A bloke in Corrimal rang me in March, apologising before he'd finished his first sentence. He'd had a cheap general treatment done in November, had it done again by the same mob in January when the ants came back, and was now looking at a third go.
I asked what they'd done. Sprayed around the outside, twenty minutes, gone. He'd paid a bit over a hundred each time, so three hundred-odd all up for a problem he still had, and he was ringing me half expecting to be told off.
He hadn't been ripped off. He'd bought exactly what he paid for. The trouble was that nobody had told him what he wasn't buying, and he had no way of knowing that "general pest treatment" describes about four different jobs at four different prices.
What actually moves the number
Size is the obvious one and the least interesting. A two-bedroom villa in Unanderra is less work than a five-bedroom place on a big block at Kiama, and any honest quote reflects that.
The one that matters more is scope. An external-only treatment is a perimeter spray plus the eaves, and it's genuinely useful as a maintenance job on a house that's already under control. A full internal and external takes in skirtings, wet areas, cupboard voids and the entry points inside, and it takes two or three times as long. Add a roof void dust and you've added a ladder, a respirator, and someone crawling through your insulation in a Tyvek suit. Those are three different prices and all three get called a general treatment on the invoice.
Then there's what you're actually treating. A general job covers the crawling insects, which is ants, spiders, cockroaches and silverfish in one visit. Rodents are a separate job with baiting stations and a proofing walk. Termites are a different trade again with its own standard and its own pricing, and I've written up what an inspection costs and what treatment runs to separately. Mosquitoes are seasonal and yard-based. If a quote for one of those looks suspiciously like a quote for another, someone has misheard the job.
Product choice shifts things too, and not always in the direction you'd expect. A cheap synthetic pyrethroid knocks down what it touches and does very little in six weeks. A longer-residual non-repellent, or gel bait in the right places, costs more in the can and lasts a season. On a cockroach job the bait is nearly always the better buy, for the reasons I've gone into in why cockroaches keep coming back.
Two smaller things that quietly change the figure: whether there's a warranty period with a free return visit built in, and travel. We work from Helensburgh down to Nowra and Berry, and a job at the far end of that has an hour in the ute attached to it.
The question that sorts out half the confusion
Is that including GST.
Sounds petty. It isn't. A quote at $220 including and a quote at $220 plus tax are a $22 difference on a job where people are agonising over $30, and a fair few small operators quote ex-GST out of habit without saying so. Ask, and ask for it in writing. NSW Fair Trading's guidance on quotes and contracts is written for building work but the principle carries: a verbal number is not a quote.
What the very cheap job usually leaves out
I want to be fair here, because there are good operators doing sharp prices and there's nothing wrong with a lean external maintenance spray if that's what the house needs.
But when a quote comes in at a third of everyone else's, something is missing, and it's usually one of these. No inspection first, so nobody has worked out what pest you've actually got or where it's coming from. External only, on a house with a problem living inside it. No roof void, which is where the spiders and the rodent runs are in most older Illawarra places. No warranty, so the return visit you'll want in eight weeks is another full price. And occasionally, no licence.
That last one is worth checking rather than assuming. Anyone applying pesticide commercially in NSW needs a current pest management technician licence from the EPA. It's issued to the individual, not the business, so the number on the website doesn't tell you about the person standing in your kitchen. Ask to see it. Nobody legitimate minds.
The Corrimal job, for the record, was a two-hour internal and external with the roof void done, and it cost him roughly what his three cheap sprays had added up to. The ants were nesting in a wall cavity behind the kitchen where an external spray was never going to reach them. He hasn't rung back, which in this trade is the review you want.
What to ask before you book
Five things, and none of them take long on the phone.
What's included, internal and external or just external, and does the roof void get done. Is the price including GST. What's the warranty period and what triggers a free return visit. What are you using, and what do I need to do about the kids, the dog, the cat's bowl and the fish tank. And what's your licence number.
An operator who answers all five straight away is telling you a lot about how the job will go. One who won't put a scope in writing is telling you something too.
Annual beats reactive, and August is cheap
The pattern I see most is people buying pest control three or four times in a bad year and never getting on top of it, when one properly scoped annual treatment would have cost less than the second call-out.
Right now is also the quiet end of our calendar. From about mid-September the phone changes character: the spiders come back into the eaves, the ants start marching in over the kitchen bench, and the cockroaches that have been sitting in the walls all winter start breeding again. Book in spring and you're competing with everyone else for a slot, usually after the problem has already started. Book in the next few weeks and you're treating an empty house before the season, which is both cheaper and considerably more effective.
If you want a real number for your place, ring us and describe it: how many bedrooms, single or double storey, whether there's a subfloor and a roof void we can get into, and what you're actually seeing. We'll quote the job in writing with the GST shown, and if the honest answer is that you need less than you think, we'll say so. You can also check where we work across the Illawarra first.
Need a hand with this in your home? Get a free quote or call 0430 007 651.