REBNY holds bedbug seminar

While rising spring temperatures would bring comfort to most, the real estate community in a city that had the most bedbugs in the nation last summer is on edge. In advance of a summer season that could achieve new heights in bedbug cases, the Real Estate Board of New York held an informal seminar on bedbug regulation and detection that featured property owners, pest control experts and entomologists, Crain’s reported. After all, 4,800 cases of bedbug violations were reported to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development last year, after numbering just 82 as recently as 2004. Now that the city passed a new disclosure law that requires landlords to provide prospective tenants with a bed bug history, many property owners are taking extra precautions to ensure buildings remain bedbug free. Opting for immediate extermination is a possibility but most owners prefer to use expensive bedbug-sniffing dogs, which can inspect 10,000 square feet in an hour, to ensure there is a problem in the first place before resorting to extermination procedures and the possible health issues associated with them. [Crain’s]