Bed Bug Growth Slows - The 2014 Market Report

So I was checking out PCT’s article on the 2014 pest control market report. Specialty Products Consultants has compiled the research for about 15 years now, and it’s always interesting to see the changes from year to year. What we found this year was that the industry grew to nearly $7.5 billion dollars which was an increase of about 3.5 percent over the 2013 numbers.

About 8.75 million households were serviced by licensed pest control companies, and that’s about 7.1% of the total US households. We have about 123 million households, 8.75 million of which had pest control services performed.
If you consider another 3.75 million customers that purchased post construction termite control, you come up with about 12.5 million households that were serviced in 2014. That’s slightly over 10%
7.1% for pest control, another 3% for termite.

Now when you look at our target market, which are families that earn over $75,000 annually, we have about 36.3% of the households in that demographic. That’s actually a pretty good number, it’s over a third. Obviously, we can do much better. There’s about another 64% still out there, but overall, that’s a good percentage.

Other notable findings, the average post construction termite job increased by $25, it’s now at $861 on a national average. In 2013 that number was $836.

Something that wasn’t highlighted in the article, but something we should pay very close attention to was that bedbugs were only up 5.6% in revenue growth. Which is still an increase, it helped the industry as a whole, but it wasn’t the driving force behind the industry growth. If you do the math, bed bug revenue growth only equated to about $25-30 million. The total industry grew by $250 million. So bed bugs helped the industry grow, but that wasn’t anywhere near the primary reason we saw such healthy increases.

Now, If you dig further you’ll find that bed bug growth has slowed down for the last few years 2012 (+28.2%), 2013 (+11%), 2014 (5.6%).

There was a total of 725,000 treatments performed in 2014, which accounted for $470 million in revenue for bed bug control.

So what’s going on? Are the treatment prices going down? Are we becoming more efficient in our treatment methods, and passing that savings on to the customer? Essentially doing more treatments, but for less money per job?

That doesn’t seem to be the case. In 2012, the average price of a bed bug treatment was $600, in 2014 the average price was $630.
So it’s actually increased $30 in two years.

Anyway, fascinating research if you really dig into the numbers and compare it to the same study from the last few years.

But now I want to hear from you. What’s your take on this? Why are the bed bug numbers shrinking? Are things slowing down in your area?
Let me know, hit me up on Twitter @stevejacksonus that’s @stevejacksonus. Take care Y’all.

Source: http://www.pctonline.com/SPC-2014-pest-control-market-report.aspx