An empty home hides nothing. Once the furniture is gone, every mark on a baseboard and every ring inside a cabinet is on display, which is why move-out cleaning is judged so much more harshly than everyday cleaning.
Inspectors almost never start with the floor. They open things. Cabinets, drawers, closets, the oven, the refrigerator, the dishwasher, the microwave. Crumbs in a drawer or a shelf that was never wiped is the fastest way to lose part of a deposit, and it is also the easiest thing to prevent.
The second pass is the perimeter. Baseboards, door frames, switch plates, light fixtures, window sills and tracks, and the corners where furniture stood for years. These are the places a normal weekly clean skips because something is always in the way, and they are exactly where an empty-home inspection goes.
Third is the wet rooms. Bathrooms and kitchens get taken back to bare-surface clean: grout scrubbed rather than rinsed, hard-water buildup lifted off glass and fixtures, sinks and drains cleared, and everything dried so no new spotting appears before the walkthrough.
One practical tip that has nothing to do with cleaning: book it for after the last load is out, not the same morning as the move. A cleaner working around boxes cannot deliver an inspection-ready home, and the walkthrough is usually the very next day.
If your landlord or realtor gave you a checklist, hand it to whoever cleans. We price move-outs against the client's actual list rather than a generic one, because that list is the standard the job will be measured by.