Help! My real estate agent killed next door's cat

I've had problems with uninvited guests before. The uncatchable mouse in an apartment in Palo Alto. The lizards that used to sit on top of the air conditioning unit and poop down the wall in Singapore. The guy who locked himself out of his room at college and crashed overnight on my floor, stripping naked to reveal hair in places I never dreamt it could grow and prompting me to invest in my first ever vacuum cleaner. 

And then - in the last house I built - the rodents in the crawlspace.

The big problem with rats - or possibly the third biggest problem, if you count plague and Weill's disease - is that everyone panics when they discover they're cohabiting with them. Then we thrash around online looking for someone who can solve the problem urgently. The well-rehearsed procedures that savvy homeowners adopt when hiring a contractor - check their reviews, check their license, check their insurance, get an estimate - disappear when we know a germ-ridden rodent with advanced reproductive skills is lurking in the shadows, ready to gnaw our babies.

In my case, I wasn't actually panicking - for one thing, I don't have any babies - but I was certainly pissed. I was preparing to sell a property that was just three years old and built by my own team, so when I'd commissioned a pest inspection, I assumed it would come back clean. I certainly wasn't expecting them to find evidence of rodent activity - a euphemism for droppings and pee - in the 18 inch crawlspace underneath the house.

We didn’t know whether this was an ongoing or historical problem. Nor did we know exactly what kind of rodent we were dealing with - pest inspectors don't tend to take stool samples - but the assumption was that it was one or more rats. (Probably more - these things breed faster than rabbits). I didn't want them chewing through anything important down there. And with my open houses planned for the weekend, I certainly didn't want potential buyers falling in love with the home, wandering in a dreamlike trance around the yard, then freaking out when Rattus Norwegius popped out through a crawlspace vent to ask if they were pre-qualified for their mortgage. Nor did I want anything dying under the house - real estate agents like open houses to smell of freshly-baked cookies, not freshly-deceased carcass.

I’d dealt with plenty of crawlspace cleanups before, so I called my regular pest contacts - but none could provide same day help. So I searched online. Very quickly, I found a licensed contractor who not only had good credentials - including a client list with other real estate firms - but who returned my call almost instantly and arranged to come round on the spot. Within a couple of hours, he'd climbed into the contaminated crawlspace without a hazmat suit - for which he earned both my instant admiration and a mental note not to let him sit on the sofa - and outlined a plan to poison whatever was down there. It was expensive - ludicrously expensive - but it was a solution.

I'd already identified how the rodents had got in - a hole in a metal crawlspace vent that was supposed to have been sealed from the inside, but hadn't - and arranged for my General Contractor to repair it. This was a mistake, my new pest best friend told me: when the rat in the crawlspace eats the poison, it will get dehydrated, stagger outside looking for water, and eventually pass away, hopefully some distance from my property. (Hopefully, I mused, in the front yard of the open house down the road.) So the worst thing we could do is trap it under the crawlspace. I called my GC back to put a hole in his hole fix.

It was only as the pest guy was walking out the house - and as I was making a mental note to vacuum the hallway - that I started to get doubts. Something was nagging in my mind - a recollection of cat owners pleading on social media for people not to use poison for pest control, illustrated with heart-wrenching photos of kitty (dcsd). Would the poison kill next door's cat, I asked him? Probably not, he said - although there might be some casualties among crows and other animals that feed on small mammal carcasses.

That was enough to get me back online. I lost half a day talking to various pest specialists with conflicting opinions about how to solve the problem - including one technician who pooh-poohed the theory that poisoned rats would flee the building in search of water on the basis that I was projecting human behavioral responses onto a different species. Personally, whether I was a rat or a real estate agent (insert your own joke here), if I was stuck under the floorboards of someone else's house, reeling from rattus gastro-enteritis while giving birth to triplets every five minutes - trust me, I'd be heading straight for the exit. But what do I know?

In the end, I found a reputable company that used traps rather than poison, came out quickly, did a professional job and didn't require me to get a second mortgage to pay the bill. I held the open houses - nothing smelled of death, and nothing with whiskers appeared at an inopportune time, with the possible exception of an elderly neighbor who interrupted a promising sales discussion looking for the restroom. We disclosed the episode to all potential buyers, and everyone was happy - rodents aside, of course.

Frankly, after all this, I'm still not qualified to say whether poison or traps are the most effective option - but I've researched enough about the damage poison can do to pets, wildlife and even small children to know that I'd always go with traps. 

Either way, the saga reinforced the truth that unless your house is actually flooding or on fire, most homeowner maintenance is better addressed by following standard protocols. Don't jump at the first solution that presents itself; trust your most conservative instincts when you're thinking about safety; and if you're selling your home, insist your real estate agent does diligent research when they're hiring contractors on your behalf. 

Oh, and keep a HEPA-compliant vacuum cleaner in the closet - you never know when it’ll come in handy.

Extract from "How not to build a house: the Book I'll Never Finish"

Keith Rodgers is founder and CEO of The Dachshund’s Undercarriage, a construction consulting company, and a Realtor® (DRE# 02233979) with Pinnacle Realty Advisors.

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