Bed bugs in an apartment: when they come from your neighbours

Apartment bed bugs come with an unfair stigma, as if they were proof of an unclean home. They are not. Bed bugs do not care about cleanliness; they care about blood meals and hiding places, and an apartment building gives them both, plus something a detached house does not: neighbours on every side, connected by the very structure of the building. Understanding how they move is the key to solving the problem — because in a building, your unit is only part of the story.

How bed bugs travel between units

Bed bugs do not fly or jump, but they crawl remarkably well through the hidden infrastructure of a building. The main routes are gaps around plumbing and heating pipes, electrical conduits and shared outlets, cracks in shared walls, and the spaces under doors and along baseboards. In older Montreal plexes — triplexes and sixplexes with plaster walls, shared stairwells and decades of small cracks — those routes are everywhere, which is why infestations in old buildings are so stubborn.

They also travel the human way: on clothing and bags in shared laundry rooms, on furniture left in hallways, and through moving day — July 1st in Quebec, when thousands of people move at once and discarded mattresses and sofas sit on the curb. A neighbour does not need to visit your unit for their bugs to become your bugs; the building does the travelling for them. That is also why a unit can be reinfested weeks after a successful treatment, with no new travel and no new furniture involved.

What to tell your landlord or condo board — in writing

The first step is written notice, not a hallway conversation. In Quebec, the landlord is generally responsible for keeping the dwelling habitable, which includes bed bug extermination — see our full guide on who pays for bed bug extermination. Write to your landlord (or, in a condo, to the syndicate / condo board) describing the signs you found, when they appeared, and asking for professional treatment, including inspection of adjacent units.

Attach an inspection report if you have one. Our inspection ends with a written report — presence, extent, rooms affected, recommended treatment — which landlords, condo boards and the Tribunal administratif du logement (TAL) accept as a reference document. Inspection: $75 — waived if you proceed with treatment. Keep copies of everything you send and every reply: if the landlord stalls, that paper trail is what supports a TAL complaint. And never stop paying rent on your own initiative, even with bed bugs — only the TAL can authorise a rent reduction.

Protecting your unit while the building is dealt with

While you wait for building-wide action, you can slow the bugs down and protect your own space. Seal the routes you can control: caulk cracks along baseboards and around pipe entries, fit outlet covers on shared walls, and install door sweeps if there is a gap under your front door. These are tenant-friendly fixes in most leases, but check with your landlord before doing anything structural.

Inside the unit, fit certified mattress and box-spring encasements — fitted by you, with our guidance — so bugs cannot colonise your mattress or feed from inside it; our encasement guide explains which models to buy. Hot-wash and high-heat-dry your bedding regularly, vacuum seams and baseboards, and keep clutter away from beds and shared walls. None of this eliminates a building infestation on its own, but it reduces your exposure and makes the eventual treatment faster and more effective.

What not to do: moving furniture through the halls

The single most damaging mistake in an apartment is dragging infested furniture through shared hallways, stairwells and elevators — to the curb, to another room, or to a neighbour's unit. Bugs drop off along the way, and you have just seeded the common areas and possibly other floors. The same goes for putting an infested sofa in the hallway "for someone to take": in July, that is practically a distribution service.

If furniture truly has to go, wrap it completely in plastic first, seal it with tape, and only then move it — and tell your landlord, so common areas can be checked. The same rule applies to bags of laundry: seal them before leaving your unit, and do not sort infested bedding in a shared laundry room. Good building hygiene is a shared responsibility, and it starts with not exporting your problem to the hallway.

Why coordinated building treatment works — and solo treatment often does not

A coordinated treatment means the infested unit, the adjacent units (above, below and beside) and the common areas are inspected and, where needed, treated in the same period. Bugs fleeing a treated unit have nowhere safe to go, and bugs in a neighbouring unit cannot quietly recolonise yours a month later. This is why landlords and condo boards should be pushed — politely but in writing — to treat the building, not just your apartment.

Our standard treatment is bio-chemical targeted treatment, applied precisely into harbourages and cracks, with follow-up visits timed to the bed bug life cycle; heat treatment is reserved for severe cases. In a building context, follow-ups matter even more, because reintroduction from a neighbouring unit can look exactly like a treatment failure. A professional who knows the building context will schedule inspections of adjacent units and plan follow-ups accordingly. If your landlord treats only your unit and the bugs return, that is not necessarily a failed treatment — it is usually an untreated neighbour. Say so, in writing, and ask for the adjacent units to be inspected. That one request resolves more "recurring" apartment infestations than any product ever will.