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What does the free consultation actually cover?

It covers the diagnosis. You call, or you send the form below, and somebody who does this work talks through the problem with you until both of you know what it is. There is no charge for that and nothing is held back to force a site visit.

The consultation is free. It is not a free estimate, and the distinction is the whole of our pricing policy rather than a piece of wordplay. A diagnosis is a conversation. A priced plan of work is a document produced after a survey, and that is a different thing with a different cost attached to it.

Most inquiries never need to become the second thing. A homeowner who describes droppings along the back of a kitchen base cabinet and nowhere else in the house has already told us most of what we need to know, and the answer is usually a short one about where the void behind that cabinet connects to. Somebody who describes winged insects at a south-facing window on the first warm day in March has described a swarm from inside the structure, and the useful next question is about the porch framing rather than about a product.

What the call is genuinely for is deciding whether there is a job here at all. A fair number of calls end with us telling the caller they do not need us: the gap is one they can close themselves, the problem is a seasonal nuisance that will resolve on its own, or the actual fault is a plumbing repair and we are not plumbers. That outcome is not a wasted call. It is the reason the call is free.

Where the answer is that the building needs work, the conversation moves on to what that work would involve, roughly how long it takes, and whether it needs a survey before anybody can be precise. At that point the fee for a written plan gets explained on the phone, before it is incurred, with no ambiguity about what it buys.

Why does a written proposal carry a fee?

Because the plan is the product, and giving it away has cost us work.

Consider what a real proposal from us contains. Somebody has walked the perimeter at grade, gone into the crawlspace or the cellar, opened the access hatches, looked at the roofline, read the rub marks and the droppings and the frass, and traced them back to the openings and the moisture conditions producing them. What comes out of that is a list of specific locations, each with a specific defect, each with a specific remedy and a sequence. That is a building survey with a scope of work attached.

Hand that document to somebody for free and it becomes a shopping list. It has happened: a proposal setting out exactly which twenty-two penetrations need closing and in what order, passed straight to a cheaper contractor to price against. The second contractor did not do the survey, did not find the openings, and did not carry the risk of being wrong about them. They priced somebody else’s thinking.

So the survey and the written plan are billed. The fee is quoted before the survey is booked, it is a fixed amount for the property in question, and it is stated on the phone rather than buried. If the work proceeds with us, the fee comes off the cost of the project, which means a client who goes ahead pays for the plan exactly once and it is folded into the job.

Canine detection inspections are billed separately, per unit. A dog working a multi-unit building is a different kind of survey with a different cost basis, and the rate depends on the building, the number of units in scope and how the schedule has to be arranged around residents. It is quoted on the call. There is no published rate for it, per unit or otherwise, because a number printed on a website is a number quoted without seeing the building, which is the thing this whole page argues against.

No prices appear anywhere on this site for the same reason. A figure attached to a service name is a price for a routine, not for your problem.

What should you have ready before you call?

Four things. None of them require you to investigate anything, and each of them changes the answer you get.

What you are seeing. Not what you think it is. The actual observation: droppings, a smell, scratching in the ceiling at night, winged insects at a window, live insects in a cabinet, chewed packaging, sawdust-like material below a sill. People routinely apologize for not knowing which species they have. That is our job and not yours, and a careful description of what is actually there beats a confident misidentification every time.

Where in the building you are seeing it. This is the one that matters most, and there is a section below on why. As specific as you can manage: which room, which floor, which wall, high or low, near which appliance or fixture.

How long, and whether it comes and goes. A problem three days old and a problem that returns every April are two different problems with two different causes. Seasonality is diagnostic on its own. Activity that begins with the first cold snap is a different mechanism from activity that begins with the first warm week, and both are different from activity that never stops.

What the building is. Roughly. A 1920s frame house with a fieldstone foundation and a crawlspace. A post-war ranch on a slab. A pre-war co-op above a commercial ground floor. A brownstone sharing party walls with two neighbors. A single-story warehouse with a loading dock. You do not need construction drawings; you need to be able to say what kind of thing it is and roughly when it was built, because the construction era predicts the failure points.

Two more, only if they apply. If anybody has treated the property already, what was done and when, including anything you did yourself. And if there is a compliance driver behind the call, say so early: an audit date, a violation, a managing agent asking for documentation. That changes what we prepare, not just what we do.

Why is “what you are seeing and where” the question that matters?

Because the pattern tells us which structural condition to look for first, and the structural condition is the job.

Pest problems are building problems, and they need permanent structural solutions. That is not a slogan; it is a claim about causation with a practical consequence, which is that the location of the evidence is a map of the pathway. Droppings confined to the perimeter of a basement are a different building fault from droppings in an upstairs closet, and the second one is telling us there is a vertical route: a chase, a soffit run, a plumbing stack, a wall cavity open at the top plate.

Some worked examples of how the pattern narrows the search.

Droppings along the back edge of a kitchen base cabinet and nowhere else usually mean the entry is under the cabinet run, most often at the sink base where the supply and drain lines come through the floor or the wall, and the void behind the cabinets connects to something. The first place we look is the plumbing penetration, not the yard.

Scratching in the ceiling of an upstairs room, heard at dusk and again before dawn, is a roofline problem: a soffit return, a gable louver with failed screening, a ridge vent closure strip that has compressed. Nobody needs to look at the foundation for that one.

Winged insects at an interior window in early spring, in a house with a covered porch, points at the porch framing or the band joist behind it, because that is where the water is. Carpenter ants excavate wood that is already wet, so the question underneath the ant question is where the moisture path runs.

Activity in one apartment of a multi-unit building that appears in the unit above or below within a fortnight is not an apartment problem at all. It is a chase or a riser that has never been firestopped, and treating unit by unit moves the population rather than removing it.

Cockroaches in a restaurant that concentrate at one station and not others usually mean a specific harborage rather than a general sanitation failure, and the useful information is which equipment, on which wall, with what behind it.

None of that requires you to be right about the species, the cause or the remedy. It requires you to be accurate about what you have observed and where. That is why both questions are on the form, and why they are two separate boxes rather than one.

What actually happens on a survey?

A survey is a physical inspection of the building, and it takes as long as the building takes. A small detached house is a couple of hours. A pre-war multiple dwelling with a cellar, a compactor room, chases and a sidewalk vault is most of a day.

The route is consistent. The full perimeter at grade, reading the sill plate junction, the foundation, the utility penetrations, the weep holes, the bulkhead and any crawlspace access. Then below: the crawlspace or cellar, the joist bays, the drain lines, the house trap where there is one. Then the interior in the areas where activity has been reported, opening what needs opening. Then the roofline, the soffits, the vents and the flashing. In a commercial building, add the loading dock, the refuse area, the compactor, the mechanical rooms and every door that opens to the outside.

Throughout, the work is reading evidence rather than counting animals. Rub marks along travel routes, droppings and their age and distribution, gnawing at soft substrates, frass, disturbed insulation, and the moisture that explains most of it. The evidence points somewhere; we follow it there.

What comes back to you is a written record of what was found and where, with the openings and the conditions identified, and a plan for closing them in the right order. Where a repair belongs to somebody else, it is named as somebody else’s repair: a leaking supply line, a failed drain, a grading problem, a roof detail. We would rather tell you that a plumber has to come first than take money for work that will not hold until they do.

You will also be told what has to happen before any sealing takes place. Reducing the existing population first is not optional, and sealing a building with an active population inside concentrates it in the wall voids instead of removing it. If a proposal from anybody skips that step, that is worth a question.

What is in a written proposal?

Six things, and a price is only one of them.

What was found, and where. Location by location, in the language of the building rather than the language of the pest. Not “evidence of rodent activity in the basement”, but which bay, which penetration, which side.

What is producing it. The opening, the condition, or both. The mechanism gets named, because a client who understands the mechanism can tell whether the work has actually addressed it.

What gets done, in what order. Population reduction first where it applies, then the physical work, then verification. Each opening with the treatment appropriate to its substrate, its size and whether it has to stay functional. A weep hole has to keep draining, so it gets screened rather than sealed. A gap in a mortar joint gets repointed. Materials are specified rather than left vague: custom-fabricated 26-gauge galvanised sheet metal, cement and mortar, Xcluder fill fabric and door sweeps, copper and stainless mesh, hardware cloth and mechanical fasteners.

What somebody else has to do. The repairs that are not ours, stated plainly, with the reason they come first.

What is excluded. What the plan does not cover, so nobody discovers the boundary later.

How it is documented. For a commercial account, what records are produced, at what interval, in what form, and how they will read to an auditor.

There is no warranty attached, and this site never suggests otherwise. What is attached is a scope specific enough that you can check it was done.

How is a commercial inquiry different from a residential one?

The building is more complicated, the decision has more people in it, and there is usually a document at the end of it that somebody outside the building is going to read.

A residential call is normally one property, one decision-maker and one problem. A commercial call brings scope questions with it before anything else: how many buildings, what is in them, who has access to what, when can work happen, and what standard the program has to satisfy. A food manufacturing site working to a Global Food Safety Initiative benchmarked scheme needs a pest program whose device maps, service records, trend analysis and corrective actions survive an audit unedited. A restaurant needs the work to happen when the kitchen is closed. A managed portfolio needs one contractor producing the same documentation across every address.

The commercial work is where this firm’s depth is, and the residential work is the same method on a smaller building. The programs built for audited food plants, hospitals and port facilities are the reason a homeowner should take the exclusion argument seriously; the house gets the method, not a reduced version of it.

If your inquiry is commercial, say so on the form and say what the site is. It changes who calls you back and what they have read before they do. The commercial hub sets out the verticals in detail, and the pages for co-op and condo buildings, food facilities, restaurants and managed property portfolios each go further into what the program looks like in that setting.

Who should be on the call for a board, a managing agent or a plant?

Somebody who knows the complaint history, and somebody who controls access. Those are frequently two different people, and a call without the second one usually needs a second call.

For a co-op or condo board. The managing agent, the superintendent, and ideally the board member who raised it. The agent has the complaint record, the superintendent knows which cellar doors stick and where the chases run, and the board member knows what the building has already been told. Boards also carry obligations that shape the scope, which the pages on board obligations cover in detail.

For a managing agent with a portfolio. Bring the address list and the complaint history by building. What is worth establishing on the first call is whether these are the same problem in fifteen buildings or fifteen problems, because the answers diverge immediately.

For a plant or a food facility. The quality or food safety manager, and whoever owns the audit relationship. What we need early is the scheme, the audit cycle and the last audit’s pest-related findings if there were any. That determines the documentation before it determines the treatment.

For a restaurant. The owner or the general manager, plus whoever locks up. Access hours are half the problem.

What does being open 24 hours mean?

It means the line is answered at any hour, on any day. It does not mean a truck arrives within the hour of every call.

The distinction is worth stating because “24 hours” is a phrase people have learned to distrust. Here it means two real things. First, you can reach a person at two in the morning when you have found something in a kitchen and cannot wait until Monday to know what it is. Second, work genuinely happens outside business hours, because some of it cannot happen any other way: a restaurant kitchen has to be closed, a plant has to be down, and hornet nest removal is done at night when the colony is inside the nest.

What happens on an out-of-hours call is a diagnosis and a schedule. If it is an emergency, it is treated as one. If it is a problem that will be exactly the same at nine in the morning, we will tell you that too, rather than dispatching a night visit you do not need.

How do you check us before you hire anyone?

By verifying the numbers with the state rather than taking them from a website, including this one.

Graduate Pest Control holds New York pesticide business registration 03298. Ryan Katz holds certified applicator C1822141, categories 7A, 7F and 8. Both are published here in full precisely so that they can be checked without asking us for anything.

The general question of how to vet a pest control contractor in New York is covered properly on its own page rather than summarized here: how to verify a pest control contractor sets out what to ask for, what a written scope should contain, what notification you are entitled to before anything is applied, and what should make you walk away. It is worth reading before you call anybody, us included. What each credential required and what it lets us do is set out on the credentials page, and the background of the person you will be speaking to is on Ryan Katz’s page.

The firm has been operating since 1983. It was founded by Arnold Katz, who holds a B.S. in Entomology from the University of Georgia and still works in it, providing identification and diagnostic support on complex accounts.

What does Graduate not take?

Stated plainly, so that nobody spends a phone call finding out.

No termite work. It is not offered. If termites are what you have, you need a firm that does it, and that is a straight answer rather than a lead-in to something else.

No ornamental or turf work. Ornamental plantings, turf and commercial grounds programs fall under category 3A, which is not among the categories on our certificate. Residential mosquito work is a different category and is offered; a landscape spray program is not.

A defined service area. Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, and Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens in the city. The other two boroughs are outside it. Every market we cover is listed on the service areas page, split between Long Island and New York City, and if you are near a boundary the fastest way to settle it is to ask on the call.

Removal of nuisance wildlife. Where a job needs an animal removed under a nuisance wildlife license, that step is carried out by licensed partner firms we coordinate with, and the exclusion work afterwards is ours. That division is stated up front rather than discovered later.

What we do take is set out across the pest control services, and the core of it is structural exclusion: closing the openings and correcting the conditions rather than treating the population and returning. Rodent control and bed bug treatment are the two most common reasons people call, canine rodent detection is available where a dog will find in an hour what a person would take a day to find, and exclusion consulting exists for buildings that need the survey and the plan without the crew. If you are trying to work out what you have before you call, the pest library has the identification detail.

What happens after you send the form?

It reaches the business email directly and is read by a person. There is no queue and no ticketing system between you and an answer.

Expect a reply within one business day, and usually sooner. If the matter is urgent, call rather than typing: the phone is answered around the clock and a conversation gets to the answer faster than a thread does. The number is (631) 212-9601.

The form asks for both a phone number and an email address because different people want to be reached differently. It does not ask for a street address, and that is deliberate. Graduate is a service-area business; the address matters when a survey is being scheduled, not when a problem is being described. Nothing you write in the form is used for anything except answering it.

If something goes wrong with the form, it will tell you so on the screen rather than pretending it worked. In that case, call the number above or write to us directly, and the inquiry gets to the same place.