“We’re on the 18th floor, it can’t be anai-anai.” It is the most reasonable wrong assumption in this business, and we hear it most weeks. Subterranean termites nest in soil, but they travel through anything continuous and enclosed — and a condominium is a stack of continuous enclosed spaces with timber at the top of them. What genuinely changes between a high-rise unit and a terrace house is not whether you can have termites. It is how they arrived, what treatment is even possible, who is responsible for the part of the route you cannot reach, and what the bill looks like.

Can termites really reach a high-floor condo?

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Yes, and by two completely different mechanisms that are worth keeping separate, because they lead to different conversations with your management.

Route one: they walked up. Coptotermes gestroi and Coptotermes curvignathus nest in or under soil, but they forage through enclosed, humid, undisturbed spaces — and a modern tower is full of them. Service risers, boxed-in pipe runs, cable and conduit shafts, the surrounds of lift shafts, false ceiling voids, and the wall cavities shared between neighbouring units. None of that is exposed, none of it is inspected, and all of it is continuous from the ground up. Activity has been reported in units dozens of floors above ground.

Route two: they were delivered. A colony fragment arriving inside second-hand timber furniture, a wooden pallet, decking offcuts, or the soil of a large potted plant. This one has nothing to do with the building at all, which is why an otherwise inexplicable infestation in a nine-year-old tower sometimes traces back to a marketplace bargain from six months ago.

The balcony planter box sits somewhere between the two. A soil-filled box built into the structure is a small patch of permanently moist ground, attached to the building, usually never disturbed. Rooftop gardens and podium landscaping behave the same way for the floors near them.

The question that identifies the route. Where does the trail come out? A mud tube emerging from a wall, a riser access panel, a floor gully or the base of a shared wall points at the building. Activity confined to one piece of furniture, with nothing on any wall, points at what came through the front door.

What actually changes between the two?

The row that matters most is the third one, and it is the reason a condo quote should look different from a landed quote rather than being the same document with a different address on it.

Why there is no soil treatment on the 18th floor

A corrective soil treatment works by putting a treated zone into the ground around and under a structure, so that anything travelling from soil to building passes through it. For a terrace house sitting on its own footprint, that is a coherent idea. For a parcel eighteen floors up, there is nothing to treat — the ground is not yours, it is not adjacent to you, and the colony is not coming through it in any way a barrier could interrupt.

So a condo unit is a baiting job. Stations go directly on the active trails, which in a unit are almost always indoors: along a skirting line, at the base of a door frame, beside the point where the trail emerges from a wall or a riser panel. Foraging workers take the bait back and it moves through the colony. The stations are topped up every two weeks, and the job runs until the colony stops feeding — typically 6 to 8 weeks — rather than as an ongoing annual contract.

This is also why the intact trail is worth more than a clean wall. A technician who arrives after the tubes have been scraped off and the area sprayed is looking for a route that has been erased, and the treatment has to go somewhere specific to work.

A condo unit in Cheras, twelfth floor, called us after the owner found a mud tube behind the wardrobe on an internal wall. She had been told by two people that it could not be termites at that height. It was — the trail came up through the boxed pipe run in the adjoining bathroom wall and out at the skirting behind the built-in. We put stations on the trail inside the unit, topped them up fortnightly, and it was quiet in about six weeks. We also told her to write to the management, because that pipe run serves the whole stack and the two units below hers had never been checked.

— Job notes, Nomobug field team

Who pays in a strata building?

The framework is the Strata Management Act 2013 (Act 757), and the principle is simple even when the situation is not: the management corporation is responsible for maintaining and managing common property, and each proprietor is responsible for the inside of their own parcel.

The friction is that a termite colony does not respect the boundary. The trail runs up a riser — common property. It emerges through a skirting — your parcel. Treating only your side clears your unit and leaves the route open; treating only the riser does nothing about the timber already being eaten in your bedroom.

What works in practice:

• Photograph the trail intact, including where it enters the unit, before anything is disturbed.
• Report it to the management in writing the same day. Email, not a conversation at the guard house. Attach the photos.
• Ask directly whether other units have reported activity. If two or three have, it is a stack problem and belongs in the maintenance budget rather than in three separate owners’ pockets.
• Treat your own parcel without waiting for the MC to decide anything. Timber does not pause during a committee cycle.
• Keep the dated reports. If activity returns through the same route, the paper trail is what turns “I mentioned it once” into a case.

Buildings that handle this well tend to be ones where somebody has already thought about pest responsibility as a written policy rather than an argument — the same logic covered in pest control for property management companies.

What is different about a landed house?

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Everything you own touches the ground, which is both the problem and the opportunity.

The problem: soil contact is continuous around the whole footprint, and Malaysian gardens are generous with bridges. Timber fence posts set into soil, a pergola, planter boxes built against the wall, a stack of renovation offcuts behind the kitchen, a garden shed on timber bearers, tree stumps left in place after clearing. Every one of those is a feeding station with a route attached, and none of them are the house itself.

The opportunity: you have a real choice of method, which a condo owner does not.

• Soil treatment creates a treated zone around and under the structure, carries a 3 or 5-year warranty, and suits a house where you want a defined barrier and a long guarantee — particularly if there has been previous activity.
• Baiting goes after the colony itself through stations on the active trails, is less disruptive, and finishes when the colony does rather than running on a warranty clock.
• Pre-construction treatment is the cheapest termite money anyone ever spends, and only available once — before the slab goes down.

Which to pick is genuinely case by case, and it is set out properly in termite baiting vs soil treatment.

What to do the day you find it

Four things, in this order, and the first one is the one people get wrong.

1. Do not spray it, scrape it, or open it up. Disturbing an active trail scatters the workers and can push the colony to reroute somewhere harder to find. A treatment aimed at a trail that no longer exists is a guess.
2. Photograph everything — the tube, the timber, the wall it runs up, and a wider shot showing where in the room it is.
3. Write to the management if you are in strata, attaching those photos.
4. Get it identified. Photos are usually enough to tell termites from ants and to quote the work, which is why a condo owner does not need to wait for anyone to visit before knowing the number. What termites versus flying ants actually look like is in white ants vs termites.

What does each cost?