Termites

Is it urgent?

Usually not. Termites do real damage, but they do it over months and years, not days, so there's time to get a proper look and make a good decision. If you just bought the house, it often makes sense to wait until you've settled in, unless there's an active problem.

How was my house protected when it was built?

New houses here get a termite treatment during construction, usually one of three ways. The most common is a soil treatment: the dirt under the slab and around the foundation gets treated before it's covered up. Depending on the product, that typically lasts somewhere around five to ten years. Some builders put in bait stations instead. The least common, and our favorite, is treating the framing itself while the walls are still open.

If you have the builder's paperwork, it tells us which one was used and roughly how long it should last. A soil treatment also gets broken when someone digs next to the foundation for a new water line, a sewer line, or landscaping.

What do you recommend?

For most houses, termite bait stations, both for how well they work and for what they cost over the long run. The stations go in the soil around the house, and termites out foraging find them before they find your house. The bait kills off the colony. They protect the structure, not the whole yard, and that's fine. Termites are useful out in the yard; we just don't want them in the house.

What's the catch?

Bait stations only work if they get serviced. If someone installs them and walks away for a few years, they stop protecting anything. We see it with newer houses: the builder's stations get buried in mulch or grown over, nobody services them, and termites show up in a house that's only three or four years old. Servicing the stations is what the monthly cost covers.

One more thing worth knowing: if your crawl space has been spray foamed, termites can tunnel through the foam where nobody can see them. That makes ongoing protection worth more, not less.

What's included, and what does it cost?

We start by diagramming the house: crawl space, slab, basement, and where every station sits, so nothing gets lost under a new flower bed. Then we service the stations and reinspect the structure every year, checking it against that diagram. We reinspect every year to make sure that if something does go wrong, we catch it, so that our warranty is a retreatment instead of carpentry.

As an add-on to Regular Service, termite protection typically runs $25 to $35 a month, after a one-time setup of $500 to $1,000, depending mostly on how many stations the house needs. It's billed by monthly autopay.

Termite protection has a one-year commitment; after that, it's month to month. If you sell the house, the coverage can transfer to the new owner.

Can you take over my current warranty?

We don't take over another company's warranty, because we don't know exactly what they did. If you already have a decent warranty with someone who shows up and services it, keep it. When a builder's first year of coverage runs out, we can switch the house over to our own stations.

Do you do termite work in Georgia?

No. Most of our customers are in Tennessee, and that's where we do our termite work. The Georgia Department of Agriculture has its own very particular way of doing things, and for the handful of Georgia houses we'd see, it isn't worth the trouble. We still do regular pest control, mosquito control, and hemlock treatments in Georgia. If you're on the Georgia side and need termite help, text us and we'll point you toward someone.

Do you do termite letters for real estate?

Yes, we do termite inspections and NPMA-33 letters for real estate closings. We also have Supra eKEY access for homes that are vacant.