Ask an Expert with Ray Reuter

One of our tenants had a bed bug infestation in one of our units and is asking us to pay for the spraying. I believe that it is a cost she should incur. As she has been in the unit longer than a year, whose cost is it?

Pests can be a big issue for landlords. They can drive away tenants before you can even deal with them which is why it’s important to get a preventive pest control service to ensure that never happens. However, today we’re obviously going to be talking about one of the hardest bugs to prevent/deal with — bed bugs.

Unfortunately, it is next to impossible to prove where bed bugs come from. They can be easily transferred from anywhere that you or anyone in your family visits, such as hotels, so it’s also hard to control whether or not they enter your home. Because of this, most people call somewhere like pest control olathe ks who will rid their homes of these unwelcome guests, then simply put the cost of the pest control on the landlord. If you were to take this to court, in all likelihood, the court would side with the tenant and have you pay the bill.

It might not hurt to approach the tenant and propose a 50/50 split on the cost of control; however, if she knows the laws or has done any research through the bed bug forums, odds are she knows she won’t have to pay.

The only time I’ve seen a tenant win a judgment is when the landlord refused to allow the pest control company to treat the residence, which cost more in the long run. This probably won’t happen in your case, because landlords should want to get the pests removed from the property pretty quickly. No one will want to rent a property infested with bed bugs, so it’s likely that they’ll want the appointment with a pest control company like Economy Exterminators. At the end of the day, this property is their investment, so they should want it clean and hygienic to continue making money on it.

Ray Reuter received his BSc from the University of Kentucky and an MSc (abt) in Entomology from University of California, Riverside. Ray works with clients of the Real Estate Investment Network helping them with the real estate investment questions including queries about pests.

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