The call comes in at ten past five on a Friday. A woman in a flat off Walm Lane has moved out on Wednesday, the check-out report landed an hour ago, and the clerk has marked the lounge carpet down for two brown marks near the sofa. She has our invoice in front of her. She has the words “guaranteed re-clean” on it. She wants to know whether that means we come back, and she wants to know before the agent submits a deposit deduction on Monday morning.
The answer in her case was yes. In roughly a third of these calls the answer is no, and the reason it is no has nothing to do with anyone being difficult. It is that the word “guarantee” is doing a great deal of work in this industry while meaning almost nothing specific.
What does a re-clean guarantee promise?
Strip the marketing off and most of them promise one thing: if the letting agent or inventory clerk records the carpet as inadequately cleaned within a defined window, the cleaner returns once and re-treats the areas named in that report, at no charge.
That is a reasonable commitment and I stand behind ours. Notice how much it excludes by construction.
It is triggered by a third party document, not by the customer’s opinion. A tenant who thinks the carpet could be brighter has no claim. A clerk’s report naming the second bedroom does. It covers the areas named, not the whole property, so a report citing the hallway does not entitle anyone to a free re-clean of four rooms.
The window is short. Seven days is common in London, some firms run seventy-two hours, a few offer fourteen. Miss it and the guarantee has expired regardless of merit, because after a fortnight in an empty flat with the heating off nobody can say what happened in there.
And it almost always requires the property to be unchanged. Once the incoming tenant has moved furniture in, the guarantee is dead, and it has to be. I cannot assess my own work through somebody else’s sofa.
Read the clause. That is the whole of my advice on this, and it applies whether the firm is charging £45 a room or £22.
The conditions that sit in the small print
Payment in full before the guarantee activates, which catches out anyone withholding half the fee pending the check-out. Access on reasonable notice, which becomes a problem when keys have gone back to the agent. Written notification rather than a phone call. Original invoice number quoted.
None of these are unfair. All of them are routinely missed by customers who assumed a guarantee was a general promise of satisfaction rather than a contractual mechanism with steps in it.
What will never be covered, whatever the wording says?
This is the section that saves people money, so I will be blunt about the categories.
Permanent staining is not a cleaning failure. Dye loss from bleach, benzoyl peroxide off acne cream on a bedroom carpet, spot-on flea treatment, hair dye, curry turmeric, red cordial in a solution-dyed carpet, rust from a radiator valve that has been weeping for two years – some of these lift and some are chemical damage to the fibre itself. Where the colour has gone, there is nothing left to clean. The remedy is dyeing or a patch repair, and neither sits inside a re-clean guarantee.
Wear is not soiling either. I covered this in a previous piece and it comes up in every deposit dispute I get dragged into. A traffic lane that has gone flat and pale on the stairs of a converted house on Evelina Road has lost its twist, and no amount of returning to it changes the appearance, because the change is mechanical rather than chemical.
Filtration soiling at the skirtings is a grey area and I treat it as one. I will improve it. I will not guarantee it, and I say so on the job sheet before I start, because a black perimeter line in a Victorian conversion is caused by airflow through the floor and comes back whatever I do.
Pre-existing damage that was present at check-in. Sun fade along the line of a bay window. Pile crush under furniture that has stood in one place for three years and will lift over a fortnight with no intervention from anyone. Moth damage. Burns.
Re-soiling after occupancy, obviously. Though “obviously” understates how often somebody rings about it.
Wicking is the exception, and it should be
Brown shadows that reappear twenty-four to forty-eight hours after a clean are contamination travelling up from the backing as the carpet dries. That is a consequence of how the job was done, so it belongs squarely inside the guarantee and any firm treating it as an act of God is wriggling.
I had one on Churchfield Road, W3, in June – a coffee spill that came back twice before I lifted the carpet edge and found the underlay had taken most of it. Third visit sorted it. No charge, no argument, and it should never have been a question.
Can a landlord even insist on a professional clean?
Not as a blanket condition, and this surprises people on both sides of the transaction.
The Tenant Fees Act 2019 came into force on 1 June 2019 in England and bans landlords and letting agents from requiring tenants to pay a third party as a condition of the tenancy, which catches compulsory professional cleaning clauses and clauses naming a specific cleaning firm. The transitional period for pre-existing agreements ended on 31 May 2020, so the ban now applies across the board. A clause demanding a professional clean and a receipt may still be printed in a tenancy agreement. It is unenforceable.
What survives is the tenant’s obligation to return the property in the condition recorded at check-in, allowing for fair wear and tear. If the carpets were professionally cleaned at the start, a landlord can reasonably expect a comparable standard at the end. They can deduct from the deposit for the actual cost of putting a specific shortfall right. They cannot levy a flat cleaning fee and they cannot tell anyone who to hire.
So the guarantee matters for a different reason than most customers assume. Its value in a dispute is evidential. It shows that the work was carried out to a professional standard and that the contractor stood ready to correct any shortfall, which is a stronger position than a receipt proving a clause was obeyed.
What deposit adjudicators pay attention to
Photographs with dates. Check-in inventory against check-out report. Itemised invoices that name rooms rather than saying “carpets”. Whether the deduction claimed matches the cost of fixing the specific defect rather than the cost of a full clean.
A cleaner’s guarantee only helps if there is paper attached to it. Read the clause, then keep the invoice.
Why is a written pre-clean assessment worth more than the guarantee?
Because it moves the argument to before the money is spent rather than after.
When I walk a property I write down what will not come out. Two lines, on the job sheet, signed by whoever is there: bedroom two, blue dye stain by window, permanent, will not improve. Hall, filtration line at skirtings, will improve approximately 60%, will recur.
That document does more for a tenant in a deposit dispute than any guarantee, because it is contemporaneous evidence from a professional that the defect is not dirt. Adjudicators respond to it. Agents argue with it less than you would expect.
The firms that will not do this are the ones to avoid. A cleaner who declines to commit to what is achievable before taking the money has arranged things so that every disappointment becomes a negotiation. I would rather lose the booking at the doorstep in Bedford Hill than have the conversation on the Friday afternoon.
Photographs, and the timing of them
Take them before, take them after, take them in the same light and from the same spot. Daylight, no flash, whole room plus a close crop. A close-up of a stain with no context is worthless to an adjudicator who cannot tell which room it was in.
When does a re-clean fix nothing at all?
More often than the industry lets on.
If a carpet failed the check-out because it is worn, a second clean returns the same result and wastes a week of everybody’s time while the deposit deadline runs down. If the mark is dye loss, going back a third time gives the agent a photograph of a cleaner failing repeatedly, which is worse for the tenant’s case than a written statement saying the damage is permanent.
The useful move at that point is to stop cleaning and start documenting. Get it in writing that the defect is not soil-related, hand that to the tenant, let it go to the deposit scheme. I have written maybe fifteen of those letters in the last two years and I am not aware of one that lost.
There is a version of this trade that treats the guarantee as a marketing line and hopes nobody reads it. There is another version that writes down what it cannot fix and then fixes everything else. Read the clause and you can tell within about a minute which one you have hired.
What to do with the week you have
Deposit deadlines move faster than most people expect. The agent has ten days from the end of the tenancy to propose deductions in most schemes, and a dispute has to be raised before the undisputed portion is released. That leaves a narrow stretch in which a re-clean, a written statement, or both, have to happen. Book the re-clean for the earliest slot offered rather than the convenient one, and send the written statement the same day rather than waiting to see whether the re-clean settles it.
A flat on Fairlop Road, E11, in April: two bedrooms passed, hallway failed, re-clean booked for the Tuesday. The clerk had photographed a shadow at the threshold strip that turned out to be the doorway’s own shade line. It was there in the check-in photographs too, taken from the same angle, eighteen months earlier.