"Even though they won't be able to do the clean, is it still possible to get photos of the cleared rooms?"
Yes — and on most of our clearances nobody is present at all, so those photographs are not a courtesy. They are the only thing the person paying has to go on.
How it works
The team leader photographs the property when they arrive and again when the rooms are empty. Every room, not a selection. The set goes over by email the same day.
If you want a particular thing recorded — the state of a carpet, a mark on a wall, the meter readings — say so when you book and it goes on the list.
Why we send the bad ones too
This is the part that matters, and it is the reason the photographs are worth anything.
On one clearance the crew came back for a second day and found fresh mouse droppings in the hallway that had not been there when they left. The person instructing us was not well enough to visit the property at all. They photographed what they had found before doing anything else and rang her, and she arranged a pest controller.
Nothing about that made us look good. But if photographs only ever show good news, they stop being evidence and become decoration. Somebody who cannot get to a property is relying entirely on what the crew tell them, and a set of pictures that has been curated is worse than none.
What photographs cannot do
They are not a survey and they are not a clean. An empty room after a clearance looks like an empty room after a clearance: dust, marks where furniture stood, sometimes lifted carpet gripper. If the property needs cleaning afterwards that is a separate job with a separate team, and worth booking at the same time if you know it will be needed.
Keeping them
Executors: keep the set with the transfer notes and the invoice. Together they show the property was emptied, when, and where the contents went. It is a complete answer to a question that gets asked months later when nobody remembers the detail.