Alterra Pest Control Friendly and polite employees, with horrific services and shady contract policies Houston Texas

Alterra door to door salesman showed up at my house on 6/6/2015.  I was thinking amazing timing as I was looking at hiring a pest control service to take care of an issue I had inside the home.  Talking with the salesman I explained that I did not have issues outside the home (I treat the perimeter and yard regularly myself).  The salesman said they would take care of the issue inside, spray the garage, the WHOLE yard, take down any wasp nests etc. around the eves.  I was kind of skeptical, but decided since I was looking for a pest service anyway I would give it a try.  They explained that this would be signing up for a year of treatments (quarterly) and also explained that I could cancel at any time, however there would be a cancelation fee if I did not complete the service contract to bring the charge up to the normal first time treatment charge of $214.

Two days later on 6/8/2015 the service representative arrives and says he is here to do the service on my residence.  I told them to proceed and I went back inside to wait for him to finish the exterior treatment before coming in to do what I really contracted them for, the INSIDE.  I watched through the window as the service tech walked around the house with a “cob web sweeper” around the exterior.  I knew that there was nothing on the outside of the house that needed that treatment, but since it is part of the package I just continued to watch.  He proceeded to come back into the back yard carrying a 3 gallon portable sprayer partially filled with I presume insecticide.  I watched at the service tech walked the perimeter of the home maybe spraying at times.  This has now taken a total of 10 minutes and the service tech came back to the door and said that he had completed his treatment of the residence.  I asked about the major issue I hired them in the first place, about treating the inside of the home and garage.  He said that he was only here to treat the perimeter of the home asked me nicely to sign the work order and then left.

Looking over the invoice afterwards I see that he marked he used 3 gallons of spray and 1 lb of granules.  Funny how I treat my whole yard with 20 lbs of granules myself.  I never saw the service tech with any granules to begin with, and even though I was in plain sight of the backyard where he marked that is where he applied the granules.

Within 2 weeks of their application I treated 4 ant mounds in the yard myself, and have had more wasps attempting to build nests than usual. Appears that their spraying did accomplish one thing, I now had a bad case of spiders inside of my garage (one of the spots I hired them specifically for).

I received my invoice from the company for $107.17 for this treatment.  I next received another call in a few weeks saying that they will be back out in two days to apply another treatment.  I said that I thought that this was a quarterly application and that they did not provide the service which I had hired them to do initially.  I told the representative on the phone that I NEVER wanted them around my house again. They told me graciously that they would be glad to cancel the contract but I would be billed the additional $107 dollars for the cancellation.  I will pay this also when it arrives because have also seen they like to report to the credit bureaus.  Personally I think they intend on receiving mostly cancelations on these contracts and that is how they fully intend to make the money.  Many people will refuse to pay the cancellation fee only to find out that they now have a mark on their credit report for slow payments or worse.  Should read about the company before taking any “door to door” salesman up on anything.

DO NOT EVER let these people into your life.  They are all nice, polite and cordial as far as representing the company, however the services provided are not what was agreed upon, and horrific in quality.