Moving out of a rented flat: how the handover works

The day you take the furniture out and the day you hand back the keys are almost never the same day. In between there is a week when the flat is empty, you are already sleeping somewhere else, and someone still has to come and look at the walls.

That is where it is decided whether you get your deposit back. Not on moving day, which is the part you are worried about now, but in a twenty minute inspection done when your head is already in the new place.

The handover date is not something you improvise

Your contract says when you can leave, and it varies from one contract to the next. Read it again before you fix anything else, because every other date is counted from that one.

Three lines matter. How much notice you have to give. The form the notice (disdetta) has to take: recorded delivery, certified email, whatever the contract says. And when the notice period starts running: usually from the day the notice reaches the landlord, not the day you write it.

The last one is the line that costs you a month. Posting a few days late can push your exit into the following month, and you pay that month on a flat you do not live in.

Once the date is fixed, everything else works backwards from it, and the plan for the weeks before starts there and not on the day the van arrives.

The state of the flat is proved, not remembered

At the handover the comparison is between how it was when you moved in and how it is now. If you signed an inventory (verbale di consegna) when you moved in, that is the document: dig it out and read it beforehand, not in front of the landlord.

Then take photos, with the flat empty, after the cleaning and before the inspection. Walls room by room, floors in raking light, bathroom fittings, windows and doors, kitchen. The photos are for you and they need the date on them: your phone adds it by itself, so leave them there and do not delete them until the deposit is back.

Then there are the holes in the walls. Shelves, the television and curtain rails leave wall plugs behind, and filling them badly is worse than not filling them: a white patch on a beige wall is visible from across the room. Ask the landlord what they prefer before you buy the filler, and get the answer in writing.

What really helps is arriving at the inspection with little to explain. If you covered the floor on the day the van came, the marks left are the old ones and not last Monday's.

The flat has to be properly empty

Empty also means the cellar, the garage, the loft, the top shelf of the fitted wardrobe and the meter cupboard. These are the places you look at last because you never walk through them, and the cellar in particular needs opening weeks ahead, not on the final Saturday.

What you leave in there does not disappear: it becomes something someone else has to take away, and whoever takes it away can ask you to pay for it. If there are things you no longer want, deciding where they end up takes time, and time is what you have least of this week.

Packaging counts too, and it has to leave like everything else, from one flat or the other. With cardboard the boxes, once emptied, have to be flattened and taken to the kerbside collection or the recycling centre: that is one more trip in a week that already has plenty, and it comes after the others, which are buying, assembling, taping and filling.

Cangubox, by contrast, go back the way they came: either we collect them from the address you gave us, or you bring them back to the CanguPoint yourself. Empty, they nest one inside the other, so in the days they spend waiting they take up less room than when they were full, and they close by lowering the lid, which is made of two hinged halves and stays attached to the box. What comes with the boxes is listed in the kit.

Readings, keys and a signature

On handover day photograph the meters: electricity, gas, water, with the numbers readable. Those readings close your bills and open the ones for whoever comes next, and if you have them in a photo nobody argues over a number remembered wrong. Bring the notice and transfer forms you have already sent.

Then the keys, and count them: main door, flat, cellar, letterbox, gate, garage remote. That includes the copies you had cut over the years, and the one left with the neighbour.

At the end you want one sheet of paper, signed by both of you, giving the date, the readings and confirming the keys have been handed over. If the deposit does not come back straight away, that sheet is where the conversation starts again.

Once that is done the old flat is closed and only the new one is left, where registering your residence runs on its own timetable and the paperwork starts in the first few days, not when you remember it.