End of Tenancy Clearance: Landlord’s Guide

By Sandeep KV, Founder of Kruze

The short version, because void days cost you money and you want to get on with it:

1. Anything the tenant left behind is a legal question, not a waste question. Their goods are still their property, and the rules on disposing of someone else’s things are genuinely contested. Take advice before you bin, sell or destroy any of it.
2. Keep evidence. Dated photographs and an inventory of what was left, taken before anything moves. This is what wins a deposit dispute.
3. Deduct from the deposit through the scheme, not by helping yourself to it. The deposit stays the tenant’s money until you have proven your claim.
4. Use a licensed carrier and keep the waste transfer note. If your waste ends up fly-tipped, the liability can land on you as well as on the man with the van.
5. Then clear it fast. From £24.99 for a few items, £50 a van load, £150 for a full property.

Step 1 is where landlords get hurt. Step 4 is where they get hurt expensively.

The tenant’s belongings are a legal question, not a waste question

This is the part of the job we will not advise you on, and you should be suspicious of any clearance company that does.

The tenancy ending does not transfer ownership of the tenant’s possessions to you. If they leave a sofa, a games console and four boxes of clothes behind, those things still belong to them. What you are allowed to do about that is a genuinely contested area of law, not a settled checklist. People will tell you there is a simple notice procedure that makes it safe. The honest position is that the rules on disposing of, or selling, goods that belong to someone else are argued over by lawyers, and the answer turns on facts specific to your tenancy and your tenant.

We are a waste company. We move things and we do the paperwork for waste. We are not lawyers, and we are not going to print a procedure and let you rely on it, because if it is wrong you are the one in court, not us.

So before you dispose of, sell or destroy anything a tenant left behind, get advice from a property solicitor or from Citizens Advice. Citizens Advice costs nothing. A short call with a solicitor costs a lot less than a claim from a former tenant over goods you binned.

One thing to unlearn while you are at it. If you have read an older guide pointing you at the statutory abandonment procedure in the Housing and Planning Act 2016, that route is gone. Part 3 of that Act was omitted on 27/12/2025 by the Renters’ Rights Act 2025. Any blog still walking you through it was written before that date and has not been updated. That alone should tell you how much of the advice floating around on this is worth.

Two things you can safely do on day one, whatever the advice comes back as. Photograph and inventory everything left, dated, before anything moves. And start the advice conversation the day you get the keys, because that is the step that decides how long the void runs.

Once the legal position on the belongings is sorted, the clearance itself is straightforward, and the rest of this guide is about that.

Deposit deductions that actually stick

Start from the thing most landlords get wrong. The deposit is not your money that the tenant has to claw back. The deposit schemes’ own joint guidance puts it like this: “the onus is on them to prove they have a legitimate claim to a share of the deposit, whilst the tenant has no obligation to prove their position. This is because the deposit remains the tenant’s money until the landlord has successfully proven their claim.”

What tends to work:

• An itemised invoice from a real company for the work done, broken down by cost of materials and labour. Invoices and receipts are stronger evidence than estimates because they show a cost actually incurred.
• Before photographs, dated, showing what was left.
• A signed check-in report and a signed check-out report. This is the pair that matters. The check-in report is your baseline and the check-out report is what the adjudicator compares it against. Without both it is hard to demonstrate any deterioration at all.
• Proportionality. You can claim the cost of removing what they left. You cannot claim a full refurbishment because the carpet was tired.

One correction to a myth that circulates. Estimates and quotes are not fatal. They are weaker evidence than an invoice, but adjudicators still take them into account, and you do not have to have completed the work before you make a claim.

What does tend to fail: a figure you invented with no breakdown, deductions for fair wear and tear (only excessive wear and tear counts, and that is treated as damage), claims that would leave you better off than you started (betterment), and anything you cannot evidence with a document that existed before the dispute did.

We give you a dated invoice and an itemised list of what was removed on every job, because that is the bit the adjudicator wants to see.

Duty of care, and the bit that catches landlords out

Here is why this matters more to you than it does to your tenant.

This is the section to read twice, because the rule for a landlord is not the rule for a householder, and it is stricter.

A householder disposing of their own household waste sits under a limited duty in s.34(2A) of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and the worst a council can hand them is a fixed penalty. A landlord clearing a void is in a different position entirely. The government’s guidance to councils on those fixed penalties says so in terms: “Where a landlord is arranging the clearance of premises after a tenancy has ended, the resulting waste is not considered to be household waste, nor are they the occupier. This means the duty of care under Section 34(1) of the Environmental Protection Act applies instead and this FPN cannot be used.”

Read that again. You do not get the householder’s fixed penalty. You get the full duty of care that applies to businesses, and breaching it is an offence with, in the words of the government’s own duty of care code of practice, “no upper limit on the courts’ power to fine”. Fly-tipping itself carries an unlimited fine and up to five years’ imprisonment on conviction.

So if you hand a void’s contents to a bloke with a Transit for cash, and he tips it in a layby near Otley, the council traces it back through the paperwork to the property. He is liable. So are you. Every holder in the chain shares the duty, and there is a second cost on top of the fine, which is a local news story with your business name in it.

Two minutes of prevention:

1. Search the company on the Environment Agency’s public register of waste carriers, brokers and dealers, or ring the Environment Agency on 03708 506 506.
2. Keep the waste transfer note they give you, for at least two years. Be clear about what that note does and does not do. It is your evidence that you took reasonable steps and passed the waste to an authorised person. It does not move your liability onto the carrier. The duty of care cannot be handed off, and it follows the waste all the way to final disposal.

Kruze holds Waste Carrier Licence CBDU597687. Go and check it. Then check whoever you have used for the last five years, because a surprising number are not on there.

Void speed, and what actually causes delays

Void days are the number that matters. A property earning nothing for three weeks because nobody could get a clearance booked is worse than paying a bit more for a same week slot.

What slows a void clearance down, in order of how often we see it:

• Sorting the legal position on the tenant’s belongings. The step above. Unavoidable, so start taking advice the day you get the keys, not the day the clearance is booked.
• Access and parking. A back-to-back in LS6 with permit parking and no loading bay adds an hour before anyone lifts anything.
• Discovering the fridge. Or the mattress, or the sofa. These cannot go in a skip, so if your plan was a skip, your plan has just changed mid-morning.
• Nobody has a key. Obvious. Happens constantly.

What speeds it up: send room photographs on WhatsApp and we quote off those, usually the same day. Book the clearance and the cleaner back to back. Give us a key rather than a two hour window.

Most void clearances we do are a half day, and we can usually be there within a day or two of the call. Details are on our end of tenancy clearance page.

Skip or man and van for a void

For a void, a man and van almost always wins, and here is the honest reasoning rather than the sales version.

A skip is priced by volume and you do all the labour. For a genuine strip-out where you are ripping out a kitchen over two weeks, that is the right tool, and our skips run from £242.

For a void clearance, you are not filling a skip over two weeks. You have one afternoon of mixed household contents that somebody has to carry down the stairs. And the exact items a departing tenant leaves behind are the ones a skip will not accept. Mattresses, sofas, the fridge. Those are prohibited in our skips and have to be collected separately anyway, which means you have now paid for a skip and a collection. A skip also needs a permit on the road, and it sits outside your empty property advertising free tipping to the whole street overnight.

Best for: full refurbishments over weeks. Bad for: a two bed void with a sofa in it.

What it costs

Individual items come off the same sheet. A double mattress is £60, a three seat sofa is £96, a fridge or freezer from £60, a two door wardrobe £54. Nothing changes because you are a landlord, and nothing changes because you are in a hurry.

The honest steer. If the tenant left one sofa and nothing else, do not book a full clearance. Book the sofa. It is £96 and it takes twenty minutes. And if the furniture is decent and you are between tenants with no rush, a free charity collection will take it and you pay nothing at all. The British Heart Foundation, for one, runs a free national furniture collection, and its rule on upholstered items is that “All upholstered items must also have a fire safety label attached.” Rips or tears exposing the inner material are refused, and so is anything stained, particularly mattresses. Check the labels before you book. That is a worse day for us and a better one for you.

For agents and portfolios

If you are running voids at volume, the useful things are boring things. One number to call. Photograph quotes, so nobody attends a viewing just to get a price. Invoices sent to accounts with the property address as the reference. Waste transfer notes filed per property, so when a council or a landlord asks, you have the document.

We do repeat void work across Leeds, Bradford, Wakefield and Huddersfield on that basis. If you want a standing arrangement rather than a quote every time, say so.

FAQs

Can a landlord throw away belongings left by a tenant?

Not as a matter of course. The tenancy ending does not make the tenant’s goods yours, and what a landlord may lawfully do with them is a contested question rather than a settled checklist. We are a waste company, not lawyers, so we will not give you a procedure to rely on. Photograph and inventory everything, then get advice from a property solicitor or Citizens Advice before anything is disposed of or sold.

How much does an end of tenancy clearance cost?

A full property clearance starts from £150. A single room or garage van load starts from £50, and a few individual items start from £24.99. Send photographs of each room on WhatsApp and we will usually give you a fixed price the same day.

Can I deduct clearance costs from the deposit?

Usually yes, if the deduction is proportionate and evidenced. You need an itemised invoice, dated before photographs, and signed check-in and check-out reports to compare against. The onus is on the landlord to prove the claim, because the deposit remains the tenant’s money until you have. Deductions go through the deposit protection scheme’s process rather than being taken directly, and where you agree the deductions the balance must be returned within 10 days.

Am I liable if my clearance company fly-tips the waste?

Potentially, yes. A landlord clearing a void is not the occupier and the waste is not household waste, so the full s.34(1) duty of care applies rather than the householder’s fixed penalty regime. Breaching it is an offence with no upper limit on the courts’ power to fine. The duty is shared by every holder in the chain and cannot be handed off, so the carrier being liable does not make you not liable. Use a licensed carrier, check them on the Environment Agency’s public register, and keep the waste transfer note for two years. Kruze is CBDU597687.

Is a skip or a man and van better for a void property?

Man and van, in almost every case. A skip means you do all the lifting, needs a permit on the road, and will not accept the mattresses, sofas or fridges tenants typically leave behind. Skips make sense for multi-week refurbishments, not for a one afternoon clearance.

How quickly can a void be cleared?

Most void clearances are a half day of work, and we can usually attend within a day or two of the call. The slow part is normally sorting the legal position on anything the tenant left behind, so start taking advice on that the day you get the keys rather than the day you book.

Landlord or agent in West Yorkshire? Send room photographs to 07436 120271 on WhatsApp and we will price the void the same day. We cover Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Wakefield, Harrogate and Barnsley.

If a departing tenant leaves a heavily hoarded property, our hoarder house clearance crews quote after a walkthrough and clear in stages where needed.