Hear from Our Customers
Most people dealing with a rodent problem in Lefferts Gardens have already tried something. Traps from the hardware store. Steel wool stuffed into a gap. Maybe even a cheap one-time spray treatment that held for a few weeks. And then the scratching in the walls started again. That’s not bad luck that’s what happens when the entry points don’t get addressed.
Your home is probably a prewar rowhouse or an attached brownstone built somewhere around 1938. That means decades of settling, shifting, and accumulated gaps around pipe penetrations, foundation cracks, and aging basement windows. Rats can squeeze through a hole the size of a quarter. Mice need even less. In a building that old, those openings aren’t always visible to the untrained eye and no trap in the world fixes a gap in your foundation.
Then there’s Prospect Park. The park borders the western edge of Lefferts Gardens, and Norway rats living in those wooded areas don’t stay there. They forage outward up to 150 feet from their nests right into the residential blocks of PLG. Add the active construction along Rogers Avenue and New York Avenue displacing established colonies, and you have a neighborhood with structural, ongoing rodent pressure that individual households can’t eliminate on their own. What you can do is make your property the hardest target on the block.
We were founded in 1971 by Richard Kourbage Sr. His sons Richard Jr. and Charles have been running the company alongside him since the late 1980s. That’s over 50 years of one Brooklyn family handling pest problems in Brooklyn buildings not a franchise, not a call center, not a company that has to look up what a prewar rowhouse looks like.
Our home base is at 2216 Flatbush Avenue in Marine Park the same Flatbush Avenue that runs directly through the heart of Lefferts Gardens. When a technician shows up at your door, they already know what a 1930s attached rowhouse looks like from the inside. They know the shared wall problem. They know what the basement connections between units mean for how rodents move through a building. That experience isn’t something you can replicate quickly.
We hold an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau accredited since May 5, 1989. We’re fully licensed, bonded, and insured, and we apply only NYS Department of Environmental Conservation registered materials. If you’re dealing with an HPD violation or a landlord dispute, we’ve worked with New York attorneys and real estate brokers on exactly these situations for years.
It starts with a free phone consultation no charge, no pressure. You describe what you’re seeing or hearing, and a real person helps you understand what you’re likely dealing with and what the next steps look like. If it makes sense to move forward, an appointment gets scheduled within 48 hours.
When our technician arrives, the first thing we do is inspect not just the obvious spots, but the full perimeter of your property. In a Lefferts Gardens rowhouse, that means checking basement penetrations, shared wall connections, utility entry points, aging mortar joints, and any gaps around plumbing that have developed over the building’s lifespan. This is where most rodent control falls short: treating what you can see without finding how they’re getting in. Our inspection process is designed to find both.
Treatment follows inspection, and it’s targeted not a broadcast chemical application, but a focused approach based on what the inspection actually found. After treatment, we address exclusion work on the specific entry points identified during the walkthrough. If there’s ongoing pressure from a nearby construction site or from the park, a follow-up visit confirms the treatment is holding. You’re not left wondering whether it worked the process is built around making sure it does.
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Rodent control in a Lefferts Gardens rowhouse isn’t the same job as rodent control in a detached single-family home somewhere else in Brooklyn. The attached housing stock here the shared walls, the connected basements, the original pipe penetrations that haven’t been touched since the Truman administration creates a specific set of challenges that require a specific approach. We serve residential and commercial properties, and our service is built around the reality of how rodents actually move through this neighborhood’s buildings.
For homeowners and renters in Lefferts Gardens, our service includes a full interior and exterior inspection, targeted treatment for rats and mice, exclusion guidance covering the entry points identified during the walkthrough, and follow-up visits to confirm the infestation has been resolved. For building owners and property managers dealing with multi-unit infestations which the NYC Housing Maintenance Code requires you to address our experience with HPD violations and health code compliance documentation is directly relevant. A rodent complaint filed through 311 can trigger a Department of Health inspection and a formal Commissioner’s Order to Abate. We’ve worked through that process with Brooklyn property owners and attorneys many times over.
If you’re in the Lefferts Manor Historic District and concerned about how treatment interacts with a landmarked property, that’s a conversation worth having on the free consultation call. Our approach is always targeted, always NYS DEC compliant, and always explained before anything is applied.
This is the most common frustration we hear from Lefferts Gardens residents, and the answer is almost always the same: the entry points weren’t addressed. Treatment kills the rodents currently in your home, but if the gaps that let them in are still open, new ones move in especially in a neighborhood with the kind of ongoing rodent pressure that comes from Prospect Park to the west and active construction displacing colonies along Rogers Avenue and New York Avenue.
In a prewar attached rowhouse, the entry points are often invisible without a proper inspection. Gaps behind kitchen plumbing, cracks in basement walls, deteriorated mortar around old utility lines, shared wall penetrations between your unit and the next these are the actual problem. Until they’re found and sealed, you’re in a cycle. A real solution requires an inspection-first approach that identifies the specific vulnerabilities in your building, not just a treatment that addresses the rodents you can currently see.
Yes and it’s one of the more common causes of sudden infestations in Lefferts Gardens right now. When a developer breaks ground or demolishes a structure, the rodent colonies living in and around that site get displaced. They don’t disappear. They move, and they move fast, into the nearest available harborage which is often the prewar rowhouse or apartment building next door.
If you’ve noticed a sudden uptick in rodent activity and there’s active construction within a few blocks of your home on Rogers Avenue, New York Avenue, or nearby corridors, those two things are almost certainly connected. The good news is that construction-displacement infestations are treatable. The key is addressing your building’s specific entry points so that even as construction continues and more colonies get displaced, your property isn’t the path of least resistance. That’s what exclusion work is designed to do.
Under New York City’s Housing Maintenance Code, yes building owners are legally required to keep their properties free of pests. If your landlord isn’t responding to a rodent problem, you have the right to file a complaint through 311, which can trigger a Department of Health inspection. A failed inspection results in a Commissioner’s Order to Abate, which is a formal legal order requiring the owner to hire a licensed pest management professional.
HPD violations related to rodent infestations are a matter of public record and can affect a building’s rental and sale value. We’ve worked with New York attorneys and real estate brokers on exactly these situations documenting infestations, supporting compliance processes, and helping property owners resolve violations. If you’re a renter trying to document what’s happening in your unit, or a building owner trying to get ahead of an HPD violation before it escalates, a call to us is a reasonable first step.
The CDC documents over 35 diseases that rats and mice can spread to humans and in a dense urban neighborhood like Lefferts Gardens, the exposure risk is more direct than most people realize. Leptospirosis, salmonella, rat-bite fever, and hantavirus are among the most serious. Hantavirus is particularly relevant because it can be contracted simply by breathing in dust contaminated with rodent urine or droppings even after the rodents themselves are gone. Dried droppings become airborne when disturbed during cleaning.
Rodents also carry fleas, ticks, and mites that can transmit additional diseases to both people and pets. In a neighborhood where rodents are moving between Prospect Park, commercial corridors on Flatbush Avenue, and residential buildings, the exposure pathway is real. Beyond disease, the NPMA estimates that rodents cause up to 25% of house fires annually through wire-chewing a risk that’s particularly significant in older prewar wiring systems common in Lefferts Gardens’ 1930s building stock.
Professional rodent control in Brooklyn generally runs between $180 and $610 for a standard residential treatment, with exclusion work sealing the entry points identified during the inspection adding roughly $200 to $600 depending on the scope of work. In Lefferts Gardens specifically, older prewar buildings with multiple penetration points and shared walls sometimes require more extensive exclusion work than a newer or detached home would.
It’s worth framing that cost against what repeated DIY attempts actually add up to. Hardware store traps, expanding foam, and one-off spray treatments cost money too and if the entry points aren’t addressed, you’re buying time, not a solution. We offer a free phone consultation and a free estimate with no obligation, so you know exactly what you’re looking at before committing to anything. There’s no financial risk in getting a professional assessment.
Yes. We serve the full Lefferts Gardens neighborhood, including the Lefferts Manor Historic District the landmarked core of PLG bounded roughly by Flatbush Avenue, Bedford Avenue, Fenimore Street, and Maple Street. The landmarked designation doesn’t change the rodent control process, but it does mean the buildings in that area tend to be original-condition prewar structures with unmodified building envelopes that have been accumulating potential entry points for close to a century.
Treatment in these homes is targeted and NYS DEC compliant nothing is applied broadly or without first understanding the specific conditions in your property. If you have concerns about chemical safety for children, pets, or elderly family members, that’s a conversation that happens during the free consultation before any service is scheduled. We’ve been working in Brooklyn’s prewar building stock for over 50 years, and our approach is always calibrated to the actual building not a one-size-fits-all template.
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