We have been renting out a 4-bed flat to students for over 20 years now. It’s a tenement building, 150 years old, in Edinburgh’s favourite student area. There have always been mice. The become very active in late summer when students are moving in and out all over the district. So: we give the usual advice about clearing up crumbs, keeping food in containers, we block holes with steel wool, we lay traps ourselves. However, the letting agency always wants to send in pest control firms. The path of least resistance is just to allow this and pay up for ‘rodent treatments and access blocking’ and this will work for a few weeks then the mice come back. Over the years this is a large sum of money with little result. They are cunning creatures. They even chew through the floorboards and skirtings from below, through the carpet, and into the kitchen. What’s the point of paying pest control?
Pest control always want to do what makes the most money for them as quickly as possible, which is putting down poison. The problem with this is that the mice eat it then go back to their nest and die there, so now you have dead bodies under the floor. Then flies will lay eggs in them and next you have a bluebottle plague. Then the smell of dead vermin will last for a few months like stale urine. Better you just spent time to keep trapping as many as possible, but as that requires multiple visits then unless you live nearby this may not be feasible and you can’t really ask tenants to do it (you can, but they won’t). So neither choice is ideal.
Good pest controller will scour your house and seal all (or most) of the entrances. Sometimes, they wil come twice to seal the missed ones. For a few months after that we heard mice grinding on the neighbours’ territory but none of them got to us. Also, you can always install metal mesh net frame/screen on the windows if you like to keep them open. We had to do it anyway because we kept budgies, to make a place safe.
If chewing through floorboards gets really bad, I’d buy several rols of soft copper mesh (not good for rats but sufficient for mice) and fix it all over the floor area, paying special attention to the corners. Then carpet underlay, then the carpet on the top. The more expensive variant is what we do in aviaries - tile the floor all over, paying special attention to the corners. Then put carpet/lino/whatnot on the top.
It will cost much more if you’re not a hands-on LL. However, in either case, if done well, it’ll be a one-time job that will last and save money in the long run.
And keeping a rat-catching cat will hep a lot, if possible. The cat smell alone will be a huge deterrent. But in this case there should be no poison.
Do you own the whole block? The freehold management company should be informed of this issue and should take action. Slightly different if it’s your block or resident managed.
No, only one flat in the block. Scotland, we don’t have leaseholders/freeholders