Hear from Our Customers
Living next to active farmland changes the pest equation entirely. When the surrounding fields get harvested each fall, mice and voles don’t disappear — they migrate. They follow the warmth, and in New Lothrop, that warmth is often your basement, your walls, or your crawl space. A professional pest control program doesn’t just react to that. It gets ahead of it, sealing entry points and treating before the annual migration turns into a full-blown infestation.
The older housing stock throughout New Lothrop and the surrounding Hazelton Township area adds another layer. Homes built in the mid-20th century — with settling foundations, aging window frames, and unfinished crawl spaces — give pests more ways in than a newer build ever would. What our professional technician sees in those spaces is completely different from what a store-bought trap addresses.
And then there’s the Misteguay Creek corridor. That waterway has been part of New Lothrop’s identity since the town’s earliest days, but it also creates consistent mosquito breeding habitat from late May through September. A recurring pest control program that covers mosquitoes — and includes flea and tick treatment at no extra charge — means your yard stays usable all summer, not just on good days.
We were founded on May 31, 2005 — which means this year marks 20 years of continuous operation in Michigan, with deep roots in New Lothrop and Shiawassee County. Roger, our owner, has 26 years of hands-on experience in pest management. This isn’t a franchise with rotating staff and a call center three states away. It’s a family-owned business where the person responsible for your service is someone you can actually reach.
We hold awards from both Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor, and every technician is IPM-trained — meaning they’re certified in Integrated Pest Management, the EPA’s science-based standard for responsible, effective pest control. That matters for families in New Lothrop who have kids, pets, or anyone with health sensitivities living in the home.
One thing that sets us apart in a community like New Lothrop where word travels fast and trust is personal: you get the same technician every single visit. Your technician learns your property — the gap in the foundation, the outbuilding that backs up to the field, the basement that holds moisture after a wet spring. That kind of continuity is how pest control actually works over time.
It starts with a real assessment of your property. Not a checklist — an actual walkthrough where your technician looks at the specific conditions that make your home vulnerable. In New Lothrop, that usually means checking the perimeter for field-facing entry points, inspecting the foundation for gaps that open up after Michigan’s freeze-thaw cycles, and identifying any moisture areas that attract pests year-round. The assessment shapes the entire program, so nothing is generic.
From there, your technician builds a treatment plan based on what’s actually present and what’s likely coming based on the season. Shiawassee County’s pest calendar is predictable once you know it — carpenter ants in spring, mosquitoes through summer, the rodent push in fall, overwintering stink bugs and lady beetles in late October. A good program anticipates that cycle instead of just responding to it after the fact.
After the initial treatment, you stay on a recurring schedule that keeps the pressure managed all year. If something comes back between visits, we come back too — that’s what our guarantee means. Michigan state law requires all commercial pest applicators to be licensed through MDARD, and every First Choice technician meets that standard. You’re not getting someone who picked up a spray tank last week.
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We handle the full range of pest problems that show up in New Lothrop and surrounding Shiawassee County — rodents, ants, mosquitoes, wasps and hornets, bed bugs, stink bugs, fleas, ticks, and wildlife intrusions including bats. Bat removal is a documented, recurring issue in New Lothrop specifically, particularly in older brick homes and cape cods where aging rooflines and deteriorated mortar give colonies easy access. That’s not a generic concern — it’s a specific one for this community.
For bed bugs, we offer something that fewer than 100 pest control companies in the entire United States provide: certified canine detection. Our dogs locate infestations with 95–98% accuracy, compared to roughly 50% for visual inspections alone. Michigan ranks second in the nation for bed bug infestations, and Flint — just 12 miles from New Lothrop — is among the worst-affected cities in the country. If you’ve had family visiting from the area or you’ve traveled recently, that’s not a distant concern.
Our mosquito program includes flea and tick treatment at no extra charge — relevant for New Lothrop families with dogs or kids spending time near the creek corridor or in the field-edge areas around Hazelton Township. We offer both residential pest control and commercial pest control in New Lothrop, MI, covering the village’s homeowners and its roughly 44 local businesses. Discounts are available for seniors, veterans, and first responders, and we’ll match reasonable competitors’ rates.
This is one of the most common questions we hear from homeowners in New Lothrop and other agricultural communities, and the answer is straightforward: it’s not random. Every fall, as the surrounding fields in Hazelton Township are harvested and food sources disappear, mice and voles begin migrating toward structures that offer warmth and shelter. Your home is a target — not because something is wrong with it, but because of where it sits relative to active farmland.
The problem with DIY traps and store-bought repellents is that they address the mice already inside. They don’t address the entry points that let new mice in every single season. Our rodent control program identifies and seals those access points — gaps in the foundation, openings around utility lines, deteriorated door sweeps — and combines that with targeted baiting that interrupts the migration before it becomes an infestation. Done right, the annual rodent problem becomes manageable instead of inevitable.
A lot of people assume bed bugs are a city problem. They’re not. Bed bugs travel with people — in luggage, on used furniture, through anyone who’s visited a hotel or stayed somewhere with an active infestation. Michigan ranks second in the nation for bed bug infestations, and Flint, which is about 12 miles east of New Lothrop on M-13, consistently ranks among the 25 worst-affected cities in the country. Anyone commuting to Flint for work, shopping, or healthcare has real exposure risk — and so does anyone who’s had guests visit from that direction.
What makes bed bugs particularly stressful is the uncertainty. A visual inspection catches infestations only about 50% of the time, which means you can have a problem and genuinely not know it. We use certified detection dogs that find infestations with 95–98% accuracy. If the dogs don’t find anything, you have real confirmation — not just a technician’s best guess. That level of certainty is worth a lot when the alternative is lying awake wondering whether the problem is there or not.
This is the right question to ask, and any pest control company that brushes past it isn’t one you should hire. Our technicians are trained in Integrated Pest Management — IPM — which is the EPA’s science-based framework for pest control that prioritizes the least invasive treatment option first. That means chemical applications are used precisely and only when necessary, not as a default starting point.
In practice, your technician will walk through what’s being applied, where, and what the re-entry window looks like before anyone goes back into treated areas. For families in New Lothrop with dogs, cats, or farm animals nearby, that conversation matters. IPM-trained technicians have done this enough times to know exactly how to treat a home effectively while keeping the people and animals inside it safe. If you have specific health concerns or sensitivities in the household, bring them up during the initial assessment — that information shapes the treatment approach from the start.
Shiawassee County has a pretty predictable pest calendar once you’ve seen it a few times. Spring brings carpenter ants — they emerge from decaying wood in older structures and start foraging into homes as temperatures climb. Wasps and hornets begin building nests around the same time, and termite swarm season starts in April and May. We have documented service history with stinging insects in New Lothrop specifically, so this isn’t a theoretical concern for the area.
Summer shifts the pressure to mosquitoes, which are especially active near the Misteguay Creek corridor and the drainage areas around the surrounding farmland. Fleas and ticks peak through the warmer months as well. Then fall arrives and the rodent migration begins — field mice moving from harvested farmland into homes and outbuildings throughout Hazelton Township. Stink bugs and lady beetles start looking for overwintering sites in wall voids and attics around October. Bed bugs don’t follow a seasonal pattern — they’re active year-round regardless of temperature. Knowing this cycle is half the battle; a recurring pest control program built around it is the other half.
For most properties in New Lothrop, a one-time treatment handles the immediate problem but doesn’t address what’s coming next. Pest pressure here isn’t a single event — it’s a cycle. The rodent migration happens every fall. Mosquitoes return every summer. Carpenter ants emerge every spring. A one-time treatment in August doesn’t do anything for the mice that show up in October, and it doesn’t carry over to the following season.
Recurring pest control is built around that cycle. Your technician treats proactively based on what’s likely to be active at each visit, which is far more effective than waiting for a visible infestation and then reacting to it. It’s also significantly less expensive in the long run — the cost of a recurring program is a fraction of what it costs to deal with structural damage from carpenter ants, replace furniture contaminated by bed bugs, or address a full rodent infestation that’s been building for months. For properties near active farmland or the creek corridor, recurring service isn’t a luxury. It’s just practical.
Yes — we offer discounts for seniors, veterans, and first responders. In a community like New Lothrop, where more than 15% of residents are 65 or older and many households have military or first responder connections, these discounts reflect something real about how we operate. This is a family-owned business that has been in Michigan communities for 20 years, and the people who built those communities — and who continue to serve them — matter to how we price our work.
If you qualify, mention it when you call. The discount applies to the service, not just the first visit, and it stacks with the price-matching guarantee we already offer for reasonable competitors’ rates. The combination means you’re not choosing between a company you can trust and a price that works for your budget. For seniors on fixed incomes or veterans managing household costs, that’s a practical difference — not a promotional footnote.
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