My brother and his gf just moved from a rental house (in Portland, OR). They had cats, and the landlord said the cats had fleas and left them in the duplex. Now, I don’t have any trouble believing that this was true. However, their almost-two thousand-dollar security and pet deposit was kept in its entirety because every bit of it was supposedly needed to cover flea bombing the bottom apartment of a house!! This just sounds completely ridiculous to me. This deposit was about $1,800. It was a two-bedroom apartment in a house and the cats certainly never went out of that apartment that they rented into any of the rest of the house.
Has anyone ever heard of any amount like this being charged by any professional for just flea bombing a two bedroom apartment and cleaning a carpet?? It sounds to me like my brother is getting ripped off, and I really want to help him with this situation if I possibly can. Any information/advice appreciated!
Fleas are definitely difficult and time-consuming to properly get rid of so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that a thorough professional flea extermination could run a thousand dollars or so for a very large house, but for a two bedroom apartment $1800 is pretty outrageous. I would request to see some kind of itemized receipt.
Landlord-tenant issues are very local. He needs to read his lease. Does the lease say the landlord needs to provide a receipt for unrefunded expenses? Does it claim extra privileges for pet-related damages? Did he comply with any pet-related terms in the lease?
If things don’t look like they are in your brother’s favor, he should confirm that the terms of the lease are legal in his area.
Depends on how bad the fleas were, how big the place was that had to be bombed, how many times it needed to be done. It took three times for our old house when we moved. The house was completely empty with no food source but fleas are tough critters. A month after the first treatment we went in to paint; hundreds were on all over our pants within minutes. That was AFTER the first treatment.
I’d say we spent around 1200 dollars all told, professional sprayers and the carpet cleaning alone.
As an apartment building owner, I can definitely say that if fleas are in one unit, they can absolutely be in other units, even if the infested animal never went in that unit. Example: we adopted a cat that had fleas. Eventually, I had to have Apt 6-not only a separate unit with no animals, but on a whole different floor-bombed for fleas. Now, because I suspect the problem originated with my cat (although I sometimes allow other tenants to keep pets, so I can’t say for sure), I paid for the treatment. But if I didn’t have a monthly contract with an exterminator, I would have had to pay to have every infested unit fogged for fleas. That could run a whole bunch of money.
I don’t know the answer to some of these questions, but it wasn’t an apartment building. It was a house with a basement that was rented as an apartment unit and had one bedroom. I told my brother to ask the landlord for actual copies of actual receipts (not just an itemized list of what was supposedly done), to call local exterminators to see if he could get any kind of rough estimates to at least get some kind of idea of what they might have charged for the same kind of work, to read up on state law there, and to try contacting local tenants’ rights organizations. That’s everything I could think of. My brother’s gf is saying, “Oh, well, this landlord was acting like a sleazebag all along about everything anyway, I didn’t really expect to get the deposit back no matter what we did or didn’t do…” !!!
One thing about this is that it did make me think about my own situation. I’ll be moving next week (to go to Oregon to be with them), and I guess this house maybe should be flea-bombed (by me), even though there’s only a tiny piece of non-shagged carpet that the landlady was going to replace anyway (everything else is hardwood floors and vinyl.) I have one cat and even though it’s had Advantix all the time, there’s no doubt that at times, it’s had fleas.
I understand that. My point was that fleas are social little fuckers, and they get around. If the apartment your brother occupied had them from your brother’s pet, most likely the entire house has to be treated. That cost should be borne by your brother and his gf.
I still don’t know if the landlord’s keeping the entire deposit is warranted or not. As I said, I have monthly extermination, and the company I use carries a guarantee. As long as I maintain monthly service, any other problems I have, any time I need them between monthly visits, no extra charge. So I’ve no way to estimate what it would cost to get a house thoroughly flea-treated.
I do know that I wouldn’t trust an ‘estimate’ from a pest-control guy, though. They would like for you to believe that one treatment is going to get rid of the problem. But most of the time, it doesn’t.
As far as you moving, yeah, you’re probably going to want to wipe down the counters and stuff when you move in, anyway (personally, I can deal with my own dirt, but the thought of other people’s dirt. . .ewwww; so I wipe stuff down when I move into a new place), so it wouldn’t hurt to just pick up some cheap foggers at the Dollar store or something, and do the whole apartment.