Yes — ideally completely empty, and in that order: movers out first, cleaners last, walkthrough after. A move-out clean is priced and scoped for a vacant property, and a good part of the list — cabinet, drawer, closet and shelf interiors — only exists once your belongings are out of the way.
That’s what the walkthrough actually looks for. If you’d rather not do it during the week you are moving, send us the address and the move-out date and we’ll come back with a price.
“Empty” is a scope condition, not a preference
A JAS move-out clean is a 38-item list on an empty property, starting at $409 on our published Miami-Dade rates, worked in a 5–7 hour visit by a 2–3 person team. That same page says it plainly: the starting price applies to a vacant property in normal condition. That is not fine print — it is the condition the starting price is built on.
Think about it in hands and surfaces. A closet with three boxes in it is not a closet that can be cleaned inside; it is a box to move, a shelf wiped halfway, and a mental note to come back. A cabinet with glasses still in it does not get opened. The footprint where the washer stood is out of reach behind a stack of cartons. A 38-item list does not get shorter when the unit is full — it gets unverifiable, which is worse.
And the verification is the product. The visit ends in a photo archive — 38 items plus a full photo archive PDF, with a one-tap forward to your landlord on eligible completed visits. An empty cabinet photographs; a full one photographs nothing useful. If you want the line-by-line of what is in scope, what is priced separately and what is not a clean at all, that lives in what’s included in a move-out cleaning — what matters here is the order of the day.
The three states a unit shows up in
- Completely empty. What the published starting price assumes — a vacant property in normal condition. Every cabinet, drawer, closet and shelf interior is reachable, the baseboards run uninterrupted, and the visit stays the job the size table prices.
- Nearly empty. A few boxes staged by the door or in the garage, a mattress leaning in a room you are taking that evening, the broom you left on purpose. Normal, and not a problem — nothing there is standing between the team and a surface on the list.
- Still furnished. A different job, and it should be named before the crew arrives. The team works around the furniture and cleans what is safely accessible, work blocked by furniture is priced separately, and occupied properties require review.
The honest boundary is not between “empty” and “not empty.” It is between things that are stored and things that are in the way. A few boxes stacked in the garage or on the balcony take nothing off the list. Furniture still standing in the rooms does: the visit then cannot meet move-out scope as published, and that is something we owe you before the date — while you can still move it — rather than with a team already standing in the living room.
A half-emptied unit does not make the clean impossible. It makes it a different clean — and a different clean has to be named up front, not discovered on arrival.
What it does to the price and the clock
The service page is direct about it: an emptied unit cleans faster than a furnished one. That is why the size rows — $409 at one bedroom and one bath through $719 at four bedrooms and three baths — start from a vacant property in normal condition, and why the final price depends on size, scope, condition, access, parking, and additional services. Furniture is not a row on that table; it is a review.
The clock moves with it. The published duration column runs from 4 hours at the smallest row to 7–10 hours at three bedrooms and two baths, and those figures also assume a team that walks the rooms without detouring around anything; we broke that clock down in how long a move-out cleaning takes. Translated into moving-day terms: every obstacle is paid for in minutes, and minutes are the one thing that week does not have spare.
The separately priced lines do not change because the unit is empty, but they are decided better once it is: empty refrigerator $49 · inside oven $49 · oven + refrigerator bundle $89 · interior windows from $10 per pane · trash and junk removal by separate quote. Range-priced work, occupied properties, and extreme residue require review — that is the published wording, and it is how it actually works.
Sequencing the Miami lease-end week
The sequence that works has three stops and only one possible order: truck, clean, walkthrough. If your movers finish in the morning, the clean is scheduled for after the last box is out and before your final walkthrough. And where the calendar allows it, give the clean the day after the truck rather than the same day: moves run late, and a 5–7 hour visit does not fit behind a truck that was going to finish at noon and finished at four.
In Miami that collides with the buildings. In Brickell and Miami Beach towers, most condo associations require a reserved freight elevator and a firm move-out window — and that reservation belongs to the truck, not to you to divide. Pushing the clean into the same block means competing with yourself for the same elevator. A day later, the elevator is free and the crew walks into a unit nobody is going to carry another box through.
Two dates rule everything else. Booking needs at least 24–48 hours of lead time, and end-of-month dates fill first because most leases turn over then — which means the 30th and the 31st are asked for in weeks, not hours. And in Doral, corporate leases often come with a formal inspection checklist we can clean against: get it before you book, and pick your add-on lines against that list rather than against memory.
The last stop is the one that decides, and it is not ours: the person doing the walkthrough brings a list of their own. We wrote it up stop by stop in what landlords inspect after you move out. It is worth reading before you decide what stays in the unit on cleaning day — because the oven and the refrigerator, which open almost every one of those walks, are exactly the interiors that are priced as their own lines.
What we will tell you either way
Our Terms put the buying order in writing: “We price before you commit: you request a quote, see it, and then request a time.” They also put the other half in writing, which is the half that matters when a unit turns out less empty than promised: if the scope on arrival is materially different, we re-quote with you before doing extra work — never silently. A piano that stayed behind is not a doorway argument; it is a phone call before the date.
And one limit we will not cross: nobody can promise you the deposit. The clean addresses the items landlords check most and ends in a photo archive you can forward, but the deposit decision itself always rests with your landlord. What you do control is handing over a unit that can be inspected in full — and that starts with getting everything out of it.
FAQ
Can the movers and the cleaning crew be there at the same time?
It is the one arrangement we would talk you out of. Two crews in one unit means dollies crossing wet floors, doors propped open, and a kitchen being cleaned while a sofa is still coming down the hallway — so the rooms finished first get re-dirtied last. The published sequence is the better one: schedule the clean for after the last box is out and before your final walkthrough.
My lease ends the same day the truck comes. What do I do?
Take the earliest arrival window you can and load the truck the day before if the building lets you. Booking needs at least 24–48 hours of lead time, and end-of-month dates fill first because most leases turn over then, so the reservation should exist before the moving day does. If the day genuinely cannot hold both, ask your landlord whether the walkthrough can move to the following morning — asking costs nothing, and it turns one impossible day into two workable ones.
The unit is empty, but the appliances stay. Do you clean behind them?
Only when it is safely accessible without moving installed or heavy appliances — an empty unit makes the footprint reachable far more often than a furnished one, but the limit is the appliance, not the boxes. The interiors are their own lines at our published Miami-Dade rates: empty refrigerator $49, inside oven $49, or the oven + refrigerator bundle at $89.