How to Get Rid of Cockroaches in a Scarborough Apartment

To get rid of cockroaches in an apartment, you need gel bait placed where they hide, two or three visits spaced a few weeks apart, and, in most Scarborough towers, treatment of the units around yours at the same time. Sprays and foggers make it worse. Report it to your landlord in writing first: in a RentSafeTO building the City requires the owner to inspect a pest complaint within 72 hours and to stop the spread to other units. If you need cockroach control in Scarborough for your own unit, the inspection is free.

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Why apartments get cockroaches that houses do not

Almost every cockroach in a Scarborough apartment is a German cockroach. Health Canada's cockroach page describes the adult as 1.3 to 1.6 cm long, tan to light brown, with two dark stripes behind the head, and notes that it has wings but cannot fly. It is not cold-tolerant, so it does not live outdoors through an Ontario winter. It lives inside heated buildings, and an apartment tower is the best home it can find.

Rutgers University's German cockroach fact sheet explains why apartments in particular get hit: infestations are more common in apartment buildings because cockroaches move between units through common utilities, shared walls and hallways. A house has four walls of its own. A unit in a 1970s tower shares a wall on two sides, a ceiling, a floor, a plumbing stack and a garbage chute with dozens of other households.

In an apartment, the cockroach problem usually belongs to the building, not to your kitchen.

Health Canada also says plainly that cockroaches do not necessarily mean a place is dirty. They come in on used furniture, food, bottles and cardboard cartons, or they walk in from next door. A tidy tenant with an infested neighbour will still have them.

What the City's inspection data says about Scarborough buildings

We pulled the City of Toronto's RentSafeTO evaluation records for 795 Scarborough apartment buildings and mapped them in our Scarborough apartment pest report. The City scores every building with three or more storeys and ten or more units, and two of the scored items are about pests: evidence of pests in common areas, and whether the building keeps a proper pest-control log.

What the data shows:

• 7% of Scarborough buildings showed common-area pest evidence at their most recent evaluation, and 7% were not keeping an adequate pest log.
• By ward, the share of flagged buildings was highest in Scarborough-Guildwood and Scarborough-Agincourt (13% each), then Scarborough-Rouge Park (11%), Scarborough North (8%), Scarborough Centre (6%) and Scarborough Southwest (2%).
• By decade, buildings from the 1960s (8%) and 1970s (9%) flag most often, against 3% for 1990s buildings.

That decade pattern matches what we see on calls. The large postwar slab towers along Kingston Road, Eglinton Avenue East, Lawrence Avenue East and Markham Road have long vertical plumbing stacks, garbage chutes that run every floor, and decades of gaps around pipes where they pass through walls. Each of those is a road between units.

Read the numbers honestly. They measure lobbies, halls and garbage rooms on one inspection day. A building with a clean score can still have an infested unit, and one with a flag may have fixed it since. To look up a specific address, use the City's own RentSafeTO map, which our report links from each building.

Signs you have cockroaches in your apartment

The first sign is usually one small, light-brown roach running for cover when you switch on the kitchen light at night. After that:

• Pepper-like droppings in the corners of cupboards, along drawer runners and under the sink.
• Brown egg cases about 8 mm long behind the fridge, around the stove, or tucked into cabinet hinges.
• Roaches near the plumbing: under the kitchen sink, behind the toilet, around the bathroom vanity, where the pipes come through the wall.
• A musty, oily smell in the kitchen once numbers build.
• Roaches in daylight. They hide during the day, so seeing them then means there are a lot of them.

If you see one large, almost black roach in a basement storage room or near a floor drain, that is more likely an Oriental cockroach, which lives in cool, damp spaces and is handled differently. Our cockroach control page covers how to tell the two apart.

Why spraying your own unit makes it worse

This is the most common mistake we see in Scarborough rentals, and it is an understandable one. You see roaches, you buy a can or a fogger, and for a few days it seems to work.

Rutgers explains what is actually happening. Pyrethroid sprays, the insecticides in many store aerosols, are repellent to cockroaches. Instead of dying in their hiding spots, they move. In an apartment that means into the wall void, up the plumbing stack and into the units beside, above and below yours. The fact sheet says these sprays may push cockroaches to neighbouring units through pipe penetrations and common walls. It also says total-release foggers are ineffective and can be a fire hazard in a home with gas appliances.

Leave insecticide chalk alone too. Health Canada carries an advisory warning that it contains a highly toxic substance.

How to get rid of cockroaches in an apartment: what works

The method that works in a tower is slow, quiet and thorough. In order:

1. Report it in writing. Before you spend anything, send your landlord or property manager a dated email or text: what you are seeing, which rooms, since when. Keep a copy. This starts the clock on the building's legal duties (see the next section) and it means the neighbouring units get checked.
2. Bait, not spray. Rutgers calls bait the most effective formulation. Gel bait goes in small dots into the cracks and hinges where roaches hide, not on open counters. Health Canada notes that bait in tamper-proof stations kills roaches about 48 to 96 hours after they eat it, which is slow enough that they carry it back to where the others shelter.
3. Repeat on schedule. A typical German cockroach egg case holds about 40 eggs, and the female carries it until close to hatching, hidden away where a single treatment cannot reach. One female produces 5 to 8 cases in her life, 200 to 250 eggs in total. Rutgers recommends re-treating every 2 to 4 weeks until no roaches appear over a 4-week period. That is why a proper plan is two or three visits, not one.
4. Monitor with sticky traps. Put them under the sink, beside the stove, on the floor by the fridge and behind the toilet. They tell you whether numbers are falling and where the roaches are coming from. If the traps by the shared wall or the plumbing fill fastest, that points next door.
5. Cut food and water. Health Canada's list is practical: wipe spills right away, store food in sealed plastic or glass instead of cardboard, take garbage out daily in a sealed bag, do not leave dishes overnight, do not leave pet food out, and fix dripping taps, leaks and sweating pipes.
6. Seal the gaps you can reach. Caulk around the pipes under the kitchen and bathroom sinks and along cracked baseboards. Health Canada recommends sealing cracks, crevices and pipe openings. In a tower, the gaps inside the wall are the building's job.
7. Treat the neighbours too. This is the step that decides whether it works. If the units beside, above and below you are not checked and treated in the same window, the roaches come back through the stack.

What your landlord has to do in Scarborough

Scarborough is part of the City of Toronto, so the full set of City rules applies here.

If you live in a building with three or more storeys and ten or more units, it is covered by RentSafeTO. The City's Building Owner Handbook sets out the pest duties:

• All common areas, inside and outside, must be inspected for pests at least once every 30 days.
• When a tenant makes a service request about pests, the area must be inspected within 72 hours.
• Where pests are found, the owner must hire a pest management operator licensed by the Ministry of the Environment, act to prevent the spread to other parts of the building, and exterminate the pests in every area where they are found.
• The owner must not hide the presence of pests and cannot rent a unit to a new tenant knowing it has pests.
• Pest inspection and treatment records must be available to tenants and prospective tenants, and the pest management plan must be posted on the Tenant Notification Board.

That last point is useful. You are entitled to see the building's pest records, which tells you whether the units around you have been treated or only yours.

In any rental, large or small, Toronto's property standards bylaw requires properties to be kept free of pests (Toronto Municipal Code, Chapter 629, s. 629-9), and Ontario's Residential Tenancies Act, s. 20, makes the landlord responsible for keeping the unit in a good state of repair and fit to live in. In practice the landlord pays for cockroach treatment.

If the landlord does not act, call 311 to request a City inspection. Our guide on whether the landlord is responsible for pest control in Ontario walks through the full escalation, including the T6 application to the Landlord and Tenant Board. Do not withhold rent; it puts you at risk and is not the remedy the system recognizes.

Cockroaches in winter: why it does not slow down in a tower

Searches for cockroaches in apartments from the Toronto area pick up in October, going by the Google Keyword Planner figures we pull. Part of the reason is simple: people are home more and the lights are on longer, so they see what was already there.

The bigger reason is heat. Rutgers notes that German cockroaches stop developing below about 15 °C. Outdoors that ends their season. Inside a heated Scarborough tower, where the boiler runs from fall to spring and the kitchens and the walls around the hot-water risers stay warm, they breed all winter. A full life cycle takes about 100 days, so a few roaches in October can be a real infestation by January if nobody treats the stack.

That is also why "it will die off when it gets cold" does not apply in an apartment. If you are seeing roaches now, deal with it now.

Preparing your unit for treatment

Whether the landlord books it or you do, the treatment goes better if the unit is ready:

• Empty the kitchen cupboards and the cabinet under the sink, and wipe the shelves.
• Get cardboard boxes, paper bags and stacks of flyers out of the kitchen. Roaches shelter and lay egg cases in them.
• Pull the fridge and stove forward if you can, or tell us if you cannot.
• Do not spray anything for at least a week before the visit.
• Put pet food and water bowls away and tell us about pets, children or anyone pregnant in the unit when you book.

Health Canada also suggests freezing small infested items at minus 8 °C for at least 24 hours, preferably up to a week, if they cannot be washed or heated.

Who does the work

We book the inspection, usually same day. The work is carried out by our service partner, Insectica Pest Control, a licensed and insured crew. You get the species, the rooms involved, whether the neighbouring units need treatment, and a price from our published range before anything starts. Every completed treatment plan carries our two-month guarantee: if roaches are still active within two months, we come back once at no charge. For anything else in the building, mice, bed bugs or otherwise, the same free inspection applies to all pest control in Scarborough.

Common questions

Reviewed October 2026.

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