Cleaning a unit between tenants

Turnover is a scheduling problem more than a cleaning one. The work is not complicated, but doing it in the wrong order costs you either a week or a re-clean, and sometimes both.

What a new tenant notices

Not the floors. They notice what they open on the first evening, and what they smell when they walk in.

• Kitchen cabinets and drawers, opened within the first hour.
• The oven, the hob and the extractor filter.
• The fridge, including the seals.
• The washing machine drawer and door seal, which is the single most complained-about item in a turnover.
• Bathroom grout, silicone and the shower screen.
• Air-conditioning filters, which get pulled out on day one by anybody who has rented before.
• Drains and floor traps, which announce themselves on day three rather than day one.

The sequence that does not cost you a re-clean

Empty the unit first. Then any repairs, painting or contractor work. Then the clean. Then the inventory and photographs. Then the tenant.

Cleaning before the trades is the most common and most expensive mistake in a turnover, because painting and repairs put dust and marks back into a finished unit.

Clean once, after everybody else has finished. Every turnover that costs double did it the other way round.

If the unit has been sitting empty

Dry traps, a closed fridge, a dormant washing machine and still air produce smells that are nothing to do with cleanliness and will be blamed on it. Run the water, open it up and deal with those before the viewing, not after.

When it is not a turnover job

If the previous tenancy ended with an incident, a death in the unit, a hoarding situation or an odour with a source, that is different work and it comes first. A turnover clean over any of those produces a unit that presents beautifully and fails within a fortnight, usually in warm weather.

We will tell you honestly which one you are looking at when we come and look.

Photograph it empty

In daylight, including inside the cabinets and appliances, on the day of handover. It is the cheapest protection available for the next handback and it takes fifteen minutes.

The service is general and deep cleaning. After a renovation see post-renovation cleaning before a rental handover.

The items that generate first-week complaints

Almost every turnover complaint we hear about comes from the same short list, and none of it is about floors.

A washing machine seal, a fridge seal, an extractor filter, a blocked or smelling floor trap, and an air-conditioning filter. Five items. A tenant who finds all five clean generally assumes the rest of the unit is too, and a tenant who finds one dirty starts looking for the others.

If a budget is tight, spend it there rather than on a second pass over the floors.

Between tenancies is when access is free

It is the only window in which the unit is empty and nobody is inconvenienced, which makes it the sensible time for anything that needs furniture moved or appliances pulled out.

Once a tenant is in, the same work needs arrangements, notice and somebody at home. Things deferred at turnover tend to be deferred for the whole tenancy and then argued about at the end of it.

If the unit has been standing empty rather than simply changing hands, see cleaning a home that has been left empty too long. The tenant’s view of the handback is in move-out cleaning.