I aquired a listing recently and the home is vacant. The seller flew from Tennessee to meet with me and just to get into the home since it has been vacant for so long. She did a very good job of cleaning out the house.
It had been listed prior and apparently the agent never went in and open it up to air out of turn on the A/C for a little while. So while she was here cleaning the home she ran into a few problems.
She started to hear noises coming from the roof, then while in the home she used the restroom. Noticed that the toliet started to back up. She went to turn the water off to it when she noticed a rat facing right at her. Poor thing went running out of the bathroom and locked the door behind her.
Well Broward County Critter control had to come to the house. They caught a Racoon in the attic and manage to take care of the rat problem. All was great and my seller went back home. I assured her that the home would be visited frequently and opened up.
I got a call from her yesterday that Broward County has to go back into the house. It turns out the Racoon was a female and was lacating. There may be babies in the roof and they may need to cut a part of the ceiling to get to them.
OH no you have got the be kidding me? Well I met with them this morning and we talked about a few things. These little critters just love homes like this. If the agent before had went in and with the toliets flushed them every so often the rats would not have come up from the sewers. Then the Raccoon climb up and crawled through a hole on the side of the roof.
Well it turned out that there were no babies in the roof so no cutting needed to be done. The hole that the Raccoon climbed through was still closed shut. We flushed the toliets so water was still in it.
I learned a few things from this gentlemen. So my question to all of you. Do you go to your vacant homes just to air it out and make sure there are no little friends making home there?
