Bedbugs: 101

Bedbugs: 101
As landlords, one of our greatest fears has been a tenant getting bedbugs. It was bound to happen eventually, and so it did this last fall. It turned out to NOT be as terrible as our worst nightmares, so I thought it would be helpful to all of you to write up our experience and our recommendations.
Thanksgiving weekend we got the call from our new-ish (2 months) tenants. “We think we have bedbugs.” A quick search turned up THE guy in NYC: Boot-A-Pest, John Furman, 516-481-7378 . He’s referenced several times in this forum, as well as other sites and the venerable NY Times and NY Mag. For $300, he comes to conduct an inspection and make a recommendation. If you go with his service, the $300 is credited to the treatment costs. Great guy, well-run business, 100% honest and respectful and fast.
Boot-A-Pest describes the infestation as very small, and localized to two spots in the apartment. It becomes clear that the tenants did not bring these with them, but likely picked them up at a movie theatre or the kid’s preschool or something. That’s the good news.
The bad news: our tenants have A LOT of stuff in their apartment. Not “Hoarders”-worthy, but a classic case of too much crap in too little space. John tells us that his treatment will not work as long as there is so much stuff in the apartment. They can either move a lot of it to storage, never to return to the apartment, and he’ll treat the space. Or, if that won’t work for them, he refers us to a second company that does a thermal treatment instead of the traditional poison. Cost of John’s traditional treatment for the given space: $1,200 (gulp). Estimate for the thermal treatment: $2,600 (sigh).
We confer with the tenants, and give them their options. We are willing to spend $1,200, which is essentially the highest-end cost of traditional treatment, with the best guy in the City. But because of their situation with the copious amounts of stuff in the apartment, they can either move a lot of their belongings to storage and we provide this treatment, or they don’t, and we will pay $1,200 toward the much-more-costly thermal treatment—they will have to cover the rest. Because they don’t want to part with their stuff, and because they have 2 young children (and are worried about the poison approach), they opt for the thermal treatment.
Enter AAA Superior Pest (a3superior dot com). Also fantastic and professional and quick and honest. They essentially heat the apartment in question to something like 140 degrees for 6 hours, which kills all the bugs and their eggs. Obviously, this is not cheap, and they quote us the $2,600-ish (my memory of the exact number isn’t great; probably self-preservation). We set up the treatment, get an agreement from the tenant to pay the difference (as added rent), and sign the contract. Treatment goes great; follow-up inspection after 30 days shows no bugs; no further evidence as of today, almost 90 days out. Phew.
A few additional things we learned/confirmed through this experience:
1. Some landlord friends have written in a bedbug clause to their leases, stipulating that the tenant is responsible for treatment. I don’t think such a thing would hold in court, but more important, our experience confirms that *we want the tenant to tell us right away if they think they have bedbugs.* This gives us the opportunity to treat it quickly and effectively (if expensively), rather than have the tenant be cheap/slow/otherwise ineffective, which would ultimately just make the situation worse.
2. The apartment in question is one of 3 in our house. In an abundance of caution, the exterminators recommended the other apartments be inspected before treatment and 30 days after. Given the minor infestation in the first apartment, they indicated that it was VERY unlikely that the source was another apartment in the building. They said that there has to be a really major infestation for the bugs to even move to a new place. There were no bugs in the other 2 apartments, as expected. What we learned from this is that our BIGGEST fear is unfounded: “OMG, if one tenant gets bedbugs, they will spread to the other apartments within 32 minutes. All our tenants will move out. It will cost us $10,000,000 to eradicate the bugs. We’ll never find new tenants because we’ll be black –listed. We’ll have to move to New Jersey.”
3. We decided to update everyone in the building that this was going on. This was a difficult decision to make, weighing tenant privacy against the need to stay on top of the situation and inform the others it might affect. We didn’t say which apartment it was, but folks likely figured it out. Everyone seemed grateful and happy for the information, and there were no unintended consequences.
I hope you never need this information~