If you’re a property manager or landlord, you may have experienced the heart-dropping sensation that comes with discovering a tenant has left your property a real mess. Excessive trash, rotten food, piles of laundry, and other similar messes can cause pests and vermin to consider your rental unit their happy home.
Here’s what to do if you’re left to deal with this mess. Follow these steps to help protect your property – and hopefully be able to hold your tenants accountable to some degree for the damage they caused.
Step one is to document the state of the rental unit. Take pictures of the damage. Do a video walk through, making sure to note any areas of significant damage, insect infestation, or pest damage.
Step two, unfortunately, is to remove the mess. You can do this on your own – make sure you’re wearing the appropriate protective gear to keep yourself safe – or you can hire a professional cleaning crew to take care of the mess. The reason this step is important is that the mess provides an attractive source of food and shelter for pests. Removing the food source & comfortable nesting grounds makes your rental unit less pleasant for the pests. Besides, you need this stuff gone so you can rent the unit again.
Step three is addressing any deeper damage caused by the tenant’s mess. Significant damage can also contribute to pest problems – for example: beer soaked carpets tend to accumulate insects underneath, particularly if the carpet padding has been saturated. It is at this point that you’re going to want your local pest control expert to determine the nature and scope of any pest problems the rental unit may currently have.
Types of pests that can cause problems in rental units include bed bugs, cockroaches, ants, rats, mice, and more. Your local professional exterminator will have a strategy and technology to eliminate these pests from your property quickly and promptly, without any risk to you or any future tenants.