When it comes to a property being presented to a new tenant, or a tenant vacating a property it is a legislative requirement the property be ‘reasonably clean’.
So what is ‘reasonable’? This term is hard to define but can be seen as what a reasonable person would agree as being generally clean. We find the members who oversee tribunal hearings have differing opinions when presented with a cleaning dispute and also differing moods, so there can be varying degrees of what ‘reasonable’ can be when trying to win a cleaning claim against a tenant.
It is important to understand that there is sometimes a gap where money needs to be spent to bring a property back to a right standard. For example, if we are presented a ‘sterile clean’ property at the start of the first tenancy, and each tenancy has tenants leaving it ‘reasonably clean’, despite our best efforts sometimes we need to spend the landlord’s money to get a property back to very high cleaning standard again, closing the gap between very clean and reasonably clean. We can push with a tenant the best we can however in some cases this isn’t possible.
We believe this is simply part of having to put money back into the property just like with repairs and maintenance and to ensure the property is kept in the highest standard possible to attract and retain the right tenant!
