Are You Losing Your Building to Bed Bugs?

Postings all over the internet may have you believe that bed bugs are impossible to get rid of. Getting rid of bed bugs is actually simple. It may take some diligence and dedication, but they can be completely eradicated from your home or your entire building.

I touched on this already in another post, found here, so in this post I wanted to address the standpoint from a landlord’s perspective.

I had a landlord of a small multifamily building in Boston contact me recently. He had been ordering bed bug products from our website for about a month, but he wanted to speak to someone about his experience thus far. This poor guy was about to give up his building because of bed bugs. He saw no other alternative. He was spending so much money on PCOs to exterminate his building, that he had been consistently losing money for over a year and didn’t’ know what else to do. He said the PCOs more or less controlled the population from growing, but didn’t do much to eradicate the problem. His last resort was to save money by treating his building himself. Not only did he find he saved thousands of dollars (a month!), he but he received feedback from his tenants the treatments were working to knock down the bed bugs population. He was so elated from the success of his treatments, that he was compelled to share his success story with us.

I want to point out, that I am not bashing PCOs above. Many PCOs can be very effective in eliminating infestations, but unfortunately some are not. They are usually in areas where bed bugs aren’t quite as common and have little to no experience dealing directly with bed bugs. Also, it is possible that they were treating with an insecticide that this strain of bed bugs had a resistance to. In that case it reflects poorly on the PCO, but its really not their fault except they maybe should have realized this and changed to a different insecticide.

What this landlord did to treat his bed bug infestation was not rocket science. He was diligent and determined to make it work. He also enrolled his tenants to cooperate with his efforts, which can be a big help.