End of Tenancy Cleaning Northcote & Between the Commons.

Quick answer for Northcote & Between the Commons: Northcote is the whole-house end of this market. The terraces Between the Commons are mostly let intact to families rather than split into flats, which means five or six rooms, a side return kitchen, a loft conversion, a cellar in many of the older houses, and a garden with a shed. Northcote ward is 29.3% privately rented with the lowest social rented share of the wards we checked, 8.3% (ONS Census 2021). From 1 April 2026 Wandsworth selective licensing covers Northcote, at a licence fee of £885.

Prices in Northcote & Between the Commons: studio £169, 1-bed £195, 2-bed £245, 3-bed £295, 4-bed £355, 5+ bedrooms from £425, the same fixed ladder everywhere we clean. The oven is in that price, not an add-on. We cover all of Northcote & Between the Commons including Northcote Road, Webbs Road, Bolingbroke Grove, Broomwood Road.

The Between the Commons grid was built out between the 1870s and the 1900s as terraces for a solidly middle-class market, and the houses are wider and deeper than the Battersea stock a mile north. Two storeys plus a loft in most, three in some, with a bay to the front, a through reception, a rear addition, and a garden of real size for inner London. Crucially, most of them were never converted into flats, so a tenancy here is a whole house on one schedule.

That changes the job completely. A whole-house checkout means the kitchen and the utility, two or three bathrooms in many cases, four or five bedrooms, a hall and stairs and landing with a runner or fitted carpet, a cellar or vault under the front where one survives, a loft room with a shower, and outside the patio, path, side return and shed. Every one of those was written down when the tenancy started.

The side return kitchen extension is near universal here and is the single biggest time cost. Long run of units, a peninsula or island in the larger ones, a glazed roof or lantern, bifold doors to the garden, and a floor that runs unbroken from the front of the house to the garden threshold. Bifold door tracks are the specific trap: the bottom track fills with grit, hair and leaf fragments, it is at eye level in a photograph taken from the garden, and it is almost never cleaned by a tenant.

Loft conversions are the second near-universal feature. Dormer to the rear, a shower room in the space over the stairs, storage behind a knee wall, and a Velux or two on the front slope. Velux windows pivot fully for cleaning, which is useful, because the outside of a front-slope roof light is visible from the street and dirty glass reads badly.

Cellars are the feature people forget. Many of the older houses on Webbs Road and the streets off Bolingbroke Grove have a small cellar or a coal vault under the front steps. If it was listed, it needs clearing, sweeping and cobwebbing.

A whole house is a longer schedule and therefore a longer list of possible deductions, and Northcote inventory clerks work through them methodically because the deposits are large. The items that come up most: the bifold track, as above; grease on the ceiling and wall above a hob where there is a recirculating extractor rather than a ducted one; the oven, usually a double or a range in these kitchens, where the second cavity and the grill get less use and more neglect; the utility room, where a washer dryer and often a second fridge sit in a cupboard that never gets aired; and the bathrooms, plural, where the family bathroom gets cleaned and the loft shower and the downstairs cloakroom do not.

Then the specifics of family occupation. Skirtings and door frames at child height carry marks that are dirt rather than damage and clean off. Radiators have dust drawn down behind them. Fitted carpets on stairs and landings hold more than a vacuum lifts, and where the inventory recorded professionally cleaned carpets at the start, it will expect the same at the end. Gardens are recorded here in more detail than anywhere else in the patch, because they are genuinely part of the property: patio, path, decking, shed, and often a play structure.

Limescale is present as everywhere in this region, with Thames Water classing the supply as hard, and in a house with three bathrooms that means three shower screens and three sets of taps rather than one.

The licensing change is genuinely useful to know if you are a landlord here. Wandsworth selective licensing covers Northcote from 1 April 2026, with a licence fee of £885. It does not change the cleaning standard, but it does mean more of the local landlord base is operating to written conditions and keeping records, which in practice raises the evidential quality of checkout inspections on both sides. Cleaning already appears in 54% of deposit dispute cases according to Tenancy Deposit Scheme adjudication data reported by the NRLA, and better records tend to mean fewer arguments and quicker resolutions.

Northcote has no station of its own, which is part of its character. Clapham Junction sits at the north end of Northcote Road, five to ten minutes on foot from most of the grid, and from there the connections are as good as anywhere in south London. Wandsworth Common station is on the western edge for services to Victoria. Buses run along Battersea Rise and Bolingbroke Grove.

Northcote Road itself is the reason people rent here. The market has roots going back to the 1860s and still trades along the road, busiest on Fridays and Saturdays, with the shops and cafes either side. It is a genuine high street rather than a parade, and it sustains the family rental market around it.

For a move-out that market is the access problem. Northcote Road is congested and partly pedestrianised in stretches at busy times, and the stalls take kerb space on trading days. We avoid Friday and Saturday middays on the road itself where we can. The residential streets running off it, Webbs Road, Bennerley Road, Chatto Road and the roads towards Broomwood Road, are controlled parking zones with resident bays and a visitor permit scheme, and they are narrow with cars both sides.

Whole houses here generally have a front path and a step rather than a lift or a communal hall, which makes access simpler than a mansion block: we can get kit to the door and work outwards. What we do ask is that you tell us in advance about a side return gate that is locked, a shed we need a key for, or a cellar hatch that only opens from inside, because those are the parts of the schedule that get missed when nobody can get to them.

Five letting agents trade on Northcote Road itself: KFH at 108, Marsh & Parsons at 118, Hamptons at 98-100, John Thorogood at 140 and Rampton Baseley at 131. Five offices on one high street is the highest concentration in this patch, and it is a straightforward signal about where the family lettings money is. It also means five inventory formats, all of them long, because a whole house takes a long schedule.

The census picture explains why. Northcote ward held 4,607 households at Census 2021 with 1,348 privately renting, 29.3%. The private rented share is lower than the wards nearer the station, but the social rented share of 8.3% is the lowest of the forty-eight wards we checked across both boroughs. In practical terms that is the cleanest renter mix anywhere in the patch: almost every home that is not owner-occupied is a private let, and those lets are family houses rather than flatshares.

The tenant profile follows the schools. Households take a house on a two or three year view, notice comes in spring, and moves cluster in July and August so children start a new term in the new house. That produces a genuine summer crunch in which every agent on Northcote Road is trying to turn round houses in the same fortnight. If you are moving in that window, book the clean when you serve notice, not the week before you go.

We price whole houses on the room count and the schedule rather than an hourly rate, we cover the outside where it was recorded, and we leave dated photographs of the finished house so there is a record if a deduction is proposed later.