Where does the deposit actually go in a Westerham let? On the check-outs we get called into, it goes on the deep window reveals and the tops of the sills, where a year of dust sits at eye level for anyone holding a torch. So that is what the work here is built around: a hand-back clean aimed at the person carrying the check-in report, run to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out itself. Ring 0333 555 2076 and we will price the actual property.
Last updated June 2026. We cover the Westerham end of TN16: the High Street, Market Square and The Green, Quebec Square and Vicarage Hill, London Road, Fullers Hill, Croydon Road, Hosey Hill, Farley Lane and out to Crockham Hill and Brasted. This page sits inside the county directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Kent.
The report you signed on day one and never read again
Start with the document, because the whole argument runs through it. On the day you moved in, a clerk walked the property and wrote down the condition of every surface, almost always with photographs. The kitchen and bathroom entries usually said “clean” or “as new”, and they were true, because the place had just been cleaned professionally for you. At check-out a clerk walks it again and reads that report line by line. Anything worse than the entry, past fair wear and tear, is money off your deposit.
You are being marked against a professional clean. That is the bit tenants miss, and it is why a mop and a free Saturday so often falls short of the line by a hand’s width.
The Tenant Fees Act 2019 means nobody can write “professional clean required” into your tenancy as a condition and enforce it. You are free to do it yourself and plenty of people in Westerham do, because this is a town of long, settled tenancies where tenants care about the house. The standard does not move for that, though. The clerk still holds the report, and the report was written about a professionally cleaned property.
Ragstone, tile-hanging and why a Westerham surface eats sponges
Sevenoaks District Council’s own conservation appraisal for Westerham describes the town’s fabric plainly enough: red stock brick, orange and red hanging tiles and roof tiles, ragstone and brick walls, painted weatherboarding, and first-floor timber frames with rendered panels between the members. Some of that frame is exposed. Some of it was encased in brick centuries ago and you would never know. Coultherst’s Almshouses carry tile-hanging on the first floor over a ragstone ground floor with modern casement windows, which is a fair summary of the whole town in one building.
None of this cleans like a flat. Ragstone is porous and irregular and it will shed a cloth into fibres if you go at it wrong. Hanging tiles hold grime in the laps. Painted weatherboarding wants a wet cloth and patience rather than anything abrasive, and a timber frame with rendered panels has a hundred small ledges that a duster skates over and a clerk’s torch does not.
Then the windows. They are casements, often in deep reveals, and the glazing bars split every pane into small squares with a corner in each. That takes about four times as long as a modern unit of the same area, so the reveals are usually the last thing a tenant gets to and the first thing written up.
A duster skates over a hundred small ledges. A clerk’s torch does not.
One list, worked in the order a clerk works
Every Westerham booking runs to the same 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of check-outs and ordered the way the money actually comes off. The full list comes with the job. This is the shape of it, and it is the only list on this page:
- Oven stripped rather than wiped: racks in a soaking tank, the door glass split so the brown film between the panes comes out, then the cavity, fan, element and seals
- Hob, splashback and extractor degreased, filters washed or replaced, and the cooker pulled out so the gap beside it gets done
- Every cupboard and drawer, inside and out, including the awkward corner ones that older Westerham kitchens are full of
- Fridge, freezer, dishwasher and washing machine cleaned through, drum, drawer and door seal included, then pulled back and the floor under them washed
- Scale off taps, showerhead, screen, tile joints and the toilet waterline, with a careful approach where the fittings are original
- Casement windows inside, glazing bars, corners of each pane, the reveals and the sills
- Deep skirtings, picture rails, beams, panelled door tops, coving and any plaster detail dusted by hand
- Hearth, surround and chimney breast where an open fire or a burner has been used, treated rather than smeared over
- Light fittings, switches, sockets, radiators behind and under, banisters, then hard floors washed last so nothing tracks back
- Every room photographed before and after, dated, and sent out with the invoice
The photo set is the part people underrate. It has settled more deposit arguments than any phone call has, because it is dated and a clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already in the pictures.
The chalk under the town ends up on your shower screen
Westerham sits under the scarp of the North Downs, and the water that comes out of the taps here has been through chalk to get to you. It is hard. That is not a local grievance, it is geology, and it does the same thing in every property in the town: a cloudy crust on the shower glass, a white bloom on chrome, a ring round the kettle and the toilet waterline, a film on the inside of the dishwasher.
Clerks working this district know the water and go straight to the bathroom glass. They look at it edge-on against the light, which shows the bloom that a face-on glance misses entirely. Then they run a thumbnail down the tap. A wipe leaves the film and the film fails, so we take the scale off with a proper descaler and the time it takes, and on original chrome or brass we work slower because a scratched fitting is a bigger deduction than a dull one.
One honest caveat. Where grout or a sealant bead has gone past saving after a long tenancy, we photograph it before we start rather than pretend a scrub will fix it.
Quebec Square to Farley Lane: the stock changes inside half a mile
The council splits the conservation area into character areas, and they are a genuinely useful map of the work. Quebec Square and Vicarage Hill at one end. The Green, Market Square and Fullers Hill in the middle, which is where the listed buildings pile up and where a lot of the rented stock is flats and maisonettes above the shops. London Road running east, with its shaped tiles, gablets and tall chimneys. Lodge Lane out to Verralls Corner. The Forge to Farley Lane on the western approach, where the A25 comes in past Squerryes Park and the buildings thin out into parkland.
Rented property in Westerham falls into roughly three shapes. There are the cottages and small period houses, tile-hung or weatherboarded, low ceilings, uneven floors, original joinery, often an open fire that has been used properly every winter. There are the flats over the Market Square and High Street shops, which are small, awkwardly shaped, and carry a kitchen extractor working far harder than it was designed to. And out towards Croydon Road and the edges you get interwar semis and later infill that clean much more like a standard house, though even those keep traditional windows because of the conservation designation.
The place names give the history away, and the history is why the buildings are odd. Mill Lane was one of the town’s corn mills. Black Eagle Close carries the name of the brewery that stood there; the other brewery, the Swan, was at the bottom of Hosey Hill. There is still an oast house on Croydon Road. Water Lane is a footpath off The Green heading south to the Darent valley, and if your let is down that end the access on moving day is on foot, which is worth mentioning when you book.
What it costs, and the sum nobody does until the check-out fails
| Property | Typical duration | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| Studio or bedsit over a High Street shop | 3-4 hours, 1 cleaner | £156 |
| 1-bed flat, Market Square or London Road | 4-5 hours, 2 cleaners | £207 |
| 2-bed cottage or maisonette | 5-7 hours, 2 cleaners | £243 |
| 3-bed period house, Vicarage Hill or Hosey Hill | 6-8 hours, 2 cleaners | £339 |
| 4-bed house, Croydon Road or Crockham Hill | 8-10 hours, 2-3 cleaners | £425 |
| Carpet add-on, same visit | Same visit | £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room |
| Whole carpeted area of a 2-bed | Same visit | £115 |
| Oven only, if that is all the agent flagged | 1.5-2 hours | £77 single, £110 double, £114 range 90cm |
Those are full prices with kit, products and travel included, and they assume a property in normal lived-in shape. Book by time instead if the job is an odd shape: £30 per cleaner per hour. Most Westerham work lands between £243 and £339 with a carpet add-on, because most of the lets here are two and three beds and most of them have a fire.
Three things move a Westerham quote, and we would rather say so now than after we arrive. A working fire with soot on the plaster and tar on the beam is hands-on time. A kitchen nobody has pulled out in three years is the other. And carpets in a long tenancy, where the covering is whatever the landlord laid years ago and there is a worn path to the hearth, usually want the hot-water add-on if the deposit is coming back whole. We tell you which apply when we see the photos, and the figure we give you then is the figure you pay.
Now the sum. A three-bed off Hosey Hill at £339, against a deposit of several thousand pounds and a clerk who is paid to find faults, is not really a decision. Most people run that sum after they have failed the first check-out, which is the expensive order to do it in.
Four different jobs get muddled on the phone, so here is the distinction we use.
- End-of-tenancy clean
- The hand-back clean, done to the letting-agent benchmark with the property empty, built to match a check-in report, carrying the 48-hour re-clean guarantee. This page is about that one.
- Deep clean
- A full reset of a home you are staying in. Same thoroughness, no formal standard to hit, no clerk at the end of it. Also £30 an hour per cleaner.
- Regular domestic clean
- Ongoing weekly or fortnightly upkeep with the same cleaner kept on the house, from £22 an hour weekly and £24 fortnightly.
- One-off team clean
- A standalone visit by a team, usually two cleaners for about three hours, at £26 per cleaner an hour with a £186 minimum, which is two cleaners for three hours plus the £30 kit charge. Not the same thing as the retainer above.
A flat over the Market Square, in March
“Two-bed flat above one of the shops on the Market Square, three years, and I teach so the kitchen got hammered every evening and cleaned properly about twice. The extractor was the thing I could not face. It sat under a sloping ceiling and I could not get square on to it. Monster sent two people for six hours, took the filter and the hood apart, did the reveals on all the casements which I had not touched once in three years, and left me a folder of photos. The clerk queried nothing. Deposit back in full, eleven days.”
Priya, Westerham TN16, March 2026
That is a fair example of the flat-over-a-shop pattern here. The trouble is never the floors. It is the extractor, the awkward geometry under a roof slope, and the window detail nobody can reach comfortably, and it took two cleaners six hours rather than anything clever.
What Sevenoaks licenses, and what 1 May 2026 moved
Westerham sits in Sevenoaks District Council’s area, in the Westerham and Crockham Hill ward, and the licensing position here is simpler than in most of the places we work. Sevenoaks has not designated a selective licensing area and has not adopted an additional HMO scheme. The only regime running is the mandatory national one, for houses occupied by five or more people forming two or more households, which the council sets out on its houses in multiple occupation page. A new application currently costs £1,031.17 for up to five units, with £24.40 for each unit above that. The council’s Private Sector Housing team takes questions on 01732 227000.
Why it matters to a clean: a licensed HMO is inspected against council conditions, so a shared house going back at the end of a joint tenancy is held to a tighter line than a family let, and the kitchen and the shared bathroom carry nearly all of that weight.
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 is gone, and every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic one, so a tenant can give two months’ notice at any point in the year. The cleaning obligation did not change at all. What changed is timing. Westerham used to have very predictable move-outs, because tenancies here ran long and ended when the fixed term ended, and that predictability has now gone. Book the clean earlier than you used to.
The cleaning obligation did not change. The calendar did.
Booking it round the A25 and a parking space
Ring 0333 555 2076 with the postcode, the bedroom count, the check-out date, whether the property is empty, whether there is a fire or a burner, and whether you want carpets done. Out of hours, email [email protected] and someone calls back first thing. Two photos of the kitchen and the bathroom sharpen the quote more than any description does.
Then two practical Westerham notes. The A25 runs straight through the middle of the town and the High Street parking is limited and busy, so tell us where the van can actually stand, whether that is a space behind the property, a bay, or the yard at the back of a shop. And if the let is down a footpath rather than a road, say so, because the kit has to be carried and that changes the slot we give you.
We clean the day before or the morning of the check-out where we can. If the clerk or agent flags anything we cleaned, tell us inside 48 hours and we come back and put it right at no charge, provided nobody has moved in. That guarantee is why agents keep sending us work, and it sits behind the 97% first-time pass rate, the £1.2m deposits recovered and the 300+ letting agents we deal with. If a landlord still disputes it after that, the deposit scheme adjudicates, and Shelter’s guidance on tenancy deposits walks through the steps. Our dated photo report and invoice are admissible evidence there.
Monster Cleaning Ltd has been doing this since 2014. Companies House 9919639.
Questions we get asked
How much is end of tenancy cleaning in Westerham?
A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. Those are full prices for an empty property with kit, products and travel included. By the hour it is £30 per cleaner. Furnished or heavily neglected houses we quote from photos so the figure is fixed before we turn up.
Do you guarantee the clean will pass the check-out?
Every Westerham job runs to our 57-point agent-approved checklist and carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. If the clerk or the agent flags something we cleaned, tell us inside 48 hours and we return and redo it free, as long as the property is as we left it and nobody has moved in. Our first-time pass rate is 97%.
Is the water in Westerham hard enough to matter?
Yes. The town sits under the North Downs chalk and the mains water is hard, which is why bathroom glass, chrome and the toilet waterline are where a Westerham bathroom usually fails a check-out. We take the scale back with a proper descaler rather than a wipe, and we go gently on original chrome and brass fittings.
The cottage has an open fire and the chimney breast is stained. Will that come back?
In most cases, yes. Soot on the plaster above a hearth and tar on the beam over it is common here, because plenty of Westerham lets have a fire that gets used all winter. We treat the staining rather than smearing it, clean the hearth and the surround, and bring it back towards the check-in photograph. If it will not come all the way back, we tell you and photograph it.
Does Sevenoaks District Council run a licensing scheme that affects my check-out?
Sevenoaks has not designated a selective licensing area and has not adopted an additional HMO scheme. The only regime is mandatory HMO licensing, for five or more occupants in two or more households. A licensed HMO is inspected against council conditions, so a shared house going back at the end of a joint tenancy is held to a tighter standard. The council’s Private Sector Housing team is on 01732 227000.
Does the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 mean I can skip a professional clean?
It means a landlord cannot deduct from your deposit purely because you did not hire a company; the Tenant Fees Act 2019 already covered that ground. You still have to hand the property back as clean as the check-in report recorded it. Since 1 May 2026 the practical change is timing, not standards: notice can land at any point in the year, so move-out dates are less predictable than they were.
Can you clean a listed or conservation-area property without damaging it?
Yes, and most of what we clean in the town centre is one or the other. Beams, panelling, ragstone, tile-hanging, painted weatherboarding, deep skirtings and old glazing bars are routine for us. We use appropriate products, we do not take paint off original joinery, and we do not scrub historic plaster hard.
Which parts of Westerham do you cover?
The Westerham end of TN16: the High Street, Market Square and The Green, Quebec Square, Vicarage Hill, Fullers Hill, London Road, Croydon Road, Hosey Hill, Farley Lane and Lodge Lane, plus Crockham Hill, Brasted and the Squerryes side of the parish. If your street is not named and it has a TN16 postcode, ring and ask.
Is carpet cleaning included in the price?
Vacuuming throughout is included. Hot-water extraction is an add-on: £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for the whole carpeted area of a two-bed. Older Westerham lets often have a worn path to the hearth or a mark in front of the fire, so a living-room add-on is the common one here.
Do you bring your own equipment?
Yes. Machines, descaler, degreasers, cloths, all of it arrives with the team. You do not need to leave a hoover behind or supply anything. We need access, and ideally the check-in report.
How much notice do you need?
Three to five days is usually comfortable, and more at the end of the month. Since tenancies went periodic the check-outs have spread across the calendar rather than bunching, which has helped, but the day before a check-out is still the busiest slot to get. Ring early and we will tell you straight what is free.
What if the property is furnished?
We still clean it, we just quote from photos, because furnished lets vary too much to price blind. We clean around and under furniture, inside built-in wardrobes and cupboards, and wipe hard surfaces down. Empty drawers in free-standing furniture are included.
What do you leave me at the end?
A dated photograph of every room, before and after, and an itemised invoice on company paper. That folder is what settles it if the check-out tries to deduct for something we cleaned, and it is what the deposit scheme wants to see if it goes that far.