You're already dealing with all the dreaded T's of managing property in Chicago: tenants, toilets, and trash. Now you get the dreaded call that the trash from the upstairs tenant has turned into mice in the walls for the rest of the building. The best solution is to find a good pest control company and let them take care of it, but if you are looking to save some money or want to make sure that the pest control company is doing a proper job, let's dig into how to rid your apartment of mice.
Why is a mouse problem such a bad thing? Besides being gross and spreading over 35 diseases, they are known to use your food as their food sources, which means your tenants could be left with boxes of food bitten through and no longer safe to eat. Mice are also known to bite through drywall, and worse yet, they like to chew on live electrical wires causing house fires. All of these things mean that what you consider a simple mouse problem can become a whole house problem very quickly. How quickly you ask? When in a warm home with food, two mice can turn into a population of 5k or more in just one year.
So how do we stop the problem? We need to take several steps:
1. Exclude
2. Block the food sources
3. Kill
Step 1: You set up snap traps and you catch that pesty little mouse. Sounds like the battle is over right? Wrong. Remember what I said about how fast they multiply? The odds are you killed one mouse in a close knit family of a few hundred who are ready to go on their search for food now that their sister didn't come back. This is why the first step in stopping a mouse problem is “exclude”. A mouse can get through a hole the size of a nickel, so we need to find out how they are getting in. This may mean caulking around windows and other gaps, fixing the bricks on the building, or adding weather stripping to doors and windows. Stopping more mice from getting into your apartment building is going to be the biggest and most important step when you are a property manager trying to stop the infestation of mice or rats.
Step 2: We need to clean up. If you have food laying out that is easy for them to get, they are going to find the storage boxes of food and eat to their hearts content. They have no issue eating food in garbage cans, in the sink left on dishes, or boxes not put into locked and secure storage boxes. They can gnaw through wood, drywall, and even more easily through paper and cardboard boxes. This means things like cereal or ramen need to be kept in secured, locked plastic or metal boxes to keep them safe. Bonus points: mice hate the smell of vinegar and bleach, so use cleaners with a strong vinegar or bleach scent and they may stay away.
Step 3: Now that we have stopped the attraction of mice into the home by sealing up holes and keeping them away from our food, we need to kill the mice that are currently in the home. First thing we want to do is set up bait stations in areas where we have seen signs of mice. Because we have taken away the source of food that they are used to, they will look for new foods to eat which is when our bait is going to be able to lure them in. We want to use bait that kills the mice slowly, because if a mouse dies in the bait station other mice will smell the scent of the mouse that died and no longer eat the poison. Never use bait without a station as that will allow pets and children to also touch and eat the bait which in large enough doses could be harmful. Also, when setting up the bait we want to wear gloves. Mice can smell your oils on the bait and will stay away as we are a known predator to most of the mice. Lastly, we also want to set up bait stations outside the home to keep new mice from trying to get inside and making any new holes in the home. Let them easily find the food outside the home and they will be more likely to never venture inside the home.
That's it. Three easy steps and time will clear your building of mice or rats. One thing we have noticed about certain pest companies is that they want to keep treating your home for a long time, so they never do step one. When you skip step one, you just keep allowing more and more mice into your home and the problem will never fully go away. This allows them to keep you on their plan for years so you continue to pay for pest control.
As the south side of Chicago's premier property management company, Chicago Style Management deals with a lot of older buildings and has dealt with and solved a lot of mice and rat problems inside our buildings. If you decide you don't want to take on the challenge yourself, we'd love to chat about how we can help you manage your Chicagoland property profitably and passively. Give us a call today 224-601-5415.
