Rental Property Mice

How To Rid Rental Property of Mice Once And For All

Question: The tenants moved out, left a mess, and now the property appears to have mice. The person is asking that they had hired an exterminator or the exterminator put down traps. And they want to know is there anything else they can do?

Don’t put down traps. So the problem with exterminators, I hate to generalize, but the problem that we actually find with exterminators is they often are not really there to solve the problem. They’re actually there to get you to continue using their services. I’m sure there’s plenty of good exterminators out there, but it’s just never been my experience.

Setting traps mean you are going to catch a lot of the individuals. Generally, rodents have a nest and trails. The adults ones are very smart and not easily caught so the traps are possibly going to only catch the younger one. What you need to do is bait. Bait is incredibly effective. Mice and also roaches as well, will take bait back to the nest and it will kill all of them all at once and get rid of the problem once and for all. The key here is you have to have enough bait to kill the entire population. So if you have a packet or two down, it’s not going to be enough. You have to kill everybody because every mouse has potential to become a hundred others. So use bait, don’t use traps.

You can use traps to find out if you still have a mouse problem. I don’t use them because I find them to be fairly cruel – not the ones that kill instantly, but the glue traps I just find horrifying. The glue traps are not going to take care of the mass population, nor any of the wooden traps or none of the plastic traps that’ll catch the mouse. So what you need to do is bait, and make sure to get enough of it that will actually kill all the mice. There are a lot of different products out there that are really kind of effective and easy to handle, different indoor-outdoor items.

As safety precaution, we put bait down on all of our properties, and same thing with ants as well. We proactively go to the property twice a year. We’ll actually put this bait down in different key locations just to make sure we don’t have a mouse problem. We take measures to wipe them out when it’s an individual that’s just came to the property to make its nest before they can even get its foot in. Thank you for the question. Good luck.

Author:

Joe White

Joe White is a Philadelphia Property Manager and Real Estate Broker. He is the owner of Grow Property Management and has been involved in the management, sales and purchases of Philadelphia area rental investment properties since 2008. He is an author and works as a real estate investment consultant and construction manager.

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