Your Tenant Reported Bed Bugs. What to Do First

Acknowledge the report the day you get it, in writing. This costs nothing and it is the single most useful thing you can do for your own position later.

If this goes to the Board, section 30(2) requires the Board to consider whether the tenant told you before applying. A tenant with three unanswered emails is in a strong position. A landlord who replied the same day and booked an inspection that week is in a very different one, even if the problem turns out to be real and takes months to resolve.

Two expensive mistakes sit at either end. Treating a unit because a tenant reported bites, without confirming anything, means paying for treatment you may not need and still not knowing whether you have a problem. Sending someone to look for ten minutes, finding nothing, and telling the tenant there are no bed bugs means discovering in six weeks that there are, by which time neighbouring units are involved.

A visual inspection is genuinely unreliable at low levels. Early infestations live in seams, joints and voids, and a person looking for them finds them only once there are enough to find. That is the gap a scent based inspection covers.

This is where most landlords lose money. Treating the reported unit alone is the most common reason a bed bug problem returns a month later and costs several times what it should have.

In an apartment building, the working assumption is the reported unit plus the eight around it, meaning either side, above, below and diagonally adjacent. In older buildings it is worth adding the units on the same service riser, because that is a route treatment does not close. In a semi or townhouse it means the neighbouring unit, since party walls and service penetrations connect them.

The point of inspecting rather than treating all of them is cost. Confirming which units are actually affected is what lets you treat three instead of twelve.

Section 27 lets you enter on 24 hours written notice, between 8am and 8pm, stating the reason, the day and the time. Inspection and treatment both qualify.

Give the notice properly every time, and keep copies. If a tenancy later turns into a dispute about access, the question will be whether your notices were valid, and informal texts asking to pop by do not satisfy the section.

If a tenant refuses lawful entry repeatedly and it is preventing treatment, that is conduct, and conduct is the only thing that opens an eviction route. An N5 under section 64 gives twenty days and is voidable if the tenant corrects the behaviour within seven. That is the intended outcome, not a technicality: the notice exists to get cooperation, not to end the tenancy.

Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 629 requires properties to be kept free of pests, and that applies to every rental property in the city.

If your building is three storeys or more and has ten or more units, RentSafeTO under Chapter 354 adds specific duties. Common areas must be proactively inspected for pests on a regular cycle, reports of pests trigger a reactive inspection within a short window, you must retain a licensed pest management operator, records of inspections and treatments must be kept, and tenants must be notified of treatment schedules and products used. Renting a unit to a new tenant when you know it has pests is prohibited.

Verify the current requirements against the City's own consolidation. RentSafeTO has been amended repeatedly and the specifics matter for compliance.

Dated written acknowledgement of the report. Notices of entry. Inspection findings, including which units were clear. Pest control invoices and treatment records. Follow up verification after treatment.

That file is what turns a dispute into a short hearing. Without it, you are relying on the adjudicator preferring your recollection to your tenant's.