You had the flat treated three weeks ago. The kitchen was clear for a fortnight. Now there are two of them behind the sink again, and you are wondering what you actually paid for.
This is the single most common complaint we hear in Dubai, and in most cases the first company did nothing wrong on the day. They just treated the wrong thing.
The problem was probably never only your flat
German cockroaches, the small tan ones with two dark stripes behind the head, are the species in almost every apartment call we attend. They do not come in from outside. They travel between units through the shared service riser that carries your kitchen and bathroom plumbing, and through the gaps around those pipes where they pass through the slab.
That means a treatment stops at your front door while the population does not. If the flat above yours has a heavy infestation and is never treated, yours is being restocked continuously. You can pay for a spray every month and never get ahead of it.
This is why we will sometimes tell a tenant that the honest answer is to raise it with the building manager rather than book another visit. If several units on a riser are treated in the same window, the problem ends. If one is, it does not.
Spraying kills what you can see
At any moment, most of a cockroach population is not out in the open. It is behind the kickboard, inside the motor housing of the fridge, in the cavity behind the wall tiles, under the sink unit. A surface spray reaches the ones walking across it and very few of the rest.
Worse, a repellent product can push them deeper into the structure and spread a single harbourage into three. Two weeks later you see activity in a room that was previously clean and assume it is a new infestation. It is the old one, relocated.
Proper cockroach control uses gel bait placed into those harbourages instead. The insects feed, return to the harbourage, and the effect carries through the population over about two weeks. It looks like less is happening on the day. It is doing considerably more.
Water matters more than food
People clean the kitchen thoroughly and are frustrated when the cockroaches stay. A German cockroach can survive a long time on almost nothing; crumbs are a convenience, not a requirement. Water is not. In a Dubai apartment the reliable supply is condensation on chilled water pipes, the tray under the fridge, a slow trap under the sink, and the gap behind the washing machine.
Fix a dripping trap and you remove more pressure than a deep clean does.
What a second visit should look like
If activity is back after a treatment, the next visit should not be a repeat of the first. A technician should open the kickboard and the sink unit, look behind and underneath the fridge, check where the pipes enter the wall, and tell you which of those places the insects are actually living in. Anyone who walks in and starts spraying without opening anything is guessing.
Ask for the species in writing. German cockroach and American cockroach are different problems with different treatments, and a report that just says “cockroaches” tells you nothing about whether the right work was done.
Our own pest control in Dubai covers a return visit inside ninety days at no charge, because a treatment that needs repeating at your expense was not finished. If you are dealing with this in a villa rather than an apartment the pressure usually comes from drainage and landscaping instead, which we cover under residential pest control.