If you're only giving yourself 24 hours to turn stuff around, that's enough time to respond to a normal issue that can be solved with cleaning or painting or a screwdriver, but you're not giving yourself enough time to be confident that you've totally broken the life-cycle of living organisms and that they're all dead. That's something that only time will tell.

So, yeah. That's one of the issues that you run into with multi's. It's efficient, but all the risk is concentrated in one place. If I have a sfh that has a bug problem, then it's just that sfh that's affected. I can take it off the market, and it's obnoxious, but losing two, three, four months' rent is par for the course, when someone's left you with a serious problem, and you want to be 100% it's resolved before you're ready to release it to the next tenant's occupancy. Because it's your reputation on the line.

I did a heat treatment for mine, and we still followed up with a chemical treatment two weeks later. And then I followed up with bedbug-sniffing dogs about a week after that. When I was chatting with the heat treatment guy, I asked him how he could just treat one apartment and be confident in it. He said he couldn't-- because the bedbugs had the possibility of moving to a cooler adjacent unit. So he had to treat three units at a time, move down a unit, treat two of the same units plus a third new one, move down a unit, and treat three more with an overlap, etc.

So, yeah. It's not like squashing a stand-alone spider.

Bedbugs come from used furniture. They come from international care packages coming through the mail from bedbuggy countries. They come from luggage from international travelers. If any of those describe your students-- you're likely to run into it more frequently.

But you did give her the apartment. You did know about the bedbugs. And while you started the treatment-- it's not a one-and-done situation. And an empty apartment is easier to treat than a full one.

That's why I do quarterly treatments now. The company gives free unlimited call backs if bed bugs are found when subscribed to this program.

Both instances of bed bugs were due to brought in second hand furniture. 1st time was a nightmare since it was my first experience too.

Second time things went more smoothly (relatively). Was under the service plan and they were knocked out in about 2 months, while tenants stayed.