Monster Cleaning Catford sets a move-out figure off the bedroom count on your tenancy agreement, so a studio in SE6 is £156 and a two bedroom flat is £243. You hear that number on the phone and it is the number on the invoice. Carpets are counted separately, room by room and flight by flight. So is the cooker, £31 on top, even one that was wiped last week.
| Property | Fixed price |
|---|---|
| Studio | £156 |
| 1 bedroom | £207 |
| 2 bedrooms | £243 |
| 3 bedrooms | £339 |
| 4 bedrooms | £425 |
Why the figure is banded rather than timed
An end of tenancy clean is judged against the check-in inventory, which is a document the tenant did not write and has usually never read past the first page. Price that by the hour and every overrun lands on you. Banding it on bedrooms moves the overrun onto us instead, so a roomy two bedroom conversion pays what a cramped one pays and a bathroom that turns out worse than it sounded on the call is our problem for the afternoon. The one thing that moves a band is a property materially unlike the one described, and you would hear about that before a cloth came out of the van. A loft room let as a bedroom counts. Extra bathrooms never do.
What the banded figure takes in
Kitchen units emptied and done on both faces, along the door tops and down the side of the run where the cooker pulls forward. Fridge and freezer, once you have switched them off and let them thaw overnight. The washing machine drawer, its filter and the door seal, which is the first thing a clerk opens and the last thing anybody thinks of. Bathrooms taken right back through their scale. Then skirtings, door frames, switch plates, radiator backs where a brush reaches, wardrobe interiors, window frames and runners, the inside faces of the glass, and floors at the very finish so nothing is walked over twice.
The hall is the working corridor, so it is cleaned last
Corbett Estate houses are narrow at the front with a long hall and a straight staircase coming directly off the front door, and that hall is the route for everything. Buckets, hoses, the vacuum, the tray of oven parts going out to the van and coming back in. Most of these terraces have a side return at the back and no gate through to the street, which means the waste water leaves the same way the kit came in. Nothing goes out through a garden. So runners go down before anything else moves, the hall floor is the last surface touched in the property, and on the tighter late-Victorian two-up two-downs off the estate, where the plots are only fourteen to sixteen feet across, two cleaners working the ground floor at once simply get in each other’s way. Those get one cleaner and a longer slot rather than two people and a shorter one.
Limescale on the original tiling is what a clerk photographs
Thames Water supplies Catford at around 300 ppm, which is properly hard. Shower screens cloud from the tray up, taps crust at the base, and the original glazed wall tiling that survives in a lot of these houses holds a film a cloth slides straight over without lifting. It is the easiest fault in a property to photograph, which is exactly why it turns up in check-out reports. Scale is a mineral bonded to the surface rather than soil sitting on one, so it wants an acid descaler and real dwell time, and it does not want scouring. A scoured chrome tap costs more to put right than the scale ever would. Those waiting minutes are already inside the banded figure.
Changeovers here run all year, which is useful to you
Some towns have one enormous turnover month and everything jams into it. Catford does not work that way. The rented stock is mostly subdivided terraces and flat conversions let to families and sharers, alongside a solid block of owner-occupiers on the Corbett Estate who are not moving anywhere, so check-outs arrive steadily across the calendar with a modest lift over the summer. The practical upshot is that we are rarely booked solid a fortnight ahead. A check-out at four days notice is normally fine, and a Sunday one costs the same as a Tuesday one.
Water and power on, furniture out
This trips up more households than anything else here. Somebody takes the final meter reading and hands the keys back on the Thursday, books us for the Friday, and by then there is no hot water in the tank and no socket that does anything. An empty property also cleans better and prices better: a sofa still in the front room means the floor under it does not get done, and that is precisely where a clerk kneels down with a camera. Where the removals run late, we can come back at seven that evening instead. Give us the whole slot. A two bedroom flat is four to six hours with two cleaners and a studio is usually three.
The oven, and the other lines that sit outside the band
Wiping the hob top is in the figure. The oven itself never is, and is always billed separately, at £31 on a move-out, well under what an oven job costs on its own. Two oven AGAs have to be off and cold from the night before. A one bedroom flat with its oven done therefore comes to £238. A hob taken right down, caps and pan supports into the tank with the racks, is £23. An extractor is £28, filters out and the housing degreased. Sorting out which of those the property actually needs belongs on the booking call, not on the doorstep at half past seven on the morning the keys go back.
If the clerk marks something down
Ring 020 3129 2846 within 48 hours. Somebody comes back out, redoes the item, and no charge appears for it. There is no form and nobody will argue about who caused it. One tip worth having: ask the clerk for the check-out report and send it straight over, since agents relay these things loosely and the item they mention on the phone is often not the item written down.
The band holds across SE6 and out to the SE13 edge, from the flats over the shops on Rushey Green to the terraces around Ladywell station and the semis in Hither Green. Every figure is printed on the prices page. The line runs 8am to 7pm all week on 020 3129 2846, and a postcode dropped into the form gets a callback within the hour while it is open.
Questions we get asked
How much is an end of tenancy clean for a two bedroom flat in Catford?
£243, settled before anybody sets off. It buys the whole flat, with the bathroom taken back through its scale. The cooker and the floors are counted apart: the oven adds £31, making £274, and carpets done with the move-out start at £29 a room.
Does the flat have to be empty?
It cleans best empty. We can work round a stack of boxes in one corner, and if the removals overrun we will move you to an evening slot so every floor gets done.
How far ahead do I need to book?
Four days is usually plenty. Changeovers in Catford are spread across the year rather than piled into one month, so we are rarely booked solid a fortnight out even in August. Ring as soon as the check-out date is confirmed and you will get the slot you want.
Is the oven included?
No. Wiping the hob top is in the band, but the cooker is always a line of its own, £31 when it goes on the move-out. Stripping a hob down is £23 and an extractor is £28.
Do you clean the windows?
Inside faces, yes, and the frames and runners with them, on every move-out.
Do you charge more for a weekend or an evening check-out?
No. One rate covers 8am to 7pm every day of the week. A Sunday teatime check-out bills exactly what a Wednesday morning one bills.
Prefer the phone? 020 3129 2846, 8am to 7pm.