The difference between getting the deposit back and losing it usually comes down to six or seven specific things.
5 places decide a deposit inspection nearly every time, and the middle of the floor is not one of them. A move-out clean is not judged on how the property looks — it is judged against somebody else's checklist, with money attached to the result.
The five places
- Inside the oven and under the hob. The single most common deduction, and the one job nobody wants to do themselves. Budget 45 to 60 minutes if it has not been touched in a year.
- Inside the refrigerator, including the door seals and the drip tray underneath.
- Bathroom grout, the shower door track and the extractor vent. In Gulf Coast humidity these three grow things between tenancies even in an empty unit.
- Inside every cupboard, drawer and closet. An empty cupboard is not a clean cupboard, and inspectors open them.
- Skirting, window tracks and the tops of doors. This is where a finger gets run.
How long does it take?
4 to 7 hours for a typical 2-bedroom unit with a 2-person crew, and 8 to 10 for a 4-bedroom house. Doing it properly the first time is faster than a re-clean after a failed inspection, which is the outcome the schedule should be built around.
Deep clean or move-out clean?
The work overlaps almost entirely. The difference is that a deep clean is a reset of an occupied home that nobody is grading, and a move-out clean is the same work performed against a checklist with a deposit attached. That changes the order of the work and, above all, it adds documentation.
A dispute about a deposit is a dispute about evidence, and whoever has photographs wins it.
Why photographs, every time
We photograph the five checklist areas at completion and send them with the invoice. For a tenant that is the evidence. For a property manager billing an owner, it is what makes the charge easy to approve without a phone call.
If it is a turnover, do the paint first
Paint, cure, then clean. Cleaning solvent on a coat that is dry to touch but days from cured leaves marks. One vendor doing both keeps that sequence right and keeps the unit inside the 48 to 72 hour window — see turnover painting and move-out cleaning.
Tell us the handover date and we will work backwards from it.
