A Tenant Has Trashed the Property: What to Do in the First 72 Hours

The first instinct when you open the door on a property that’s been wrecked is to start clearing it. Understandable, and it’s the single most expensive mistake available at that moment.

Everything that follows — the bond claim, the insurance conversation, the owner’s decision about what to spend, and whether they trust your judgement afterwards — depends on evidence that only exists before anyone touches anything. Once it’s clean, nobody can prove what it looked like.

This is the sequence we use.

Hours 0–4: document before you do anything

Photograph everything, before you move a single item.

Not a walkthrough video — that’s useful too, but it’s not what wins a claim. What wins a claim is deliberate stills:

• Every room, from the doorway, wide enough to establish context
• Every item of damage, close up, with something for scale in frame
• Rubbish and abandoned belongings in place — the volume is a cost, and volume is only provable in situ
• Meter readings, and the condition of anything that isn’t visible in a normal inspection — behind appliances, under sinks, inside cupboards
• The exterior and the garden, which routinely gets forgotten and routinely costs the most to bring back

Timestamps matter. Most phones record them; check yours does before you start.

Cross-reference the ingoing condition report as you go. Photograph the damage next to the report entry that describes that item as undamaged. That pairing is what turns “the property is a mess” into a defensible line item.

Don’t throw anything out yet. Abandoned goods have their own process under NSW tenancy law, and disposing of a tenant’s belongings incorrectly can create a liability that dwarfs the damage. Check the requirements before anything goes in a skip.

Hours 4–24: make it safe, and nothing more

Do only what genuinely can’t wait:

• Isolate anything unsafe — exposed wiring, broken glass, a gas appliance that’s been interfered with
• Stop active water damage
• Secure the property: locks changed, windows and doors closed up
• If there’s anything biological, a serious infestation, or evidence of drug manufacture, stop entirely — that needs a specialist and a different process, not a clean-up crew

Everything else waits until it’s scoped. Work done before scoping is work nobody agreed to pay for.

Hours 24–48: get it scoped and quoted properly

This is where the timeline is won or lost. Every day the property sits is vacancy the owner is paying for, and every day spent waiting on quotes is a day of that.

Get one contractor through who can scope the whole thing. The alternative — a rubbish removalist, a handyman, a cleaner, a gardener and a carpet company, each quoting separately, each on their own schedule — is how a three-week job becomes a seven-week job. Not because any of them are slow, but because they can’t start until the one before them finishes and nobody’s sequencing it.

What a usable scope looks like:

• Line by line, matched to your condition report or exit inspection where possible
• Split into damage (bond claim), fair wear and tear (owner’s cost) and improvement (owner’s choice). This split is the most useful thing a contractor can hand you, and most don’t do it
• Priced per item, so the owner can strike out anything they don’t want
• With an honest note on anything that needs a licensed trade

Get the owner a decision-ready document, not a phone call. They’re usually not local, often not in the state. Photos plus an itemised scope plus the three-way split is something they can approve in one reply. “It’s pretty bad, I’ll send a quote when I get one” starts a week of back-and-forth.

Hours 48–72: decide the strategy, then start

Three questions, in this order:

1. What’s recoverable from the bond, and is the bond enough? In NSW the bond is capped at four weeks’ rent. On a badly damaged property it frequently isn’t close. That doesn’t mean don’t claim — it means the owner needs to know early that the bond is a partial recovery, not a solution, so they can make a realistic decision about the rest.

2. Is this an insurance claim? Landlord insurance often covers malicious damage by tenants, usually with conditions about documentation and timeframes. If it might be a claim, the insurer generally wants to see it before it’s repaired. Ringing them on day two is much better than on day twenty.

3. What’s the actual leasing strategy? This is the question that determines the scope, and it’s the one most often skipped.

• Re-lease fast at market rent: fix what a tenant would object to, defer what they wouldn’t notice
• Re-lease at a higher rent: worth doing the improvements while it’s empty, because it never gets cheaper than now
• Sell: a different list again — presentation matters more, some repairs stop being worth doing

The same damaged property justifies three genuinely different scopes. Ask the owner which they’re doing before you commission the work.

The order the work actually goes in

Sequencing matters more than people expect. Out of order, you pay twice.

1. Rubbish and abandoned goods out. Nothing else can be assessed properly, let alone done, until the property is empty.
2. Structural and safety repairs. Anything that affects habitability.
3. Repairs and patching. Walls, doors, hardware, fixtures.
4. Painting, if it’s needed. After patching, before flooring.
5. Floors — carpet clean or replace. Near the end, or it gets wrecked again.
6. Interior clean. After all the dusty trades.
7. Garden and exterior. Can run in parallel throughout — it doesn’t conflict with anything inside.
8. Photos, and the close-out report.

The two most common expensive mistakes: cleaning carpets before the repairs are done, and painting before patching is finished.

What the owner needs at the end

A before-and-after report, structured against the original list, with each item closed out and photographed.

That document does four jobs at once. It supports the bond claim. It supports the insurance claim. It justifies the spend to an owner who never saw the property. And it’s the thing that makes them keep the property with you rather than blame the management for what a tenant did.

How we handle these

We take it as one job. We photograph the property as we find it before anything moves, come back with an itemised scope split the way described above, and once you approve it we clear, repair, clean and reset the grounds — coordinating our cleaning partner rather than handing you another number to chase. You get both photo sets.

We prioritise these, because a vacant damaged property costs money every week it sits.

One thing we’ll always be straight about: we’re not a forensic or biohazard service. If a property is past general clean-up, we’ll tell you on the first walkthrough rather than take it on and discover it halfway through.

We work across Penrith, Glenmore Park, Cambridge Park, St Clair, Kingswood, Mount Druitt and the rest of Western Sydney and the lower Blue Mountains.

Call 0494 301 215, or send through the exit report and some photos and we’ll come back with a scope.

General information only, not legal advice. Bond claims, abandoned goods and tenancy obligations in NSW are governed by the Residential Tenancies Act — check NSW Fair Trading or your own legal advice for the current process.