Read the standard before you need it
If the property is let, the standard is in your tenancy and there is an inventory it will be judged against. If it is owned and being sold or let out, the standard is whatever you have agreed with the buyer or the incoming tenant.
Either way it is written down somewhere, and reading it early is considerably less painful than discovering it at a check-out you are attending by video from another country.
The order that works
Every part of this goes wrong if it is done in a different sequence:
- Photograph the property while it is still full. That is your before.
- Do the three-way split — going, storing, going nowhere — and get it in writing.
- Move everything out, with halls, stairs and frames protected.
- Take down your own fixings and make good.
- Clean, or have it cleaned, on an empty property.
- Photograph it empty and clean, then hand the keys back.
The clean goes last, always
Booking the end-of-tenancy clean before the removal is the most common and most expensive sequencing mistake there is. A clean on a property that still has furniture in it either gets done badly or gets charged for twice.
If you will not be there
Common at the end of a posting, and entirely workable. Nominate somebody in writing before the day — a colleague, a relative, an agent — with a number they can be reached on, and we will confirm the handover in writing at both ends.
What cannot be done is a verbal arrangement discovered on the morning. That is the one version of this that fails.
Leave nothing for somebody else to deal with
The loft, the shed, the garage and the cupboard everybody forgot. At the end of an assignment those become an agent’s problem, then a deduction, then an email you answer from a different time zone.
We can take away whatever is not coming and provide the disposal paperwork, and it is much cheaper than any of the alternatives.