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March 9, 2010 4:30 PM

We are buying a condo, and we just did the home inspection today. While there, a small cockroach (and possibly a second one) scurried out from a lower level cabinet. Should this be a dealbreaker, or can they adequately be dealt with? In most every respect, the condo struck me as being pretty clean and in good shape. I live in LA, and from what we've been told, this is a pretty normal pest problem.
posted by SpacemanStix to home & garden (19 answers total)

Cockroaches are a normal pest problem everywhere.
posted by dfriedman at 4:33 PM on March 9, 2010

Here in the South, we might worry if you didn't see a cockroach! Even the cleanest house can have a "palmetto bug" or two. Are the cabinets and drawers free of brown stains and little plastic-looking egg cases? As long as you don't see indications of a massive infestation, and you're sure that cockroaches are what you actually saw, I see this as being no impediment to buying at all.
posted by thebrokedown at 4:39 PM on March 9, 2010

It would depend on a number of things - how sound and solid is the structure of the walls etc separating you from the other units in the building, who else is in the building, is there rot or moisture in the walls, what's the plumbing like.

I lived above a small bar when I was in Japan, and cockroaches were an occasional problem because the bar deposited garbage bags for weekly collection, which attracted bugs.

In another house I lived in, the bathroom window didn't have a screen, and I left it open in the summer because it got hot - cockroaches crawled in through the open window.

My mother-in-law operated a small cafe. It was an old kitchen and was pretty dirty. The walls were old and somewhat rotten. All this meant roaches had a lot of food to live on and places to hide.

Generally, if you wash your dishes, vacuum, avoid clutter, take out your trash and plug your drain, cockroaches will go elsewhere. Seal up cracks, sprinkle borax, keep a tight ship.

But if you have neighbours who are exceptionally dirty, cockroaches may be a problem.
posted by KokuRyu at 4:41 PM on March 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

There's an earlier Ask Metafilter about using boric acid to deal with roaches, which is pretty shockingly effective.
posted by mhoye at 4:43 PM on March 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

I looked at a beautiful house that was crawling with cockroaches, before I made an offer, my real estate agent got an estimate on getting rid of them. It was less than $100 (probably more in LA.) Not a deal breaker at all.
posted by Duffington at 4:46 PM on March 9, 2010

You described this as a condo so I'm assuming there are multiple other condos attached. If you get a terminator in make sure that the whole building is done at the same time otherwise the cockroaches will move from the sprayed area to the other areas and then right back again when the chemicals have broken down.
posted by Babblesort at 4:49 PM on March 9, 2010

Cleanliness (esp before bedtime- spotless kitchen) + boric acid = Happy home.


And dust the borax, don't leave mounds. Mounds are like heaps of snow- just like humans go around them, roaches go around the borax mounds.

Also, this may help too-http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/20/whats-the-best-way-to-kill-cockroaches
posted by xm at 4:54 PM on March 9, 2010

It depends on how comfortable you are with roaches and whether you consider living with them to be a "dealbreaker." The problem is that it was probably a German cockroach, (based on the fact that you said it was small) which are pretty difficult to get rid of, even in single family homes. In condo buildings where there are multiple units, they are virtually impossible to get rid of unless you and all of your neighbors get some kind of comprehensive, professional plan put together. This is because (unlike the giant roaches) they prefer to live indoors and are pretty resilient. They need very little food or water, so if one unit or part of the building becomes unhospitable, they're just going to move to another place inside the same building.

Now, that's not to say you can't be really diligent about keeping them from mostly staying away from your home, but they probably will never leave the actual structure of the building. They use pipes to travel around to different parts of the house (or to different houses, when the houses are attached units). The best you can do is to try and make your house the one they generally pass by. Get a professional company, or do it yourself by putting poison around your plumbing voids and any other areas where they can gain entry (paying special focus on kitchens and bathrooms because they're drawn to water sources).

So you may not deal with them in large numbers if you keep your house clean and clutter-free, but you'll probably always have a few. If you're okay with that, it shouldn't be a dealbreaker.
posted by a.steele at 4:57 PM on March 9, 2010

SpacemanStix, no it's not a deal breaker at all, however you are buying this property and shouldn't have to deal with any existing issues. I would ask about having the seller pay for an exterminator.

FWIW, I used to help older folks manage properties, buying, selling, renting...and this would be an issue.

The seller may simply say no, OR they may negotiate around it and offer a couple hundred bucks off the selling price so that you can pay for it yourself.

Either way, you've already learned that BORAX is awesome!

Good luck and congrats on the new property.
posted by snsranch at 5:23 PM on March 9, 2010

When we bought both our houses (in CT) I believe a pest inspection for wood-destroyers was a requirement. In our first house the exterminator found a huge bats' nest with lots of accompanying droppings in our attic, and the seller was required to take care of the bats or our deal was off, so to speak. If you're truly worried about absorbing the extermination costs or cockroaches just creep you out, as your real estate agent if this solution is worth pursuing. IANAL
posted by kittyloop at 5:30 PM on March 9, 2010

Talk to the condo board and ask to see their records for past pest control efforts. Whether a lot of past control activity is a good sign or bad (might indicate a chronic problem, might indicate good maintenance) is up to you, but you'll certainly get an idea for how they deal with it (and how effectively they might deal with it in the future), and be sure to ask face-to-face if you can -- the reaction you get when you ask will tell you a lot about whether this is a chronic or surprising problem, how sick they are of dealing with it, and such.
posted by davejay at 6:05 PM on March 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

Two words: Roach paste.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 6:14 PM on March 9, 2010

I always found glue traps to be pretty effective, as long as there was no infestation or actual colony reproducing someplace in the house.

At my mother-in-law's place, there were no (or, relatively few) roaches during the day, but they came out at night. Big ones, little ones, tiny ones - the whole life cycle. We lived upstairs (it was a townhouse) but I would sometimes head down to the cafe at night to grab a beer or two from the fridge, and the counter would be crawling with them.

Which is why when we moved into our own place I made sure to close or screen windows, and make sure there was no garbage or dirty dishes.
posted by KokuRyu at 6:59 PM on March 9, 2010

The people suggesting that you can rid yourself of them permanently seem to be talking about single-family houses.

We had a roach problem in an apartment in DC, and pest control was only able to treat our particular apartment because other tenants did not want their apartments treated. So we ended up calling the perimeter of our place the "ring of fire," in that every morning, several roaches would have expired, legs-up, within a couple of inches of our walls.

It was pretty disgusting, really, and there was nothing we could do about it because our neighbors refused to get together to treat the problem.
posted by palliser at 8:24 PM on March 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

Hmm, I can't speak to the removal part of the equation (though yes, do think about asking for pest control services to be done pre-buy), but I wanted to question the idea that cockroaches are common in LA. You'll notice that a lot of the people chiming in above are not from LA or even CA, and I would argue that any sign of cockroaches (as opposed to ants, spiders, or termites) around here is at least a little unusual and worth a longer look.
posted by librarylis at 10:47 PM on March 9, 2010

In a multi-family building, it's also common to use pyrethrin based spray products in "common area" barriers, like firewalls, basements, entrance halls, and exterior perimeters, to provide long lasting chemical barrier control against traveling, egg laying females colonizing or re-colonizing your building. Pyrethrins are "natural" pesticides extracted from the seed cases of the perennial plant pyrethrum (Chrysanthemum cinerariaefolium), which is grown commercially to supply the insecticide. This plant is a relative of the common decorative chrysanthemum flower.

Pyrethrin is toxic to humans, pets, fish and birds, too, however, so it is not a good product to introduce into homes or living spaces. But it has a broad action against many insect species, and remains a primary insecticide tool for professional application, especially in multi-family and commercial buildings, where its low cost, broad effectiveness against many insect species, and long duration action are all needed.
posted by paulsc at 12:14 AM on March 10, 2010

I would have real reservations about buying into a building with a roach problem. The last place we lived in had this issue, and several times I caught roaches scuttling in from the drains - particularly up the bathtub drain - at night, even after a few visits from an exterminator. If they're using the building's wet wall as a transport system, I'd expect to be dealing with the little buggers for a long time unless management is very proactive about solving this problem. Simply exterminating *your* condo isn't going to cut it.
posted by deludingmyself at 8:04 AM on March 10, 2010

Thanks everyone for the very helpful feedback. We feel that this isn't a dealbreaker at this point, but it might warrant a closer look, just in case it's worse than we think.
posted by SpacemanStix at 9:30 AM on March 10, 2010

I realized that I hadn't updated this.

Well, it ends up that there were many more cockroaches than we originally anticipated. When the exterminator came in and sprayed, they really came out, dying all over our counters. We freaked a little bit.

The good news is that we were able to totally rid them from our condo, at least from what we can tell. After we did the following, we've seen maybe two in three months, where as before, we were seeing theme every night. It was very clear that they were in the kitchen, and no where else in the condo. So we laid sticky strips down, and figured out that they were coming from the stove area. The previous owners left the old one, and didn't keep it very clean. So we replaced the stove with a new one. And when I went in behind the stove, I realized that there were gaps between the counters and cabinets and the wall that made pretty obvious entry points for critters. So I went crazy with a caulk gun and filled up every crack I could find, both inside and outside of the cabinets (which had been recommended to us anyway), laid down boric acid around the kitchen, and the problem went away over the next week or so. No more cockroaches.

Whoever said boric acid was a miracle worker for cockroaches was correct. And blocking off all major entrances to the kitchen seemed to be very helpful, as well.
posted by SpacemanStix at 9:40 AM on September 20, 2010