Renting

Handing back a Luxembourg apartment: the last ninety days, in order

Whether you recover two months' rent quickly or argue about it for a year is decided by work done before the exit inspection, not by how hard you clean on the final morning.

The document you are being measured against

The exit inventory, the état des lieux de sortie, has no meaning on its own. It is a comparator, set against the entry inventory drawn up when you arrived. Anything that has deteriorated beyond normal wear and tear between the two is chargeable to you; anything already recorded at entry is not.

So the first task is not cleaning. It is retrieving the entry document and its photographs and reading them against the apartment as it stands today, room by room, ninety days out. Everything you find at that point is something you can fix at your own pace and your own price.

Ninety days: notice, correctly served

On an open-ended lease the tenant may terminate at any time with three months' notice, without waiting for an anniversary date. A fixed-term lease that ran to its end without being terminated converts automatically into an open-ended contract, so many tenants have this flexibility without realising it. Inside the initial period of a fixed-term contract you are held to the term.

Serve notice by registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt. The clock and the end of your obligations both depend on when the landlord received it, and an email the landlord later says went to spam is a weak place from which to argue about two months' rent.

Keep the letter factual, and add two things that work in your favour: confirmation that you will pay rent and charges through to your effective departure, and two or three proposed dates for the exit inventory. Proposing dates puts the scheduling initiative with you, which matters, because the deadline for returning the first half of your guarantee runs from the exit inventory and the handover of keys rather than from your notice.

Sixty days: the repairs that are cheap now

Each of the following is a modest job handled by you and a contractor line item handled by a landlord.

• Filling and touching in picture hooks and wall fixings.
• Re-siliconing a shower or bath joint that has yellowed or lifted.
• Replacing a cracked toilet seat, a blown oven lamp, a missing cupboard handle.
• Descaling taps and shower heads, which in Luxembourg's hard water is visible within months.
• Replacing any bulb that does not work, including in the cave.
• Bleeding radiators, so nothing reads as a heating fault at inspection.

What you should not do is repaint an entire apartment that was already worn when you arrived. Check the entry inventory: if it did not record fresh paint, repainting is money spent fixing someone else's wear. Normal wear and tear is not chargeable.

Thirty days: utilities, administration, the cave

Contact your electricity and gas supplier to arrange the closing meter reading. A week is the minimum they ask for and is not a target, because most Luxembourg moves cluster at the end of the month and supplier back-offices are not fast in the final days. Do not let the supply be cut between occupants: reconnection is slower and more expensive than a transfer, and in winter an unheated flat is a damp problem as well as an administrative one.

Where you are moving within Luxembourg, remember the commune deadline: a declaration of arrival must be made at the population office of the new commune within eight days of occupying the new residence, and the new commune handles the deregistration from the old one, so no separate departure declaration is needed.

Empty the cave completely. It is the space most often forgotten on moving day and the most visibly full on inspection day, and anything left there can be recorded against your guarantee.

Seven days: the clean, and not before

Deep-clean in the final week or it will need doing twice. The areas that are inspected and routinely missed: oven interior and racks, extractor filters, window frames and runners, radiator backs, the insides of cupboards, the shower screen, and the balcony floor and railing.

Where a professional clean is required by the lease, keep the invoice and hand a copy over at the inspection. Where it is not required, a professional clean is still often cheaper than the deduction a landlord would apply for one.

The inspection, and what happens to the money

Attend it. Do not delegate it or leave keys with the agent. Hand over every key, badge and remote listed on the entry inventory, counted in front of the other party, with the number written on the document. Missing access devices are one of the few deductions a landlord can justify with a real invoice, because reprogramming a building's system is genuinely expensive.

Where you disagree about the condition of something, say so and have the disagreement written into the document rather than signing a version you dispute. Either party may bring in a commissaire de justice, at shared cost, for a neutral record.

Then the deadlines apply. Where the exit inventory matches the entry inventory and all rent is paid, half the guarantee is due within one month of the handover of keys. The second half follows within one month of the annual charges being approved by the general assembly of co-owners or of the charges statements being received. Where damage is recorded, the landlord may retain the disputed portion but the undisputed portion must still be returned on time. Withholding the entire deposit over a partial dispute is one of the most frequent landlord errors in this market.

Any deduction has to rest on objectively verifiable evidence. A figure typed by a landlord into a spreadsheet, with no invoice or third-party assessment behind it, generally carries no probative value.

Three questions we are asked

How long should I keep the paperwork? Until the second instalment of the guarantee has arrived and the final charges reconciliation is settled, which can be well over a year after you hand back the keys.

A deadline has passed and I have heard nothing. What now? Write once, by registered letter, setting out the dates and the amounts. If that produces nothing, the commune's rent commission can be petitioned free of charge on a guarantee that has not been returned, and its opinion, while not binding, is frequently followed by the courts.

Can I leave before my notice expires? You can vacate whenever you like, but you remain liable for rent and charges until the notice period ends unless the landlord agrees otherwise or re-lets sooner. Where you can present a replacement tenant, most landlords will negotiate.

Where wear ends and damage begins

Normal wear and tear is not chargeable, and Luxembourg law publishes no depreciation table for interiors, so the line is argued case by case. Knowing roughly where it falls saves a great deal of negotiation.

Reading as wear: paint that has faded over three or four years, carpet flattened along a circulation route, silicone that has yellowed, minor marks at socket height behind furniture, limescale that has been cleaned but has left a mark, a worn seal on an appliance door.

Reading as damage: a cracked worktop, a burnt hob, a hole in plasterboard, a stained or scratched parquet panel, a broken shutter, a damaged door frame, missing keys or badges, and anything left behind in the apartment, the cave or a common area.

Parquet deserves particular attention, because refinishing is among the largest single deductions landlords claim in this market. If the entry inventory recorded existing scratches, photograph the same areas at exit to show they have not worsened. If it recorded nothing, that silence works against you, which is the argument for a detailed entry document rather than a fast one.

Where you and the landlord read the same mark differently, have the disagreement written into the exit document rather than signing a version you dispute, and remember that any deduction has to rest on objectively verifiable evidence rather than on an estimate the landlord has typed out.