Here’s something most termite pages won’t tell you: in New York City, the attached nature of the housing stock changes the calculus entirely. When you treat a standalone house in the suburbs, a liquid barrier around the perimeter may be enough to protect that structure. But when your home shares a foundation wall with three neighbors — and all of you are sitting on the same contiguous soil — a perimeter barrier at your property line is only part of the answer.
Eastern Subterranean Termites, the species active throughout New York City and the broader Northeast, forage through underground soil tunnels that can extend hundreds of feet from the colony’s nest. They’re active 24 hours a day. They don’t care whose property they’re under. And because they live entirely underground until they’ve already caused damage, most New York City homeowners don’t know they have a problem until swarmers appear in the spring — often a year or more after the colony first reached their structure.
We’ve been treating termites in Brooklyn brownstones, Queens rowhouses, and attached homes across all five boroughs since 1971. The soil moisture from aging infrastructure, proximity to waterways like Newtown Creek and Jamaica Bay, and decades-old building construction create conditions where termite pressure is real and persistent. A termite baiting system in New York City addresses that reality directly.