Rental inventory, fair wear and tear, and deposit checkout

The angriest deposit threads on r/askSingapore are hardly ever about the diplomatic clause. They're about the spreadsheet that arrives after a perfectly clean tenancy: repaint the whole flat, new sofa, replace the nine-year-old washing machine. Singapore doesn't publish a statutory wear-and-tear tariff, so there's no official schedule you can point at. What decides these fights is your stamped Tenancy Agreement and a dated inventory, and very little else. Once the keys are back and it's purely a money argument, move across to the deposit return and handover playbook.

The inventory is a contract annex, not a courtesy PDF

Before you take the keys, do four things.

1. Ask for a room-by-room inventory covering furniture, appliances, fixtures and meter readings. Ask in writing, and don't settle for a verbal assurance that it's all standard.
2. Walk the unit with the agent or landlord and mark what's already wrong: scratches, mould, cracked tiles, chipped worktops. This isn't being difficult. It's moving those items off your ledger before you've spent a single night there.
3. Shoot timestamped photos and video of every room, the balcony, the AC vents, the insides of cabinets, and the serial plates on the appliances.
4. Store copies somewhere that isn't your work email. Email threads die when you change jobs, which tends to be the same season you move out.

A "partially furnished" line in the PropertyGuru listing is not an inventory. Establish exactly which white goods are staying before you budget for furnishing a rental.

CEA publishes tenancy templates, but they're non-compulsory market baselines rather than rules anyone has to follow. Compare every deduction clause in the document you're signing against what the LOI actually promised you.

Fair wear and tear, and damage you'll be charged for

There's no official line between the two, but after enough handovers the pattern is fairly settled.

Repainting the entire unit after a multi-year stay is the classic landlord ask. Push back on it unless the TA expressly requires painting on vacant possession and the condition genuinely exceeds ordinary ageing. Either way, ask for itemised quotes. A round number with no breakdown is an opening position, not a cost.

Aircon clauses are where tenants most often lose on the facts rather than the argument. If your TA required quarterly servicing and you let it slide, mouldy vents become your problem, and the service receipts are the only defence you have. Aircon and pest renewals covers the cadence.

A move-out that survives the SCT

With 30 to 14 days left, re-read the deduction and make-good clauses and book the professional clean if the TA requires one. In handover week, re-photograph everything and put the AC service receipts somewhere you can find them from another country.

Attend the inspection in person if there's any way to do it. Leaving the keys with the agent and flying out is how deductions appear for damage nobody ever showed you.

After the inspection, ask for written itemised deductions with photographs before anyone touches the deposit. If that's refused, check whether the Small Claims Tribunals can actually hear you. The residential lease gate is ≤2 years, and a long continuous occupancy assembled from stacked renewals can push you outside it even though each renewal was "only one year" at the time. That is a miserable thing to discover at the airport, so read security deposits and the diplomatic clause before you plan any litigation around a flight.

Traps that are specific to expats

If the lease is corporate and sits in the company's name, the deposit fight may belong to HR rather than to you. Photograph everything personally anyway, because HR will eventually ask you for evidence about a flat you no longer have keys to.

Complying with a diplomatic break clause doesn't hand back the full deposit. It ends the lease early. Damage deductions carry on applying exactly as they would have.

If the landlord lives overseas, serving them for an SCT claim can fail even when your inventory is immaculate. Keep the local notice address from the TA somewhere safe.

And if you buy replacement furniture and then decide to leave it behind, settle the ownership in writing first. Otherwise you've gifted them a sofa and you're still arguing about the deposit.

Consumer Lemon Law doesn't govern landlord and tenant make-good disputes; that's contract and tribunal territory. The goods you bought for the flat, the IKEA and Courts side of the household, sit under CASE and Lemon Law.

If HIP dust or contractor marks appear mid-tenancy, photograph the place before the works start and keep the landlord answerable for their contractor's damage. We walk through that in HDB HIP for tenants.

When you're choosing an agent, interview them on inventory discipline rather than on how big their logo is: ERA category notes. For a large claim, or a landlord you can't serve, start at the counsel category.

One note for families. Get your inventory photos dated before sports day and the book fair swallow the camera roll. Dual-career households lose deposit arguments surprisingly often because the only pictures from that month are carnival selfies.