thing Monday. Buses thread the same corridor, the 89 and the 486 along Bellegrove Road among them, which is how plenty of our clients reach a flat without a car. That commuter pattern is why our diary here clusters around month-ends and the back half of the week.
We clean to what the clerk grades, not to what looks tidy in passing.
If your let sits over the boundary, the same team covers the neighbouring patches. We run the same service in Bexleyheath, a short way along the A207, and in East Wickham, the old manor just north of Welling whose 13th-century church gives the area its name. The wider end of tenancy cleaning across the Bexley borough hub lists the rest, so if you are moving within the borough rather than out of it, the same standard follows you.
The interwar semi and where charges land
The classic Welling rental is a 1930s bay-fronted semi off the arterial road, and it has a predictable set of weak spots at check-out. Knowing them is half the battle.
The kitchen is first. These houses were not built with the kitchens people fit now, so you get a mix of older units and newer ones, and the gap behind a freestanding cooker is where grease and crumbs hide. Clerks pull the oven door open and check the inside of the glass, the racks, the grill pan. A wiped-down hob does not pass; a degreased one does. The oven is the most disputed single item on any check-out we attend.
Bathrooms next. The original houses had one bathroom, often retiled at some point, and limescale builds on the taps, the shower screen and around the bath where hard water sits. Bexley sits in a hard-water belt, so scale comes back faster here than a tenant expects. We clear it; a domestic wipe rarely does.
Then the windows. A 1930s semi has wide bay windows with deep reveals and sills, and the original timber frames, where they survive, collect dust in the joints and paint flakes in the corners. We clean the glass and the frames inside as standard. The outside of the glass is a separate job if your inventory asks for it, because it needs a pole or a ladder. A handful of these houses kept their old sash windows upstairs, and the cords and runners on a sash hold grime that a quick pass misses.
The last one people forget is the floor edges. Carpet gets hoovered, but the skirting boards, the carpet grippers at the room edges and the dust line where carpet meets wall are graded too. Hard floors get mopped into the corners as well as across the middle. None of this is hard. It is just slow, and slow is what people run out of on moving day, which is the whole reason a professional clean exists.
Why a domestic clean fails the check-out
Plenty of tenants clean hard before they leave and still lose money. It is not laziness. It is that an inventory clerk is grading against a different standard, and a couple of hours with a mop on moving morning cannot meet it.
The check-in inventory is the reason. When you moved in, the property had usually just been professionally cleaned, photographed and logged as such. The clerk at the end is comparing your work against that baseline, not against a reasonable lived-in tidy. So the bar is not “clean”, it is “as clean as the day the photos were taken”, and that is a high bar when you have spent a year in the place.
Then there is the kit. A professional oven clean uses dip tanks and proper degreasers on the racks and trays, which is why our results beat a supermarket spray and an hour of scrubbing. Hard-water scale needs the right product and dwell time, not elbow grease. The window reveals and the tops of doors need a step and a system, not a guess. Most tenants simply do not own the gear, and hiring it for one move costs more than booking the job out.
And there is the clock. On the day a tenancy ends you are packing a van, chasing a deposit, handing back keys and probably starting a new tenancy somewhere else. The clean is the thing that gets squeezed, and a rushed clean is exactly what a clerk catches. That squeeze is why so many of our Welling calls come in late the night before, from someone who has looked at the oven and the bathroom and done the maths on the time left.
None of this means a tenant cannot clean to standard. It means doing it properly takes a full day, the right products and a method that matches the grading, and for the price of one banded clean most people decide their time is better spent on the move itself.
What the clean covers, room by room
Our end of tenancy clean is a fixed scope, not an hourly visit. The team stays until the 57-point checklist is signed off, so a stubborn oven does not mean a half-finished bathroom. Here is what that scope means in practice.
Across every room we dust and wipe all surfaces, clear cobwebs from the corners and ceiling lines, clean light switches, sockets, door frames and skirting boards, and clean inside and out of every cupboard and wardrobe once it is empty. Carpets are hoovered through, including the edges; hard floors are vacuumed and mopped.
In the kitchen we degrease the oven inside and out, clean the hob and extractor, wipe down the fronts and insides of units, descale and polish the sink and taps, and clean behind and around the freestanding appliances we can safely move. The fridge and freezer get cleaned inside when they are switched off and emptied.
In the bathroom we descale and sanitise the toilet, basin, bath and shower, clean the screen or door, scrub tile grout, polish the taps and mirrors, and clear scale from anywhere the hard water has reached. We treat the limescale properly rather than smearing it around, which is the usual difference between a pass and a re-clean.
Two things we need from you and the property. The utilities have to be on, because we cannot run hot water or test an oven without power and water. And the place needs to be empty of your belongings, since we clean what we can reach, not around a stacked spare room. Beyond that, we bring all the kit and the cleaning products ourselves, at no extra charge.
Some jobs need more than the standard scope, and it is cheaper to book those alongside the clean than to fail the check-out and come back. Worn carpets with set-in marks want a hot-water-extraction deep carpet clean rather than a hoover. A heavily caked oven, the kind a landlord will photograph, is better handled as a dedicated deep oven clean. Tired sofas and mattresses can be lifted with upholstery treatment, and exterior glass can be added where the inventory demands it.
What an end of tenancy clean costs in Welling
We price by the size of the home, which is the fairer way to do it, because a thorough clean of a one-bed flat near the station should not cost the same as a four-bed semi out by Danson Park. The price is fixed before we arrive. No hourly meter running while someone scrubs a grill pan.
A studio is £156. A one-bed flat is £207, a two-bed is £243, a three-bed is £339, and a four-bed is £425. Those are the full end of tenancy figures, kit and products included, and they are what you pay; we do not quote a teaser rate and add the extras at the door.
If your place genuinely needs a person for a few hours rather than a full move-out clean, we also work by the hour at £30 per cleaner, which suits a part-clean or a top-up. Most check-out cleans, though, are the banded job.
The add-ons are priced separately so you only pay for what your inventory needs. Carpet cleaning runs at £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed flat done together. Oven cleaning is £77 for a single, £110 for a double, and £114 for a range cooker. Booking the carpet or oven work with the main clean is almost always cheaper than failing the check-out and paying the landlord’s contractor rate afterwards.
One number worth holding onto: across our work we have helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions. A clean that costs £243 to protect a £1,800 deposit is not really a cost, it is insurance.
What the agent’s clerk actually checks
It helps to know what the person grading your clean is looking at, because it is more specific than most tenants expect. On a Welling let, the check-out is usually done by an independent inventory clerk the agent books, and they work through the property with the check-in report open beside them.
In the kitchen they open the oven and look at the inside of the door glass, the racks and the grill pan, then check behind and under the cooker, the seals on the fridge, the inside of the extractor and the underside of the wall units. The kitchen alone accounts for a large share of the cleaning notes we see. In the bathroom they run a finger along the tile grout, check the shower screen for scale, look under the rim of the toilet and behind the basin pedestal, and test the taps for water spotting.
Then they go up. Window reveals, the tops of the bay frames, the runners on any older sash windows, the picture rails and the tops of the doors are all dust traps that a quick pass leaves untouched, and a clerk who knows the 1930s stock around here knows exactly where to look. Skirting boards, light switches, radiator backs and the inside of fitted wardrobes round it off.
The report comes back room by room, each line graded and often photographed, and any line that has slipped against the check-in is a candidate for a deduction. Our 57-point checklist is built to match that walk almost item for item, which is why a clean done to it tends to come back clear. We have spent a decade on the books of 300+ letting agents learning what their clerks flag, and the checklist is the distilled version of that.
Licensing in Bexley, and why it rarely touches Welling
If you rent in Welling, here is the licensing position in plain terms. Most tenants here are not in a licensed property, and that is worth understanding before you move, because it changes who is responsible for what at the end of a tenancy.
The London Borough of Bexley runs mandatory HMO licensing across the whole borough, the national rule that any house in multiple occupation with five or more people from two or more households must be licensed. On top of that, the council brought in a selective licensing scheme that covers one ward only, Belvedere, which is up by the river some way north of Welling. That scheme runs from 13 January 2025 to 12 January 2030 and catches ordinary single-family lets in that ward.
Welling sits outside it. Bexley does not operate an additional licensing scheme anywhere, and the selective scheme stops at the Belvedere ward boundary, so a standard flat or house let in DA16 is licensed only if it is a larger HMO. For most Welling tenants that means the landlord’s duties are the everyday ones, not the extra conditions a selective licence imposes.
The reason the scheme landed on Belvedere rather than Welling is worth a line, because it tells you what selective licensing is for. The council picked that ward because it had the highest share of private renting in the borough, the most serious housing hazards and a concentration of antisocial behaviour, the standard grounds for a targeted scheme. By early 2026 it had drawn close to a thousand licence applications. The enforcement teeth are real too: from May 2026 the council can issue civil penalties of up to £40,000 for breaches. None of that reaches a Welling tenant in an ordinary let, but it explains why the licensing question gets asked, and why the honest answer for most of DA16 is that it does not apply.
If your Welling home genuinely is a house in multiple occupation, with five or more people from more than one household sharing, then the mandatory licence does apply and your landlord must hold one regardless of the ward. In that case the council can set conditions on the property’s condition, and a thorough end of tenancy clean keeps the place inside those conditions when one tenant leaves and the room turns over.
Why does this matter for your deposit? In a licensed property the council can set property standards a landlord must meet, which can include condition at the end of a tenancy. Outside the schemes, the standard you are held to is whatever your tenancy agreement and the check-in inventory set, and that inventory is the document that decides a cleaning charge. The rules around all of this tightened under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which reshaped tenancy types and possession grounds, but the basic mechanics of a cleaning deduction did not change: it still comes down to the inventory and the evidence on both sides.
The deposit scheme and disputing a cleaning charge
Your deposit is not sitting in your landlord’s account. On an assured shorthold tenancy the law requires it to be held in a government-approved tenancy deposit protection scheme, and you should have been told which one within 30 days of paying it. That protection is what gives you a free route to challenge a deduction you think is unfair.
If a cleaning charge lands at the end of your Welling tenancy, do not simply pay up, and do not dig your heels in either. Ask the landlord or agent for the deduction in writing, with the amount and the reason, and a copy of the check-out report. Then compare that report against your check-in inventory. A landlord can charge to return the property to its move-in condition, but not for fair wear and tear, the gradual ageing that any home goes through over a tenancy. Citizens Advice sets out where that line sits and what counts as a reasonable deduction.
If you cannot agree, the deposit scheme’s free dispute service will adjudicate, and they decide on evidence. This is where a professional clean earns its keep twice over. We give you a dated invoice and a record of the 57-point checklist we worked through, which is exactly the kind of evidence an adjudicator weighs against a vague “property left dirty” claim. And on the rare occasion an inventory clerk does flag our work, the 48-hour re-clean guarantee means we come back and put it right inside three days, free, before the dispute ever needs to start. With a 97% first-time pass rate it seldom comes to that, but the safety net is there.
Make your claim promptly. The schemes generally expect a dispute to be raised within a few months of the tenancy ending, so the worst thing you can do is sit on it.
Booking a clean near Danson Park
Booking is a phone call. Ring 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected], tell us the postcode, the number of bedrooms and your check-out date, and we will give you a fixed price and a slot. We clean seven days a week, which matters when your tenancy ends on a Sunday and the agent wants the keys back Monday morning.
A note on access, because Welling has its quirks. The streets around Danson Park and Danson House, the Palladian villa Sir Robert Taylor built in 1766 and now the centrepiece of the park, fill up with visitor parking on a fine weekend, so an early slot is easier on those roads. Closer to Welling station, off Bellegrove Road, parking is tighter and on-street, and the High Street parades have their own restrictions, so tell us what the access is like and we will plan around it. If you are near Shoulder of Mutton Green, the old triangular village green of East Wickham that locals saved from enclosure back in 1877, the residential streets behind it are usually the simplest for the van.
For the clean itself, leave the utilities connected and clear your belongings out first. We arrive with everything else. If you have booked carpets or the oven as add-ons, we do those in the same visit, so the home is handed back in one go rather than in stages.
That is the whole process. One call, a fixed price, a clean that matches what the clerk will grade, and a guarantee behind it if anything is questioned.
Terms worth knowing before you move
End-of-tenancy paperwork is full of jargon that only surfaces when your deposit is on the line. A few definitions that save arguments.
- Check-in inventory
- The document, usually with photos, that records the property’s condition and cleanliness at the start of your tenancy. It is the benchmark every check-out is judged against, so a dispute over cleaning is really a dispute about this report.
- Check-out report
- The inspection done when you leave, often by an independent inventory clerk, comparing the property now against the check-in. Cleaning grades on this report are what trigger a deduction.
- Fair wear and tear
- The gradual, expected ageing of a home through normal living, such as lightly worn carpet or faded paint. A landlord cannot charge you for it, and Citizens Advice explains how it differs from damage.
- Selective licensing
- A council scheme requiring most private lets in a designated area to hold a licence. In Bexley it applies to the Belvedere ward only, not to Welling.
- End of tenancy clean
- A full deep clean to inventory standard, distinct from a regular tidy. It is the clean a check-out is graded on, and the one we band by bedroom count.
Questions Welling tenants ask
How much is an end of tenancy clean in Welling?
It depends on the size of the home, not the hours worked. A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. The price is fixed before we arrive and includes all the kit and cleaning products.
Do you guarantee I will pass the check-out inspection?
We hold a 97% first-time pass rate and back every clean with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. If the inventory clerk or agent flags our work within that window, we return and put it right at no charge, before any deposit dispute needs to start.
What is the difference between an end of tenancy clean and a regular clean?
A regular clean keeps a lived-in home tidy. An end of tenancy clean is a deep clean measured against your check-in inventory, covering the oven, grout, window frames and skirting that a check-out actually grades. We follow a 57-point checklist to hit that standard.
Is my rented home in Welling covered by selective licensing?
Almost certainly not. Bexley’s selective licensing scheme covers the Belvedere ward only, which is north of Welling near the river, and the council runs no additional HMO scheme. A standard Welling let needs a licence only if it is a larger house in multiple occupation under the mandatory rules.
Does the clean include cleaning the oven?
Yes. Degreasing the oven inside and out is part of the standard end of tenancy scope. If the oven is heavily caked, the kind a landlord photographs, a dedicated deep oven clean at £77 for a single, £110 for a double or £114 for a range gives a deeper result.
Do you clean carpets as well?
We hoover all carpets as part of the clean, including the edges. For set-in marks we add hot-water-extraction carpet cleaning at £36 a bedroom, £43 for a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed flat done together.
Will you clean the outside of the windows?
Inside glass and window frames are included as standard. Exterior glass is a separate add-on, because the bay windows on these 1930s semis need a pole or ladder to reach safely. Tell us if your inventory requires clean exterior windows and we will bring the right kit.
How long does an end of tenancy clean take?
It depends on the size and state of the property, but a one or two-bed flat is usually a half day and a larger house can take most of a day. Because the price is banded rather than hourly, the team stays until the 57-point checklist is complete.
Do I need to be there during the clean?
No, as long as we can get access. Many Welling tenants leave a key with the agent or a neighbour. We just need the utilities left on and your belongings cleared out so we can reach everything.
Can you clean at the weekend?
Yes. We work seven days a week, which helps when a tenancy ends on a Saturday or Sunday and the keys are due back the next morning. Weekend slots near Danson Park book up faster, so it is worth calling early.
What if my landlord still tries to charge me for cleaning?
Ask for the deduction and the check-out report in writing, then compare it to your check-in inventory. Our dated invoice and checklist record are strong evidence in a deposit scheme dispute, and the scheme’s free adjudication service decides on exactly that kind of evidence.
How do I book and how quickly can you come?
Call 0333 555 2076 or email [email protected] with your postcode, bedroom count and check-out date. We can often fit in next-day cleans around Welling, though moving-day Fridays and weekends fill quickly, so the earlier you book the better.