Finding the perfect property can often be a stressful and frustrating experience. If you have been looking for a while and you have finally found your new home or investment, it can be tempting to skip the non-essentials in a bid to settle on your property quickly, but this can lead to you making a serious mistake. While pest inspection reports aren’t a legal requirement, they are a good idea. Getting a pest report can help you ensure your prospective home is free of pests, or warn you of a potential problem. Pests such as borers and termites can cause significant damage to a structure, and they can be expensive to eradicate.

Although you should always consider a pest report as a matter of course, here are five signs that the property you are interested in might have a termite problem:

1. Swarming. This is often the first indicator that makes homeowners realise that they have an infestation on their property. During the spring, some members of a colony fly off to establish new colonies, and if you are inspecting a property around this time you may see flying insects or the dead bodies of termites that have tried to escape on window ledges or around the property.
2. Hollowed out wooden surfaces. This is particularly evident in wooden homes, but if you tap any wooden areas of a termite-infested property, the wood may make a hollow sound. This can be a key indicator that there are termites inside, and may warrant further investigation.
3. Visible evidence of termites. If you pull back rotting or dead wood around the property and see bugs inside, this could mean that there are termites in the house.
4. Mud tunnels on the walls. Termites build tubes across exposed areas to transport moisture. These tubes look like pencil sized mud tunnels and if you see them on the walls of a property you are looking at, it is a sign that there could be a serious termite problem, which is worth investigating.
5. Signs of dirt in the wood. If wooden structures sound hollow you can tell whether the culprit is termites or water damage by checking for dirt. Termites bring pieces of dirt up into wood when they move around so if there is dirt present in the wood, this is a clear sign there could be termite activity.

Termite infestations can cause a number of different problems, but the main one is structural damage from consuming the inside of wood. Although termites are generally fairly slow eaters, they work constantly, which means that if they are not eradicated, over time they can cause a high level of damage.

If caught in the early stages, it is possible to remove the termites and reduce the chances of long-term damage to the property. A pre-purchase pest inspection report will reveal the extent of the termite damage, and you can get an idea of how costly it will be to eradicate the termites and repair the damage.

No matter how perfect a property might seem, always make sure you have all the information available before you commit to a purchase. Pest damage can be expensive to fix and can cause ongoing structural issues to a property.

Although arranging pest inspection reports may seem like an onerous task at the time, being aware of any termite problems before you purchase may save considerable amounts of money and stress in the future.