Handing Your Apartment To A Subletter: What To Clean And What To Record

You are on both sides of this

Subletting puts you in an unusual position. To the building you are still the tenant and everything that happens is yours. To the person moving in you are effectively the landlord, and the condition you hand over is the standard they will hand back.

That second part is the practical reason to clean properly rather than adequately. A subletter who arrives to a spotless apartment tends to return it near that. One who arrives to a tired one has no reference point, and neither do you when the time comes to compare.

Before anything, check the paperwork

Confirm your lease allows subletting and what it requires: written permission, an approved agreement, notification of the building. Some leases forbid it outright and some allow it with conditions, and the answer changes what you should be doing rather than being an afterthought.

This page is about the cleaning and the handover, not about the legal side. If the lease is ambiguous, get the answer in writing from the building before anyone moves in rather than after.

Clean to the standard you want back

• The bathroom in full, including grout, the seal, and the fan cover, since it is the room they will judge first.
• Kitchen appliance interiors: oven, fridge, dishwasher filter, hood filter. Handing over a clean oven is what makes it reasonable to ask for one back.
• Inside every cabinet and drawer they will use.
• Floors including edges, and under the furniture where you can reach.
• Bedding washed and the mattress vacuumed, with a protector on it.
• Windows, sills, and tracks, which are quick and set the tone.

Put away what you would mind being used

Clear at least one wardrobe, one set of drawers, and shelf space in the bathroom and kitchen. A subletter with nowhere to put their things will use yours, and that is a foreseeable outcome rather than bad behaviour.

Anything valuable, fragile, sentimental, or simply personal goes into a locked room, a storage locker, or a friend's place. If nothing locks, a single wardrobe with your things in it and an explicit note is better than nothing, and considerably better than hoping.

Record the condition before they arrive

• Photograph every room, dated, once it is clean and your things are away.
• Photograph inside the fridge and oven, the bathroom fixtures, the floors, and any existing damage.
• List anything already worn or marked, so it is not attributed to them later.
• Note the inventory of what you are leaving for their use: kitchen equipment, linens, furniture.
• Send the whole set to them by email, which makes it a shared record rather than your private one.

Sending it to them is the step people skip. A record only one side has is a claim, and a record both sides received on day one is an agreement.

The two-page note that prevents most problems

Write down what is not obvious about the apartment: which drain runs slowly, that the bathroom fan needs running long after a shower, the burner that does not light first time, how the heating is set, bin day and where the bins go, quiet hours, the fob for the laundry room.

It costs twenty minutes and it prevents both the small damage that comes from not knowing, and the messages at eleven at night while you are somewhere else.

If the apartment has not had a proper clean in a while, this is the moment for one rather than the moment to catch up alone: deep apartment cleaning covers the appliance interiors and the buildup that set the standard you want returned, and the cleaning checklist doubles as the list you can hand to the subletter for the end of their stay.