Real Estate Profits And Losses. Scenario 6: Ants! The Cheapest Way To Get Them Out Of Your Property.
Feb 21st, 2008 | By moneyking | Category: Real Estate
The Money Kings are keepin’ it real, baby!!!
For your consideration: Real Estate Profits And Losses. Scenario 6: Ants! The Cheapest Way To Get Them Out Of Your Property.
Don’t worry. The Money Kings are going to go over money saving tips on a variety of insects and pests that enter your property, and begin to reek havoc on your tenant relationship, your physical property and your sanity.
We’re beginning with ants this time around, because honestly, ants are really easy to get rid of . . .
Ants are communal, and generally pretty intelligent. They’re also relatively nice creatures that keep to themselves and have no real interest in human beings. They’re easy to spot while they’re foraging for food. Each ant has a very specific job within the colony. This makes them predictable, and thus very easy to eliminate. The two cheapest ways to get rid of these pests is to:
- Eliminate their food source.
- Begin to poison them
That’s really it with these little guys. If they have no food, they’ll wander around for a while and then move on. Heck, you could probably even lure them out of your property by simply putting a ball of ice cream on the sidewalk as bait. Then you could set the torch to them, poison them or collect them up and give them to your kid as a science project. These guys hardly notice you’re even there until you try to step on them.
The money saving tip here to realize is that ants are never worth a call to Orkin or any other professional bug killing company. This includes carpenter ants and fire ants: all ants are easy prey.
Get yourself:
- A pack of ant traps for them to crawl into.
- Some liquid spray poison from any hardware store, and
- If they’re really bad, get yourself some bug bombs.
This technique works every time, IF AND ONLY IF you eliminate their food source. If you’ve got a tenant that likes to eat Cheetos and rub his dirty hands on your floor, then the ants will come to eat the cheese stain off your carpet after the poison wears off. So, WATCH what your tenants are up too.
No sexy gimmicks needed for these critters, folks. For once, you’ve got an EASY problem on your hands that can be solved quickly. If you’ve got ants, consider yourself lucky.
Happy Hunting.
The Money Kings
Keywords: real estate, tenants, ants, kill, bug, cheap, critters
Fair warning: I’m a licensed pest control operator. I could have said the following without disclosing that, and I fully understand if someone accuses me of special interest in stating the following, but fortunately, the facts back me up. You’re way off base here.
Where you state -
The money saving tip here to realize is that ants are never worth a call to Orkin or any other professional bug killing company. This includes carpenter ants and fire ants: all ants are easy prey.
That’s absolutely wrong. Not because Orkin is great, but because of the last part. All ants are not easy prey.
In particular, your advice that one “lure” ants outside and torch them - better pick up a real book on ants. What you find outside are workers and the occasional soldier. These are not reproductives, the ones who keep replacing the ants you kill. It’s the queen that you’re after, and if you don’t get her, you’re not getting anywhere. You know that slogan, “crunch all you want, we’ll make more”? There ya go.
It’s good that you recommend baits, but in your own recommendation is a prime example of why ultimately I’m the guy who gets called in to rescue the structure: you can’t just get “ant bait.” You need to know the species you’re dealing with and buy the appropriate bait. Got an entomology background? Cool, you’ll probably do ok. Otherwise… yeah. Friendly piece of free advice: if the bait you just bought is labeled for a wide variety of ants, it probably won’t appeal to any of them. Some like sugar, some like protein, some do both, but baits “designed” to appeal to all of them typically appeal to none of them. They still sell though because people don’t know any better.
And it’s bad that you recommend sprays. Most of what you can buy over the counter is extremely quick acting, meaning it doesn’t produce much of a residual, so you kill what you can see but not what will come along later because the active ingredients break down quickly. Additionally, most stuff sold to the general public is designed to repel insects - you don’t want them to run from the insecticides, you want them to keep walking through it. The reason they’re formulated that way is simple: you see the bugs run for cover, so you’re happy, then they emerge again when the effect wears off, so you buy more OTC spray. That stuff doesn’t work that way by accident.
Now, here’s the worst sin you all have committed: you lumped a wood destroying organism - carpenter ants - in with all ants. Not all ants destroy wood, but the ones that do, such as carpenter ants and moisture ants, are more than just “a nuisance” and you should definitely NOT consider yourself lucky to have them. Carpenter ants can wreck a structure and cost you a ton of money (particularly if you have tenants who don’t bother telling you that they’ve seen these guys running around). You can take all of the food away in the house, but these guys can still find it outside of the structure, all the while making a bigger swiss cheese palace out of your investment (chances are that they don’t care about your food in the first place - they just want your home).
Sorry guys, but bills are going to rule you here. This is definitely not the way to rule your money. This is how a six-legged primitive organism ends up owning you.
I’m not entirely sold on the professional companies coming in to do my own pest control. In some towns, these people are actually trained. In some they’re not.
However, I had a slightly different experience with a major pest control company (I wont mention their name). I had some rodent problems. I had some ants too. I called them about the ants.
After my third try of fixing the problem on my own, my wife made me call the pest removal “experts” to get rid of the problem, and this is where I had my first encounter using a major pest control service…
Later that afternoon a sloppy looking guy pulled up in his rusted out, company branded truck, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, to try to treat my house. I put a bunch of bait traps around the house before he came, and I think that the ant traps were what really took care of my problem. Just my experience, though.
I didn’t feel comfortable with the “professional” I had an experience with. I keep the traps out in my house at all times, and I’ve had no ants in years.
Comments like these are the type of thing we’re looking for at TheMoneyKings.com
Mr. Zimmerman, we appreciate you letting us know up front that you’re in the pest business.
We also think your tips are great!
Our posts come from our own experiences, and now with your contribution, we feel like we’re even more prepared to tackle ants when they decide to rear their ugly heads.
We tend to agree with your point on the carpenter ants. These guys are a special breed.
One of our team swears that he successfully killed them and other types of ants with OTC bombs previous to required, licensed pest inspections for home sales. Maybe he’s pulling our chain, or maybe his pest inspector needs to be retrained!
In the future, we’re going to talk about other home pests and other experiences we’ve had with professional companies vs. home remedies. Comments like what you’ve shared here will only add to embellish our commentary. Thanks for this, and thanks for the contribution! You know you can hear from The Money Kings helping you to RULE your money each and every day!
The Money Kings