Move-Out and Move-In Cleaning

An empty property is a different job

With the furniture gone there is nowhere to hide and nothing to work around, which sounds easier and is actually the opposite. Everything that was covered for years is now visible and in scope: behind and under the appliances, inside every cupboard and drawer, the tracks of the sliding door, the tops of the door frames, the marks the sofa was hiding.

It is also the one clean where the result is inspected by someone with a financial interest in finding fault.

Move-out: the deposit is the brief

If you are a tenant, the standard is whatever your landlord or property manager will sign off, and that is usually stricter than the standard you have been living to. Appliances inside and out, cabinets emptied and wiped, floors done last, and the small items that always come up on an inspection sheet.

If you are the landlord or the manager, the brief is turnaround. An empty unit earns nothing, and the clean sits on the critical path between one tenancy and the next.

Move-in: somebody else’s house

Moving into a property that has technically been cleaned but not to your standard is a bad first week. A move-in clean is worth doing before the boxes land rather than after, because it is the only moment the place will be empty again.

Kitchens and bathrooms are the ones people care about, and they are the ones a rushed move-out clean skimps on.

Related work

On a restoration job the equivalent moment is pack-back, where the property is repaired and empty and everything is about to come home. If the property has just been built or renovated, it is a post-construction clean, which is a different problem again. For ongoing work once someone is living or trading there, see commercial and residential cleaning.