Most Common Pest Control Issues? (apartment, tenant, rentals, house)
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The most common problem I've had in apts and houses are ants. But get on it right away including traps, sprays and cleaning their path/trails one can stop a problem from getting bigger.
In southern NJ, in order of significance/frequency:
1) Mice (not bad if nip it in the bud right away)
2) Ants
3) Jumping crickets (in basements)
4) Squirrels
I manage a small apartment building. To keep things cordial and avoid phone calls and dramatic/heated reactions I recommend preemptively providing apartment tenants with a small box of traps/bait for all common issues and then leaving the responsibility on them (including a $3 can of spray foam and/or putty to seal entry points; that way you don't have to schedule an appointment and invade their space by crawling around their bed and closets to find any cracks/chew holes), other than squirrel entry which generally wouldn't be their responsibility.
Might cost $15-20 per tenant per year (less if they stay multiple years and don't ask for re-ups, which few do). It's a shared responsibility since the common areas can foster them, but they can make the problem worse by leaving door open, leaving food/trash bags/crumbs around etc.
Thankfully, the building I own in back in Honolulu doesn't seem to have a rodent issue; that's my worst fear when it comes to the common pests. And due to my unit being on a higher floor, I really didn't have to deal with the flying critters either. This is a reason why I try to live on higher floors in high rise buildings.
Even in buildings with rodents where I've lived, my cat has largely acted to keep them at bad.
Most of the issues with pests that I've had in the past involved ants, crickets, etc., that would come into the unit with insufficient chalking when I lived on the ground floor. I remember when I moved into my unit in Annapolis, which had apparently been vacant for months, there was a steady stream of ants moving around in the building and unit; it seemed like they had an interior nest . . . that's how bad it was. I found that products like TERRO were a joke with the large amount of ants, as they'd overwhelm it . . . it was really that bad. Eventually, I had to use Raid--after physically taking out those ants that had amassed around the TERRO tube--which seemed to do the trick for several months until it was time to treat the area again.
Thankfully, I don't have to deal with any of that mess in the high rise where I live now.
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