Hear from Our Customers
Bed bugs don’t care how clean your home is. They follow blood, not filth — and in a commuter community like Perry, where residents are regularly moving through hotels, offices, and public spaces along the I-69 corridor into Lansing, the exposure risk is real and ongoing. One infested hotel room during a work trip or a state government conference is all it takes.
What changes after professional treatment isn’t just the absence of bugs. It’s the absence of that low-grade anxiety — the checking of sheets before bed, the unexplained bites you’re trying to rationalize away, the quiet embarrassment of not wanting anyone to sit on your furniture. That goes away when the problem is actually solved, not just temporarily disrupted.
Perry’s housing stock matters here too. Many homes in the city and surrounding township were built in the early-to-mid 20th century — plaster walls, wood-framed baseboards, aging electrical systems, and decades of accumulated gaps that give bed bugs far more places to hide than a newer build would. Getting rid of them in a home like that takes more than a spray can from the hardware store. It takes a process built around finding every last one of them first.
We founded First Choice Pest Control on May 31, 2005 — which means 2025 marks 20 years of serving Michigan homeowners and businesses. Our owner, Roger Chinault, has 26 years of hands-on pest control experience. That’s not a corporate bio line — that’s the person accountable for the work done in your Perry home.
We’re based in Swartz Creek and serve communities throughout the region, including Perry and the surrounding Shiawassee County area. The same I-69 corridor Perry residents drive every day to reach Lansing connects your neighborhood directly to our team that shows up at your door. This isn’t a lead-generation site routing your call to a Sacramento number — it’s a Michigan company with a 20-year track record you can actually verify.
Every technician at First Choice is a trained professional. No rotating strangers, no part-time college students. You get the same person, year after year, who knows your property and your history.
It starts with detection — and this is where most pest control companies fall short. A standard visual inspection finds bed bugs somewhere between 17% and 40% of the time. We’re one of fewer than 100 companies in the entire United States that offers certified canine bed bug detection. Our K-9 teams locate live bugs and viable eggs with 90–98% accuracy, finding them behind walls, inside electrical outlets, under carpet, and inside furniture joints — places no human inspector can access without tearing your home apart.
Once the inspection is complete, you’ll know exactly what you’re dealing with and where. From there, we build a treatment plan around your specific situation — not a one-size-fits-all package. Older homes in Perry and the township often have more harborage points than newer construction, so the inspection phase isn’t rushed. Our goal is to treat what’s actually there, not guess at it.
After treatment, follow-up matters. Bed bug eggs can be resilient, and a thorough approach accounts for the full lifecycle — not just the bugs that are visible on day one. We walk you through what to expect at each stage so there are no surprises, and there’s no contract locking you into anything you didn’t agree to.
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We provide residential and commercial bed bug pest control services throughout Perry, MI and the surrounding Shiawassee County area — including Perry Township and communities like Forest Green Estates. Whether you’re a homeowner in the city, a landlord managing a rental between tenants, or a small business owner dealing with a situation that needs to be resolved quietly and quickly, the process starts the same way: with an accurate inspection.
Our certified K-9 detection program is the centerpiece of what makes this service different. Because the dogs find what human inspectors miss, the treatment that follows is targeted and precise — not a broad chemical application hoping to cover what wasn’t fully located. For rental properties in Perry, where bed bugs can move between units and between tenants, that level of accuracy isn’t optional. It’s the difference between solving the problem and cycling through it repeatedly.
First Choice holds Integrated Pest Management (IPM) training credentials and is licensed through the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development — the state-level requirement for any legitimate pesticide applicator operating in Michigan. We’ve earned awards from both Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor based on verified customer reviews. Price matching is available for reasonable competitor rates, and we offer discounts for seniors, veterans, and first responders — a straightforward acknowledgment of the people in this community who’ve earned it.
The most common signs are small blood stains on your sheets, dark fecal spots along mattress seams or baseboards, shed skins near furniture joints, or unexplained bites that appear overnight. The problem is that many of these signs are easy to miss or misattribute — especially in older Perry homes where baseboards, plaster walls, and worn upholstery already show years of wear. Bed bugs are experts at staying out of sight.
That’s exactly why a certified canine inspection is worth considering before assuming you either do or don’t have a problem. Our K-9 teams detect live bugs and viable eggs with 90–98% accuracy — including inside wall voids, behind outlets, and under flooring where no visual inspection would find them. If you’ve been waking up with bites or noticed anything suspicious, a professional inspection gives you a definitive answer instead of weeks of second-guessing.
In most cases, no — and attempting it can actually make things worse. Over-the-counter repellent sprays don’t kill eggs, which means the infestation continues through the next generation even if you knock back some of the adult population. Worse, the chemical disruption can scatter bugs deeper into walls, adjacent rooms, or neighboring units — turning a contained problem into a whole-home or multi-unit situation.
For Perry homeowners dealing with an older housing stock — homes with plaster walls, hollow baseboards, and accumulated structural gaps — DIY sprays are particularly ineffective because the bugs have far more places to retreat to than they would in newer construction. Homeowners who try to self-treat and then call us typically end up with a more advanced infestation and a higher treatment cost than if they’d called first. It’s one of the most common patterns we see.
Bed bugs are an indoor pest, which means Michigan winters don’t affect them the way cold affects outdoor insects. They live where you live — in your bedding, your furniture, your walls — and your home’s heating system keeps them at a perfectly comfortable temperature year-round. If anything, cold weather concentrates the problem because both the bugs and their hosts are spending more time indoors together.
The one scenario where cold can be used as a treatment tool is controlled freezing — a professional technique that requires sustained temperatures of 0°F or below for several days, applied in a way that actually reaches the bugs’ harborage points. That’s very different from a Michigan winter doing the work for you. Don’t wait out the season expecting the problem to resolve on its own. Bed bugs in a Perry home in December are just as active as they are in July.
The honest answer is that it depends on the size of your home and the severity of the infestation — but for a whole-home treatment, most Perry residents should expect to budget somewhere in the range of $1,500 to $5,000. That range is wide because the scope of treatment varies significantly: a single bedroom with an early-stage infestation costs far less to treat than a whole house where bugs have spread through multiple rooms and wall voids.
What affects cost most is how far the infestation has progressed by the time treatment begins. Early detection — which is exactly what our K-9 inspection program is designed to enable — typically results in a more targeted and less expensive treatment than one that’s been spreading undetected for months. We also offer price matching for reasonable competitor rates, so if you’ve already gotten quotes, bring them. Discounts are available for seniors, veterans, and first responders in the Perry area.
Most professional bed bug treatments require you to be out of the home for several hours — typically four to six hours depending on the method used and the size of the space being treated. Our technician will walk you through the specific preparation steps before the appointment, which usually include washing and bagging bedding, clearing clutter from floor areas, and making sure pets are out of the home during treatment.
The full resolution process typically involves more than one visit. Because bed bug eggs can be resistant to certain treatment methods, a follow-up inspection after the first treatment is standard practice — not a sign that something went wrong. We build this into the process so you know what to expect from the start. For Perry homeowners with older homes that have more complex floor plans and structural gaps, our technician may spend additional time on the inspection phase to make sure nothing is missed before treatment begins.
Yes. We offer discounts for seniors, veterans, and first responders throughout our service area, including Perry and the surrounding Shiawassee County communities. Perry is a city with deep ties to service — it’s named after Oliver Hazard Perry, a naval hero — and the people in this community who have served in the military or work in public safety roles deserve straightforward acknowledgment of that, not just a marketing line.
If you or someone in your household qualifies, just mention it when you call. There’s no complicated verification process or fine print to navigate. The discount applies to the service, and the service itself doesn’t change — you get the same certified K-9 inspection, the same experienced technician, and the same no-contract approach that every First Choice customer receives. It’s one less thing to worry about when you’re already dealing with a stressful situation.
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