As tenanta, are we allowed to charge a fee and clean it ourselves or are we required to use a service?
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As tenanta, are we allowed to charge a fee and clean it ourselves or are we required to use a service?
Our ex-tenants are threatening to sue us for charging them a cleaning fee. We have photos to show it wasn’t clean. We cleaned it ourselves and charged the rate we were quoted from other companies. Are we allowed to do that? There were other issues as well, such as missing screens, missing garage door openers, broken blinds, cracked window, etc.
Asked on July 5, 2012 under Real Estate Law, Colorado
Answers:
FreeAdvice Contributing Attorney / FreeAdvice Contributing Attorney
Answered 11 years ago | Contributor
When a landlord is faced with cleaning up a rental to re-rent, he or she can hire out the cleaning costs or do it himself or herself. Custom and practice in the rental industry is for the landlord to hire out the costs of cleaning the rental to rent again to a third party.
If you have a written quote from a cleaning company for the rental that you are writing about and decided to clean it yourself, you can charge the former tenant the costs of the quote from the third party.
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