Changing Managing Agent: Taking Over the Pest File

The new managing agent took office on 1 July. In October, two owners report mice in stairwell A. The residents' committee asks for "the rodent control contract to be resumed". Nobody knows which one: the previous firm passed on neither the contract, nor the station layout plan, nor the contractor's contact details. The property manager calls a company found online, which charges for a diagnostic visit and discovers nineteen bait stations in the basement, eleven of them empty, three smashed and two nowhere to be found. Since when? Impossible to say.

This black hole is one of the most underestimated causes of lasting infestation in apartment blocks and rental portfolios across the Île-de-France region. A change of managing agent, property manager or contractor almost always creates a break in continuity lasting several months — precisely the time a mouse population needs to retake a building that had been brought under control. And unlike a technical failure, this break is invisible: the budget lines go through, service charges are called in, and nobody checks that anyone actually turned up.

This article sets out what the outgoing managing agent must hand over, what to demand from the departing contractor, how to audit the equipment already in place, and in what order to rebuild a control programme without paying for everything twice.

White and grey rat climbing on a clear plastic bowl placed on a light-coloured worktop

Why the handover is the most dangerous moment

A control programme is not a subscription, it is a track record

A rodent control contract is only worth as much as its continuity: the same station numbering, the same monitored access points, the same reading of bait consumption rising or falling. A contractor who knows a building knows that station no. 7, behind the waste-water stack in the bike store, is eaten every autumn, and that the grille on the neighbouring basement vent needs checking before a new block is placed.

When the file disappears, that memory disappears with it. The new operative starts from a blank page, recreates a layout plan, and loses one or two quarters rediscovering what the other already knew. Meanwhile, the building is not being treated: it is being observed.

The three classic breaks

The fourth line is the most treacherous. A restaurant or convenience store that closes takes its private contract with it: the population it was feeding moves into the communal areas within the following weeks. The topic is covered in detail in our article on rodents in a ground-floor commercial unit.

What the outgoing managing agent must hand over: the legal framework

The one-month deadline and the statement of arrears

In jointly owned buildings, the transfer of records is regulated. Article 18-2 of Act no. 65-557 of 10 July 1965, supplemented by Decree no. 67-223, requires a managing agent whose mandate ends to hand over to the new agent all of the owners' association's documents and records within one month of the end of their duties, then, within three months, the statement of accounts of the individual owners and of the association. Failing that, the new managing agent or the association may apply to the president of the judicial court sitting in summary proceedings.

Records are not limited to minutes and accounts. They include the current servicing and maintenance contracts, and therefore the annual rodent, insect and pest control contract, its amendments, its termination conditions and the related invoices. The building's maintenance log, provided for by Decree no. 2001-477 of 30 May 2001, also lists routine maintenance contracts.

The list to request in black and white

A generic request ("please send us the records") usually produces a box of meeting minutes and nothing usable. The documents have to be named:

• the current pest control (3D) contract, with effective date, term, notice period and exact scope (communal areas, cellars, bin rooms, refuse chutes, plant rooms, outdoor areas);
• the layout plan or numbered installation plan of bait stations and mechanical traps, with references by building and by floor;
• the intervention reports for the last 24 months, dated and signed;
• the safety data sheets and the record of biocidal products used, with their marketing authorisation numbers;
• the contractor's Certibiocide certificate and its CEPA / NF EN 16636 certification if it holds one;
• the history of reports from owners and tenants, including emails;
• any quotes for proofing works that were proposed but not voted through;
• correspondence with the municipal hygiene and health service or the regional health agency, if there was any.

A residential block that does not hold its own layout plan does not own its rodent control programme. It is renting its contractor's memory.

These same documents form the backbone of the register described in our guide to the pest control log for apartment blocks. Requesting them at handover is the best moment: it is the only time the outgoing firm has a legal obligation to answer.

What the departing contractor must do on site

Removing the equipment is not optional

A rodent control contract that ends leaves equipment behind: secured bait boxes, traps, monitoring boards, sometimes insect light traps. In the vast majority of contracts this equipment remains the contractor's property. Its presence after termination raises two problems.

First, a regulatory problem: a station containing an anticoagulant bait must remain under surveillance, identified, locked and checked at defined intervals. A station abandoned for eight months in a bin room is no longer a control device, it is an unsupervised store of biocidal product — with a risk of secondary poisoning for neighbourhood cats and birds of prey, and a direct risk to anyone who opens it. The securing rules are detailed in our article on rodenticide baits in apartment blocks.

Second, a diagnostic problem: the new contractor cannot interpret consumption figures when it knows neither the installation date, nor the active substance, nor the dosage.

The termination letter must therefore demand a removal report listing the equipment taken away, the quantities of bait recovered and the date. If the owners' association wants to keep the boxes, that is negotiated as a purchase, with systematic replacement of the blocks and the keys.

When the contractor never comes back

Sometimes a company terminated for poor performance simply stops turning up. The managing agent must then have the situation formally recorded by the new operative, backed by photographs and station numbering, and treat the recovered baits as hazardous waste through the appropriate channel. A simple inspection logbook for technical use, kept on site by the caretaker, is enough to date-stamp these findings and then serves as evidence in any dispute over the final quarter's invoicing.

The handover audit: what the new contractor must look at

Façade of an older light-brick apartment building with a fire escape and a red door

A technical survey, not just baiting

Taking over a contract never begins with installing thirty stations. It begins with a documented technical survey, charged separately in any serious proposal, which must produce four deliverables:

1. The activity survey: runways, smear marks, fresh or old droppings, gnawing, reported noises, mapped floor by floor.
2. The building fabric survey: entry points, unsealed ducts, chewed grilles, cellar door thresholds, service penetrations, dried-out floor gullies, refuse chute hatches.
3. The attractiveness survey: waste management, bin rooms, storage in cellars, animal feeding in the courtyard, water leaks.
4. The new numbered layout plan, with a justification for each location.

Point 2 is the one that changes the outcome. Taking over a contract is a unique opportunity to price the proofing works once and for all, because a fresh pair of eyes sees what habit had stopped noticing. Our full method is set out in the article on sealing rodent entry points in apartment blocks.

The residents' committee's minimum toolkit

A residents' committee or a property manager does not have to do the technician's job, but it must be able to check. Three items are enough to avoid relying entirely on the report received:

• a powerful site torch, essential for inspecting landing ducts, crawl spaces and the back of cellars where fixed lighting is always lacking;
• a laser distance meter, to measure the lengths of grilles and door thresholds to be treated and compare two proofing quotes honestly;
• a set of non-toxic monitoring boards, placed by the caretaker at reported locations between visits: they provide objective evidence of real activity where accounts contradict one another.

For sensitive buildings — ground-floor catering, serviced apartments, healthcare premises — an endoscopic inspection camera with a screen makes it possible to look behind a raised floor or inside a service duct without opening up the partition, which avoids a good deal of needless work. And as soon as a portfolio exceeds a few buildings, a short practical guide to pest management in multi-occupancy buildings helps the manager speak the same language as their contractors during joint inspections.

The handover timetable to keep to

The first 90 days

Do not wait for the general meeting to act. Urgent protective measures and routine maintenance fall within the managing agent's powers; only signing a new multi-year contract and carrying out works require a vote. The majority rules and the quotes to attach are detailed in our article on voting a rodent control contract at the general meeting.

The "we'll deal with it at the next general meeting" trap

A building in the Paris region that loses its treatment in July and waits for the March general meeting goes two full seasons without intervention: the autumn surge, when communal heating restarts and rodents look for warmth, then winter in the basement. In the end, the cost of recovery is always higher than the cost of the contract that was avoided, because an intensive knock-down phase is needed instead of simple maintenance.

For landlords, property managers and businesses

Changing contractor without losing traceability

For a social housing landlord, a property fund or a multi-site operator, the issues are the same but volume changes everything. Three habits prevent a traceability gap when a contract changes hands:

• require in the specification the handover of layout plans in a usable format and ownership of intervention data by the client, not the contractor;
• allow for an overlap period of two to four weeks between outgoing and incoming contractors, with a joint visit to sites classed as sensitive;
• demand an initial condition report for each site within 30 days of the award notification, serving as a baseline for measuring subsequent performance.

These clauses are drafted upstream: our guide to the specification for a pest control service sets out their wording, and the article on assessing tenders explains how to avoid choosing on price alone.

For a business, the food safety inspector does not care about your change of contractor

A restaurateur, a baker or a food warehouse manager remains obliged, under Regulation (EC) no. 852/2004 and the Hygiene Package, to control pests at all times. During an inspection by the food safety authority, the absence of reports for a quarter cannot be explained away by a change of supplier: it constitutes a documentary breach. Before terminating, you must have signed with the next contractor and obtained a copy of the history.

The three most expensive mistakes

1. Reusing the old layout plan without checking it. Building works, cellar reconfigurations and changes of use have shifted the access routes. A two-year-old plan is to be verified, not copied out.
2. Paying maintenance prices for a recovery job. A first year after a break in treatment normally costs more: a close-interval knock-down phase, then a switch to quarterly maintenance. A proposal offering just two annual visits on a building with confirmed activity is promising failure.
3. Forgetting private units and commercial premises. Communal areas treated and the shop left untreated: the population survives. Coordination with tenants must be written into the contract.

The habit to keep, for an incoming managing agent as much as for a property manager: deal with the pest control file within a month of taking office, just like the lift and the boiler. It is the only time the documents can still be recovered as a matter of right, and the only time a building fabric audit can be charged once to avoid ten years of baiting.

For a handover technical survey on a building or a portfolio in the Paris region, our team draws up a detailed quote after a joint inspection, and offers annual contracts that include handing the layout plans over to the owners' association.