The Previous Tenant Is Still There On Your Move-In Day

The first hour matters more than the rest of the week

Arriving to find furniture, boxes, or a person still in the apartment is disorienting, and the instinct is to be accommodating and start working around it. That instinct costs you the record.

Once your boxes are in the hallway and their sofa is still in the bedroom, nobody can later separate the condition you inherited from the condition you created. Ten minutes of documenting before anything moves is the whole difference.

What to do before moving anything in

• Photograph and video everything, including what is still there and any mess, with the time visible if you can.
• Message the building in writing immediately: what you found, at what time, and that your lease starts today.
• Ask for a specific instruction rather than sympathy: do we wait, is a cleaning scheduled, is the handover date moving.
• Do not accept a verbal promise about the cleaning being done later without it being in the same message thread.
• Keep the movers informed, since waiting time is usually billable and that cost belongs in the conversation too.
• Do not remove or dispose of anything belonging to the previous resident, however tempting.

What not to do

Do not negotiate directly with the outgoing resident about condition or cleaning. They have their own walkthrough coming and their own deposit at stake, and an informal agreement between you helps neither of you when the building asks who was responsible.

Do not start cleaning it yourself in the moment. It feels productive and it destroys the evidence of the state it was handed over in, which is the one thing you cannot recover later.

If you have to move in anyway

Often the truck is booked and there is no alternative. In that case, stage everything in one room, ideally with the door shut, and leave the rest of the apartment untouched and photographed.

That keeps a clean boundary: this room is mine, the rest is as I found it. It also makes the later cleaning possible, since a crew can work around one closed room and cannot work around a distributed move.

Getting the cleaning sorted afterwards

• Ask who is paying for it, in writing, before booking anything yourself.
• If the building arranges it, ask for the date and the scope rather than a reassurance.
• If you arrange it, agree the reimbursement in writing first, and keep the receipt.
• Schedule it around your staged room rather than trying to empty the apartment again.
• Ask specifically about appliance interiors and the bathroom, which are what a rushed turnover skips.

The version done properly on an empty unit is move-in apartment cleaning, and if the unit was handed over in real disorder rather than merely late, deep apartment cleaning is the scope that covers what a skipped turnover leaves behind.

The part worth remembering afterwards

This situation makes your own move-in documentation more valuable than usual, because the unit did not go through a normal turnover. Anything not recorded in the first days is a candidate to be attributed to you at the end of your tenancy.

Keep the thread with the building. A record showing the unit was not ready on the start date is worth having for the whole length of the lease, not just for the week it happened.