Hear from Our Customers
Bed bugs don’t care how clean your home is. They’re hitchhikers — they follow blood, not filth — and they’re just as likely to show up in a well-kept farmhouse off Henderson Road as anywhere else. What matters isn’t how they got there. What matters is finding them accurately and treating them completely, the first time.
That’s where most homeowners run into trouble. A visual inspection by a human technician is accurate somewhere between 17 and 40 percent of the time. That means there’s a real chance a standard inspection misses an active infestation entirely, and you spend weeks wondering why bites keep showing up after you thought the problem was handled. The homes in the 48460 ZIP code were mostly built in the 1960s — and that older construction means more gaps around baseboards, more aged wall cavities, more places for bed bugs to hide that no flashlight can reach.
Our certified K-9 detection team finds live bugs and viable eggs with 90 to 98 percent accuracy. When the dog clears a room, you can trust that result. When treatment follows a confirmed detection, it’s targeted, effective, and not a guessing game. You stop losing sleep. You stop second-guessing every bite. You get a real answer and a real plan — not a maybe.
We’ve been serving Michigan families since May 31, 2005. That’s two decades of showing up, doing the work, and building a reputation that doesn’t need a sales pitch. Roger, our owner, has 26 years of hands-on pest control experience — and the company we built reflects that: no part-time technicians, no rotating strangers, no national call center routing your request to whoever’s available.
When you call First Choice for bed bug control in New Lothrop, you get the same trained technician assigned to your home every visit. In a village of fewer than 650 people — where Misteguay Creek runs through the heart of town and your neighbors know your name — that kind of personal accountability isn’t a bonus feature. It’s the baseline you deserve.
We hold Integrated Pest Management training credentials, have earned awards through Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor, and offer discounts for seniors, veterans, and first responders. No binding contracts. No pressure. Just consistent, experienced work from a company that’s been doing this long enough to know what actually works.
It starts with a call. You describe what you’re seeing — bites, small dark spots on bedding, maybe a musty smell you can’t place — and we schedule a certified K-9 inspection at your home. Our dog and handler move through the space methodically, flagging areas of live activity with a level of accuracy that no visual-only inspection can match. This step matters more in New Lothrop than you might expect. Homes built in the 1960s — which describes most of the housing stock in the 48460 area — have more structural complexity: older baseboards, more aged wall penetrations, more places where bugs can establish without being seen. The K-9 inspection accounts for all of it.
Once the inspection confirms activity and identifies the affected areas, we build a treatment plan around what’s actually there — not a generic room-by-room protocol. Treatment typically involves a combination of targeted application methods based on the severity and location of the infestation. We walk you through what to expect before we start: what to move, where to be, how long to stay out, and what the timeline looks like for follow-up.
After treatment, we don’t disappear. Because you have the same technician every time, they already know your home when they come back to verify results. You’re not re-explaining everything to someone new. That continuity is part of how we make sure the job is actually done — not just done on paper.
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Bed bug control in New Lothrop means something specific — not a generic package pulled off a shelf. The service starts with certified K-9 detection, which is the foundation everything else is built on. You don’t treat a guess. You treat a confirmed problem, in confirmed locations, with the right methods for what’s actually there. We’re one of fewer than 100 companies in the entire United States offering this level of detection. No other pest control company currently serving Shiawassee County has been confirmed to offer it.
Treatment is tailored to your home’s specific conditions — the size of the infestation, the areas involved, and the layout of the property. For a rural community like New Lothrop, where estate sales, farm auctions, and secondhand furniture are part of everyday life, bed bugs often enter through used items rather than travel. That context shapes how we assess risk and where we focus. Landlords with rental units in the village should know that Michigan’s habitability standards require addressing pest infestations — and we serve both residential and commercial customers across Shiawassee County.
We also offer price matching for reasonable competitor rates. If you’ve gotten a quote from another company, bring it. In a community where the cost of living runs well below the national average and every dollar counts, you shouldn’t have to overpay for the most accurate bed bug detection available anywhere in the region.
This is one of the most common misconceptions we hear from Michigan homeowners, and it’s worth clearing up directly. Bed bugs live inside your home — in your mattress, inside your walls, behind your baseboards, and within your furniture. The outdoor temperature in New Lothrop in January has almost no effect on them. For cold to kill bed bugs, they’d need sustained exposure to temperatures below zero degrees Fahrenheit for several consecutive days. That’s not happening in a heated home, no matter how cold it gets outside.
What Michigan winters actually do is keep you indoors longer — spending more time in the rooms where bed bugs live, which often means more bites and a faster path to realizing something’s wrong. If you’re noticing signs of bed bugs in the fall or winter, don’t assume the cold will handle it. It won’t. Year-round treatment is available, and waiting only gives an infestation more time to spread.
A human visual inspection — the kind most pest control companies offer — is accurate somewhere between 17 and 40 percent of the time. That’s not a knock on the technician. It’s a physical limitation. Bed bugs hide in places that are genuinely inaccessible to the human eye: inside wall voids, behind electrical outlets, beneath carpet edges, and deep within the aged construction of older homes. In a community like New Lothrop, where most homes were built in the 1960s, that structural complexity makes visual-only inspection especially unreliable.
A certified K-9 detection team operates at 90 to 98 percent accuracy. The dog’s nose can locate live bugs and viable eggs through walls and flooring that no inspector can see through. That difference in accuracy isn’t a marketing point — it’s the difference between treating the right areas and spending money on treatment that misses half the infestation. We’re one of fewer than 100 companies in the U.S. offering this service.
Yes — and this is a more relevant concern in New Lothrop than in most suburban markets. Rural Shiawassee County has a strong tradition of estate sales, farm auctions, and secondhand furniture markets, especially in spring. Upholstered furniture — sofas, chairs, mattresses, box springs — is one of the most common ways bed bugs enter a home. The bugs and their eggs hide in seams, joints, and fabric folds, and they’re nearly impossible to detect with a casual visual check before you load something into your truck.
That doesn’t mean you need to stop buying secondhand. It means you need to inspect carefully before anything enters your living space. If you’re unsure about a piece, we can run a K-9 inspection on it. And if something has already come inside and you’re now noticing bites or small dark spots on your bedding, that’s the time to call — not after you’ve tried a few cans of store-bought spray and the problem has spread to the next room.
In most cases, no. This is one of the fears that keeps people from calling sooner, and it’s worth addressing directly. Professional bed bug treatment — especially when it follows an accurate K-9 detection — targets the infestation at its source without requiring you to discard belongings. Mattresses, box springs, sofas, and other furniture can typically be treated in place.
There are situations where a mattress is so heavily infested or physically deteriorated that replacement makes sense — but that’s the exception, not the rule, and it’s a conversation that happens after inspection, not before. In a community where furniture may have been in the family for years or was purchased at a local estate sale, the last thing you need is someone telling you to throw everything out before they’ve even confirmed what’s actually there. A proper inspection tells you what you’re actually dealing with. Treatment follows from that — not from a worst-case assumption.
There’s no honest one-size answer to this, but here’s what you can realistically expect. Most professional bed bug treatments require more than one visit. Bed bug eggs are resilient, and a single treatment — even a thorough one — may not reach every egg in the affected area. A follow-up visit after the first treatment allows us to confirm results, address any remaining activity, and verify that the infestation has been fully resolved.
The number of treatments needed depends on the size of the infestation, how long it’s been active, and the layout of the home. In older homes — which describes most of the housing stock in the 48460 ZIP code — the structural complexity can mean bed bugs have established in more areas than initially visible. That’s exactly why accurate detection before treatment matters so much. When you know where the bugs actually are, you treat those areas effectively instead of spraying broadly and hoping. We assign the same technician to your home for every visit, so follow-up isn’t starting over — it’s a continuation of work already underway.
Yes. We offer discounts for seniors, veterans, and first responders. New Lothrop is a small, tight-knit community — the kind of place where those groups are your neighbors, your family members, and the people who’ve contributed the most to the area over the years. Making professional bed bug control accessible to them isn’t a promotional footnote — it’s a straightforward commitment to the people who deserve it most.
We also offer price matching for reasonable competitor rates. If you’ve already gotten a quote from another pest control company serving Shiawassee County, bring it to the conversation. The goal is to make sure cost isn’t the reason someone in New Lothrop puts off treating a problem that only gets harder to resolve the longer it goes. Call (810) 308-1934 to ask about current discounts and to schedule your K-9 bed bug inspection.
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