Closed Crawlspace Market Keeps Expanding

Although controlling ants, cockroaches and bed bugs has been a staple of the pest management industry in the United States for more than 100 years, closing crawlspaces is a relatively new service offering for the industry.

In 2009, the first-ever report on closed crawlspaces by the National Center for Energy Management and Building Technologies was published — and that changed everything. According to Billy Tesh, president of Crawlspace Depot, the report showed that closing a crawlspace made a home 18 percent more energy efficient, among numerous other benefits.

Since that time, more pest management professionals have been expanding their services to offer closed crawlspaces each year, while consumer understanding of the service also has increased.

“It was a big change in attitude towards the crawlspace. We were always taught increase ventilation and make sure the vapor barrier is 75 percent and ventilate, ventilate, ventilate,” Tesh says. “But in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s there were changing dynamics of the crawlspace of a home.

 

Closing crawlspaces is literally a foot in the door of potential new customers. Sixty-three percent of PMPs who have closed crawlspace clients were able to convert them into ongoing general pest control clients.

“So ventilating was not successful and more of a detriment. This research project in eastern North Carolina [tested crawlspaces in] different ways — six were ventilated and six were closed — and it improved air quality while reducing costs. That showed me that it was an effective and sustainable way of correcting that problem.”

The 2022 PCT State of the Closed Crawlspace Market research shows that crawlspace services continue to grow as an add-on for PMPs throughout the country.

Thirty percent of PMPs surveyed provide closed crawlspace services. Those figures have been generally on the upswing for the past five years.

Of course, there are PMPs who do not (or cannot) offer this service in their area of the country. According to the survey, the majority of PMPs are not offering it for three reasons — the required training, the time necessary to investigate and enter the market, and the largest reason, a lack of demand in their market. Almost 50 percent say their market does not have many homes with crawlspaces.

Chad Highley, A.C.E., owner of Environmental Pest Control in Lawton, Oklahoma, provides the service, but because the majority of new homes in his area are built on slabs, the market is limited for growth.

“That’s what we’ve run across,” Highley says. “The majority are slab foundations so the ones that are crawlspaces are much older and even most of those have inadequate clearance. They aren’t as desirable. So, you end up with the homes that really need it are usually rental properties and the landlords don’t want to spend money on it.”

Of those surveyed, 34 percent have been performing closed crawlspaces for 20 years or more, 36 percent between five and 19 years, and 28 percent have offered it for less than four years.

Closing crawlspaces is literally a foot in the door of potential new customers. Sixty-three percent of PMPs who have closed crawlspace clients were able to convert them into ongoing general pest control clients. The exact same percentage of PMPs (63 percent) have been able to convert general pest customers into crawlspace clients.

“From the pest management side, we started out slow, one to two jobs a month then one to two a week and after about eight years we got the traction,” says Tesh. Tesh owns the pest management firm Pest Management Systems Inc., Greensboro, North Carolina, and is the president of Crawlspace Depot. Once the 2009 report came out, Tesh says that “helped qualify closed crawlspaces for new construction and it also validated why it works on post construction. That’s when we had one crew doing this work and now have 30 crews.”

Six percent of surveyed PMPs performed 100 or more jobs last year. While 32 percent of PMPs who offer the service performed fewer than 10 jobs per company last year (and 18 percent didn’t close any crawlspaces last year), the bulk of those providing the service (36 percent) performed between 10 and 49 jobs last year.

Revenues can be large in the crawlspace market. Of those surveyed, 16 percent generated revenues of $100,000 or more from the add-on service, and 18 percent earned between $25,000 and $99,999 for the year. Twenty percent had revenues between $5,000 and $24,999.

Tesh says it’s important for those pest management firms providing crawlspace services to continue to develop their craft to help the crawlspace market grow. “They need to first and foremost understand the science behind why closed crawlspaces work and why vented crawlspaces don’t work. And that’s really about understanding the training, from training your sales staff to your installation staff on how to do the job and how to be more efficient and how to improve performance and how to make a profit. That’s how you succeed in the closed crawlspace market.”