I'm selling my house, so the buyer set up a termite inspection. When the company called to set up an appointment, they were vague about the details at first (I wasn't expecting their call), but we got that straightened out. The inspector would come the next day at 4pm. I work from home, so at 3:45 I was going to stop work and prepare for the inspector. He rang the bell at 3:50pm (not super early, but also not super convenient for me). He did not introduce himself and walked into my house.
The inspector stood in my living room, asking me all sorts of unnecessary questions about my work and my
upcoming move. (This wasn't just small talk; the whole conversation felt awkward.) I said, "I suppose you want to see the basement" and sent him downstairs, saying I'd be upstairs if he needed anything.
Two minutes later he comes back upstairs, announces I have termites, apologizes, says he doesn't want to give me the hard sell because it's sad I have termites, and then proceeds to give me the hard sell. He says they can schedule the abatement for the next day. He asks how big my house is and made up a price ($950 for a 900 sq. ft) based on my square footage. Then he spends 10 minutes telling me that he still has to check the rest of the house, but here's how they do the abatement (blah blah blah... drilling holes and such.) As this was my first experience with a termite inspector, the details sounded right but they also sounded rather invasive and ecologically harmful, so I was put on guard a bit. I didn't have any problem if I DID have termites -- I would have done the abatement without any fuss -- but I wanted to SEE the termites before I paid some guy $1000 for a rushed job.
So we went into the basement and he took video inside the crawl space that showed a mud tube where the termites would have lived. When I asked whether it was a new or old infestation (since I knew the house had been infested decades before I owned it), he didn't give me a straight answer. But he DID try to scare me by telling me that queen termites are the size of guinea pigs and that some university in South America will pay top dollar for someone to produce a live one, because no one's seen a live termite queen in 100 years. W**?! By this point, I was done with this schmo, and I told him I wasn't going to schedule the abatement until I spoke with my real estate agent. He gave me a ratty business card that had coffee spilled on it.
Before he left, he was in my driveway (I was inside, right next to the window), he called his boss and concluded the conversation with "I quoted her $950. Yeah, she's an English professor." Someone please tell me what the heck my job has to do with the price of termite control?! W**. I immediately looked up the company on Angie's list and the BBB and they were listed in neither place, which concerned me.
The next morning, a different secretary from the office called to tell me that the owner wanted to come re-inspect because the video the other guy had taken was "inconclusive." The owner, Randy, was at my house within 15 minutes. Very punctual, nicer, not asking me creepy questions, etc. But he too couldn't prove there were live termites (and after only a cursory glance in my crawl space). But because the guy the day before (who admitted he'd only been on the job for 6 months) had written down in the report that there were live termites, they were required to abate. I requested a copy of the report but never received it. He did ask me when I moved into the house, and when I said "six years ago," he said, "yup, looks like 6 years' worth of damage here." Again, W**.
When I told him I wouldn't be using their services because I was getting a second opinion from another company (Raney's Termite Control, which I *highly* recommend -- see my review on them), the owner of First Strike made an off-hand remark about my two cats and left. A fourth W** moment.