What Letting Agents and Inventory Clerks Check at a Glasgow Checkout Inspection

Quick answer: A Glasgow checkout inspection is a room-by-room comparison. The letting agent or inventory clerk walks the flat holding your check-in inventory and writes down every place the property today differs from the property you were handed. Cleanliness is the category that generates the most argument, and the faults that come up over and over are a greasy oven, a marked shower screen, dust along cornices and skirtings, grit in sash and case window runners, and crumbs left inside kitchen units. Nothing on that list is difficult. All of it takes longer than tenants expect.

We clean tenement flats, villa conversions and new-build apartments across Glasgow for a living, and we read the checkout reports afterwards. This guide is what those reports keep saying, translated into something you can act on before the clerk arrives rather than after.

If you would rather buy back the weekend, our quote form takes about a minute and gives you a fixed price with nothing to work out afterwards.

What actually happens at a Glasgow checkout inspection?

The checkout is the formal handover appointment. Someone from the letting agency, or an independent inventory clerk the agency instructs, meets you at the property with the check-in document and produces a written checkout report from it.

The shape of the appointment barely varies:

1. They arrive inside an agreed window, usually somewhere between half an hour and an hour and a half depending on the size of the flat.
2. They photograph and record the meters, then count the keys you are handing back, including any fob for the close door.
3. They work through the rooms in the same order the check-in document uses, because the report has to line up with it.
4. Each line on the inventory gets a condition note. Anything that has moved from its check-in description gets written down.
5. They photograph whatever they have written down, so the note has evidence attached to it.
6. The report is typed up and sent out, generally inside a week to a fortnight.

That report then travels. It goes to the landlord, and if the landlord proposes taking money off your deposit it goes to the deposit scheme along with the original check-in inventory and whatever quotes or invoices support the figure. You either accept the proposal or you say no and let the scheme decide.

Worth knowing before you start worrying about it: the person doing the inspection is not freelancing. Every letting agent in Scotland has to be registered and works under the statutory Letting Agent Code of Practice, which has been in force since 31 January 2018 and is enforceable at the First-tier Tribunal for Scotland. Every private landlord has to be registered with Glasgow City Council as well. The standard being applied to you is one they can be held to in turn. We set out the full legal position on our end of tenancy cleaning law page.

What do letting agents check when you hand the keys back?

They check against the document, line by line, and everything they write falls into one of six buckets.

• Cleanliness, in every room and inside every enclosed space.
• Damage, meaning something a clean cannot put right.
• Missing items, from furniture down to light bulbs, smoke alarm batteries and bin lids.
• Maintenance faults you should have reported during the tenancy, particularly damp and leaks.
• Meter readings for the utility handover.
• Keys, every set issued at the start, plus window keys and close fobs.

Damage and missing items are usually settled in a sentence, because either the item is there or it is not. Cleanliness is the one that runs on, because it is a judgement rather than a count, and judgements are where disagreements live.

The one thing worth understanding before anything else: the standard is not "clean". The standard is "as clean as the check-in inventory says it was on the day you moved in, allowing for fair wear and tear". If the check-in report described the oven as clean, you owe a clean oven. If it recorded a chipped worktop and a marked hall wall, those are already logged and they are not yours to fix.

Read the check-in document before you buy a single cloth. It is the only measuring stick in the room, and it is the first thing an adjudicator opens.

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Can a landlord in Scotland deduct money from your deposit for cleaning?

Yes, if the property comes back below the check-in standard, and the proposal has to survive three tests.

• Reasonable. The amount reflects what putting the fault right actually costs, evidenced by a quote or an invoice, not a round number chosen for tidiness.
• Proportionate. If the flat is clean apart from the oven and the shower screen, the deduction covers the oven and the shower screen. It does not fund a full clean of a property that was mostly fine.
• Evidenced. Photographs in the checkout report, the matching check-in entry, and the costing that turns the fault into a figure.

What a landlord cannot do in Scotland is charge you a cleaning fee. Any payment demanded beyond rent and deposit is an unlawful premium under the Rent (Scotland) Act 1984, tightened by the Private Rented Housing (Scotland) Act 2011. A tenancy clause saying you must pay for a professional clean at the end is unenforceable, and charging such a sum is a criminal offence with the money recoverable. That is a fee. A deduction for genuine dirt is a different animal and it remains perfectly lawful.

Your deposit sits with SafeDeposits Scotland, Letting Protection Service Scotland or mydeposits Scotland, capped at two months rent and lodged inside 30 working days of the tenancy starting. All three run free adjudication on the evidence. Our deposit guide for Glasgow tenants walks through the paperwork side of that in detail.

Which cleaning problems cost Glasgow tenants the most deposit?

Reading back through checkout reports, the same handful of items account for most of the cleaning notes. Roughly in the order we see them:

1. The oven. Cavity, racks, seal, and the door glass above all.
2. The shower screen, taps and chrome. Not scale, in this city, but soap film, body oils and water marks that dry into a haze.
3. Cornices, picture rails and the tops of doors. Glasgow's tenement stock puts a lot of detailed plasterwork above head height, and dust settles into every bead of it.
4. Skirtings and the edges of rooms, especially behind doors left standing open all tenancy.
5. Inside kitchen units. Crumbs in the corners, sticky rings where a bottle stood, grease on the hinge side.
6. Sash and case window runners. Grit, paint flakes and cobwebs in the channel the sash slides through.
7. The fridge and freezer, either not defrosted or defrosted and left with water in the salad drawer.
8. Surface mould on bathroom sealant and along window reveals.
9. Light fittings, ceiling roses and lampshades.
10. Smell. Cooking, damp, tobacco, animals.

Every one of those is a cleaning job rather than a repair, which means every one of them is inside your control right up until the moment the clerk walks in.

What does the clerk check in a tenement kitchen?

Quick answer: Inside the oven, meaning cavity, racks, seal and both faces of the door glass. Inside the fridge and freezer. Inside every unit and drawer, top shelf included. The hob, the extractor and its filter. The sink, taps and plughole. The floor, including the strip under the kickboards. The bin, inside and out. Behind and under anything on castors or feet.

Glasgow kitchens are usually smaller than the flat suggests, because in a traditional tenement the kitchen has been fitted into what was once a back room or a scullery. That means units squeezed into awkward corners, a cooker wedged between two runs of worktop, and a washing machine tucked under a counter with a gap either side that collects everything.

The clerk opens things. That is the whole job. They lift the top drawer out if it slides, run a finger along the shelf above the extractor, and look behind the kettle at the splash line on the tiles. If the kitchen reads clean in the first ninety seconds, the rest of the inspection tends to move briskly. If it does not, they slow down everywhere else too, and that is how a single greasy oven turns into a five-line report.

What does the clerk check in the bathroom?

Quick answer: The toilet, under the rim included, and the hinges of the seat. The shower screen and its rubber seal. The shower head and hose. Grout lines and the sealant run round the bath. The extractor vent cover. The floor, particularly behind the pan. The mirror and any glass shelf. Anywhere mould has taken hold.

Here is where Glasgow is genuinely different from most of the country, and it works in your favour. Our water arrives from Loch Katrine and it is soft, so limescale is not the enemy it is in the south of England. You are very rarely descaling anything here.

What replaces descaling is polishing. Soft water leaves soap film rather than chalk. Chrome taps, the shower screen, the mirror and any stainless steel go cloudy from soap residue and body oils, not from mineral deposits. The fix is a proper wash to lift the film, then buffing dry with a clean microfibre until the surface throws a reflection. A screen that is merely wiped will dry into streaks and photograph badly, and photographs are what the report is made of.

Mould round the bath sealant is the other reliable bathroom note. Surface mould sitting on top of sealant or grout is a cleaning matter and comes off. Mould that has got into the sealant itself, so it stays black when clean, is a materials question rather than a cleaning one, and after a long tenancy in a flat with a weak extractor it usually sits on the landlord's side of the line as a repairing standard issue. If you are looking at black growth spreading across a wall or plasterboard rather than a bead of silicone, that is not a cleaning job at all, and our mould removal page explains what proper remediation involves.

Do inventory clerks really open cupboards and appliances?

Every time, without exception. Enclosed spaces are exactly where a rushed clean gets found out, so they are exactly where a clerk looks first.

They open every kitchen unit and drawer, every wardrobe, every bathroom cabinet and the cupboard in the hall. They open the oven, the fridge, the freezer, the washing machine door and its detergent drawer, the dishwasher if there is one, and the microwave. In a tenement they will also look at whatever storage came with the flat, which might be a walk-in press off the hall, a box room shelf, or a shared bin store down the close.

The reasoning is not suspicion. The agent's real job at this point is to hand the property to somebody else without a complaint arriving in week one, and every complaint they have ever had from an incoming tenant started with someone opening a cupboard.

Do they check the oven every time?

Quick answer: Yes, and it is the first thing checked in most kitchens. The clerk looks at the door glass from both sides, the cavity walls and roof, the racks and any tray, the rubber seal round the door frame, and the hob and extractor alongside it. Some will run the oven for a minute to see whether leftover grease smokes.

Oven cleanliness is the single most common cleaning note on any UK checkout report and Glasgow is no exception. The exterior is nearly always fine, because tenants wipe what they can see. The risk sits behind the door.

What gets looked at:

• Door glass, clear and streak free, and on a double-glazed door the layer between the panes as well.
• Cavity, meaning the roof of the oven as much as the back and sides. The roof is the surface people forget.
• Racks and trays, degreased, with carbon shifted rather than smeared.
• Seal, the rubber gasket, free of crumbs and not perished.
• Hob, including under the pan supports on gas and the knob surrounds on everything.
• Extractor, the underside and the filter, not just the front panel.

We have written the whole method out at how to clean an oven before your end of tenancy inspection, free, with the timings. If you would rather not spend an evening in a cloud of degreaser, an oven deep clean is £55 added to any of our fixed prices.

Do they check skirtings, cornices and the things above eye level?

Yes, and in Glasgow the above-eye-level part matters more than it would elsewhere.

Skirtings. Every room, all four walls, and specifically the section behind a door that has stood open for two years. A clerk checks by drawing a finger along a stretch nobody would think to clean, then looking at the finger.

Cornices, ceiling roses and picture rails. A West End tenement in Hillhead or Kelvinbridge will have run cornice work the length of every ceiling, a rose in the middle of each public room, and a picture rail round the walls. That is a great deal of moulded surface holding dust, all of it in the top third of a photograph. Villa stock in Pollokshields West adds stair halls and panelled doors to the same problem. You need a step and a long-handled duster, and you need to do it before you touch the floors.

Everything else that lives high. Tops of door frames, light fittings, lampshades, the tops of wardrobes and kitchen wall units, radiator tops, the ledge above a bay window. None of it is difficult. All of it is invisible from standing height, which is exactly why it survives a DIY clean and does not survive a clerk with a phone camera held up.

Soft water and hard chrome. Because scale is not the issue in Glasgow, the fixtures conversation is a polishing one. Taps, plugholes, shower heads, towel rails, oven fronts and any stainless splashback want lifting and buffing rather than acid.

Do they check carpets, floorboards and the hall?

Yes, three ways over.

1. A visual sweep for stains, marks, hair and the line of dust that always sits where carpet meets skirting.
2. A comparison against the check-in entry, because a mark logged at move-in is not a mark you own.
3. Underneath movable furniture, if you have shifted a sofa or a bed and left a rectangle of untouched floor behind it.

The hall does more work than anywhere else in a tenement flat, because everything comes through it and it is long. Original boards hold grit between them and the walls scuff at shoulder height along the whole run. Give the hall its own slot in the plan instead of treating it as a corridor between the rooms that matter.

Vacuuming is part of every clean we do. Shampooing or hot-water extraction is a separate job and is only genuinely required in three situations: your tenancy agreement specifies it, the carpets carry marks beyond fair wear and tear, or the check-in inventory records them as professionally cleaned when you arrived. For most flats a proper vacuum, edges included, is the whole answer. Where a shampoo is needed we charge £35 a room and £25 for a hall, stairs and landing.

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Do they check sash and case windows and mirrors?

Yes, and sash and case windows are the item most likely to be scored down in Glasgow specifically.

Internal glass, frames, sills and runners are all on the inventory. So are mirrors, splashbacks, shower screens and the oven door. The places that get missed:

• The runner channel the sash slides in. It fills with grit, paint flakes and cobwebs, and you only reach it by moving the sash.
• The staff bead and the cords, visible once the sash is moved and not before.
• The deep reveal either side of the window in a stone building, which collects dust on the ledge and cobwebs at the top corners.
• The underside of the sill, where it meets the wall.
• The top rail of the frame, standard cobweb territory.
• The edges of a mirror, where a cloth stops just short.
• The rubber seal at the foot of a shower screen, a reliable mould trap.

External glass above ground floor is not usually a tenant matter, and in a factor-managed close the common stair windows are the factor's responsibility rather than yours. Ground-floor external glass depends on what your agreement says.

Do they check smells, bins and the close?

Yes, and this is the part that catches people out because it is not really a surface at all.

Smell. The clerk opens the front door and forms an opinion before they have taken a note. Cooking, tobacco, animals, damp, a bin left with something in it. If the flat smells lived in, that goes down as a general note and it colours everything after it. Open the windows for half an hour before they arrive, even in January.

Bins. Kitchen, bathroom and bedroom bins emptied and washed out, not just emptied. If the bin lives in the unit under the sink, clean the unit as well, because that is where the smell has gone.

The close and the back court. Your flat is what is being inspected, and in a factor-managed building the stairwell and the back court are the factor's remit, not yours. What is still yours is anything of yours left in them: bags by the bin store, a bike chained under the stair, a mattress in the back court. Clear your own material out before the appointment. A clerk who finds your sofa in the back court will write it down.

Presentation. Curtains drawn back, blinds level, cushions straightened, beds made if the flat is furnished. Nobody is measuring this and it is not a cleaning task, but the report is written by a person and people notice.

What is the difference between damage, cleaning and fair wear and tear?

Three categories, three very different outcomes, and the boundary between them is where most disputes actually sit.

Cleaning is anything a clean puts right. Grease, dust, soap film, crumbs, hair, surface mould, smell. The cost of fixing it is the cost of the cleaning work, which is why our own published prices are the sensible anchor: a full flat clean starts at £155 for a studio and £229 for a two bed, and a single-item put-right such as an oven is £55.

Damage is anything a clean will not touch. A hole in plaster, a cracked pane, a burn on a worktop, a torn carpet. It needs a trade rather than a cleaner and the evidence is a repair quote.

Fair wear and tear is the deterioration a property picks up from being lived in normally over the length of the tenancy. Hall carpet worn along the walking line after three years, paint faded on the wall the sun hits, small scuffs at shoulder height. You cannot be charged for it under any Scottish tenancy, and the longer your tenancy ran the more of it you are entitled to.

The genuinely grey cases are marks on walls. A greasy fingerprint round a light switch is cleaning. A scuff where a chair back has rubbed for two years is wear. A gouge from a wardrobe corner is damage. The same mark can be argued into any of the three, and that argument is precisely what scheme adjudication exists to settle.

What does the checkout clerk actually write down?

Quick answer: The clerk records the difference between check-in and checkout, not a general score. A useful cleaning note names the room, the item, the surface and the evidence, and if yours does not, you are entitled to ask for it in that form before you agree to anything.

If a note on your report is vaguer than the middle column above, that is a fair thing to query. "Property requires cleaning" is not a costed, evidenced, proportionate deduction, and a scheme adjudicator will treat it accordingly.

How should you prepare in the fortnight before checkout?

A fortnight out, do the paperwork:

• Find the check-in inventory. If you never received one, or cannot lay hands on your copy, ask the agent for it now rather than the night before.
• Read the tenancy agreement for anything that names a cleaning obligation, and note that a clause requiring you to pay for a professional clean is not enforceable in Scotland.
• Walk the flat with the inventory in your hand and write your own list of gaps. That list is your plan of work.
• Decide who is doing it. Our DIY versus professional guide sets out the honest maths, and the cost calculator will price the professional side in under a minute.

Three days out:

• Book the clean, yours or ours, ideally for a day or two before the inspection so there is room to fix anything.
• Buy what you are missing. Heavy-duty oven cleaner, a decent stack of microfibres, a long-handled duster for the cornice work, a thin brush for window runners.
• Start defrosting the freezer. It takes far longer than anyone plans for and you cannot clean it until it has finished.

The day before:

• Do the work, top down, floors last. Our printable checkout checklist is free and covers every line a clerk reads.
• Photograph every room in daylight, matching the angles used in the check-in photos wherever you can.
• Photograph the meters and write the readings down separately.
• Get the rubbish out to the bin store, and your own items out of the close and back court.

On the day:

• Refresh, do not re-clean. Vacuum out the footprints, wipe the surfaces that have collected dust overnight, empty the bins one last time.
• Air the flat for half an hour before the appointment.
• Gather every key. Front door, close door or fob, window keys, back court and bin store, anything issued at the start.
• Be there if you can. You are not obliged to attend, but being in the room means you can say "that was there when I moved in" while the clerk is still standing in front of it.

What if you disagree with the checkout report?

Three moves, in order, and most disputes stop at the first.

Speak to the agent or landlord. Ask for the deduction itemised: which room, which item, what evidence, what it costs and where that figure came from. A surprising number of proposals shrink or disappear at this stage, because a lot of them were opening positions rather than costed claims. Put your disagreement in writing, and if the check-in inventory already recorded the fault, attach it.

Use the scheme's free adjudication. SafeDeposits Scotland, Letting Protection Service Scotland and mydeposits Scotland all run it, it costs a tenant nothing, and the disputed money stays with the scheme until it is decided. The adjudicator reads the check-in inventory, the checkout report, both sides' photographs, any quotes or invoices, and the tenancy agreement. Raise it promptly, because every scheme sets a window. Evidence decides these, not tone: dated photographs and a copy of the check-in document beat a strongly worded email every time. SafeDeposits Scotland publishes its own Scottish adjudication figures if you want to see how these land, and it is worth saying plainly that SafeDeposits sits within the same TDS Group that runs the English scheme, so a familiar English name on your paperwork is not a sign anything has gone wrong.

Escalate if you have grounds. The route from here is the First-tier Tribunal for Scotland, Housing and Property Chamber. That is the forum for a deposit that was never lodged at all, or the prescribed information never served, where the Tribunal can order the landlord to pay you up to three times the deposit. It is not the sheriff court and it is certainly not a county court, and very few cleaning disagreements ever need it.

Does anything about Glasgow change the inspection?

The law does, and the housing stock does.

• Scots law throughout. Your tenancy is almost certainly a private residential tenancy under the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016, open ended since 1 December 2017, ended by you with 28 days written notice. There is no fixed term to run out. Do not read across from an English guide talking about assured shortholds or Section 21, because none of it applies here.
• Soft water changes the bathroom job. Loch Katrine water means chrome and glass go cloudy from soap rather than scale. Polish, do not descale.
• Tenements put the work above your head. Cornices, roses, picture rails, tall doors and deep window reveals across Hillhead, Dennistoun, Shawlands and Partick. Budget time for a step ladder.
• Sash and case windows are their own task. Move the sash, clean the runner. A clerk who has inspected a hundred tenement flats knows to look there.
• Factor-managed closes split the responsibility. The stair, the back court and the bin store belong to the factor. Your own belongings left in any of them belong to you.
• Conversions and warehouse flats need reach. Merchant City and the Finnieston dockside stock come with height, so window reveals, ledges and door tops sit out of arm's reach. Original stone and exposed brick want a dry method, because water marks masonry and the mark shows in a photograph.
• Student turnover clusters. Around the University of Glasgow, the West End empties on a schedule, and a licensed HMO handover means more doors, more beds and more surfaces than a one bed let. We price that honestly on our student cleaning page.

For landlords and letting agents

If you manage Glasgow property, we turn flats round to check-in standard with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee, so anything your clerk flags in the first two days gets put right at no further cost. You get a timestamped photo record and an itemised receipt, which is the paperwork you want on file if a deduction is later disputed. For portfolios we run per-property rates and priority slots around end-of-month handover dates. Our landlord page has the detail, or talk to us directly.

When is it worth booking us instead?

The maths tends to point one way if any of these are true:

• You have never cleaned an oven to inventory standard and the checkout is close.
• The flat has run two years or more without a deep clean.
• You are cleaning on the same day you are moving, which is the single most common reason a DIY clean falls short.
• You cannot physically be there, because you have already moved city or you are working away.
• The deposit at stake is two months rent, which in Glasgow is a great deal more than the clean.

We work across ten Glasgow areas, we bring everything, and every job carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. If the agent flags a cleaning item within two days of us finishing, we come back and put it right for nothing. Where the timing has got away from you entirely, we also run same-day cleans.

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FAQ

Does the landlord do the checkout, or an inventory clerk? Both happen in Glasgow. Agency-managed flats generally use an independent clerk, while a self-managing landlord may do it personally. The independent clerk is usually the fairer of the two, because they have no financial interest in the outcome either way.

How long does a checkout inspection take? Around half an hour for a studio, forty-five minutes to an hour for a one or two bed flat, and an hour and a half or more for a large tenement flat or a villa. Thorough rather than slow.

Do I have to be at the checkout? No, attendance is not required. It is still worth being there if you can, because you can answer a question in the moment and take your own photographs. If you cannot attend, ask for the report and the photographs as soon as they exist.

How much does a cleaning deduction usually come to in Glasgow? It should come to the cost of the cleaning work needed, which is why our own price list is the fairest yardstick: a single item such as an oven is £55, and a full flat clean runs from £155 for a studio to £229 for a two bed. If a proposed deduction is well above what the work would cost to buy, ask for the quote it is based on.

Can I be charged for something that was already there when I moved in? Not if the check-in inventory recorded it. That document exists to protect both sides and it is the first thing an adjudicator reads. If the inventory missed the fault and you took no photographs on the day you moved in, the argument gets harder, which is the case for photographing everything on day one of a tenancy.

Is limescale a problem in Glasgow flats? Very little. Glasgow's supply comes from Loch Katrine and is soft, so scale barely forms. What you get instead is soap film on chrome and glass, which needs washing and buffing dry rather than an acid descaler.

What if the report lists things I know I did clean? Dispute it. Send your dated photographs and the check-in inventory to the agent first, and if that gets nowhere, take it to your deposit scheme's free adjudication. The disputed sum stays with the scheme while it is decided, so contesting a wrong deduction costs you nothing but time.

Who cleans the close and the back court? In a factor-managed building, the factor does. The common stair, the back court and the bin store are not part of your flat's inventory. Anything of yours left in them, however, is very much your problem and should be cleared before the appointment.

Do you guarantee I will pass the inspection? We cannot promise what an individual clerk writes, because some are stricter than others. What we guarantee is that the work meets check-in standard, and that if a cleaning item is flagged within 48 hours we return and fix it free. That is the 48-hour re-clean guarantee on every job we do.

If you would rather not gamble two months rent on a Saturday with a bottle of oven cleaner, get a fixed price in about a minute. Every clean is worked to check-in standard, photographed, receipted, and backed by the 48-hour re-clean guarantee.