A seller in Garden Hills gets a clean termite report a week before closing and relaxes. The house is fine. The paperwork is fine. Everyone moves on to the final walkthrough.
Then, four days before the closing table, the buyer's lender flags the report as expired. Not because anything changed at the house. Because the report itself was only ever good for a fixed window, and a delayed closing date quietly pushed the transaction past it.
This happens more often in Buckhead's older pockets than almost anywhere else in the market Shanna Bradley works, and it happens for a reason that has nothing to do with sloppy paperwork. Georgia never built one system to govern termite documentation at closing. It built three, run by three different parties, on three different clocks, and none of them are required to talk to each other.
The Letter Isn't a Law. That's Exactly Why It's Complicated
Start with the basic fact that surprises almost every first-time Georgia buyer: the termite letter is not required by state law. Georgia's Structural Pest Control Act sets the technical standards for how a Wood Infestation Inspection Report has to be filled out, but it does not force anyone to order one. What actually makes the report universal is that mortgage lenders treat it as a condition of funding, and Georgia real estate contracts have long routed the inspection through the buyer's due diligence period rather than through any statutory closing requirement.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Because no single government body owns this process end to end, three separate systems ended up governing the same piece of paper: the lender's funding requirement, the pest control company's own contractual guarantee, and, if the home already carries a termite bond, that bond's own transfer rules. Each one runs on its own timer.
Georgia has good reason to take this seriously in the first place. The state sits among the highest termite-pressure zones in the country, a combination of humid climate and clay soil that keeps subterranean termites active for most of the year. Homeowners insurance does not cover termite damage in Georgia, which means an undisclosed infestation becomes the buyer's financial problem the moment the deed transfers. Pest control veterans around Atlanta have a saying for this: it's not a matter of if a house gets termites, only when.
What the Report Actually Documents
The document itself is officially the Wood Infestation Inspection Report, still called Form 100 or the CL-100 by pest control companies, and it replaced the national NPMA-33 form for use in Georgia. A licensed inspector walks the accessible parts of the structure, the foundation, the crawl space, any wood in contact with soil, and records only what is visible on that specific day.
That last part is the piece buyers routinely misread. A clean report is genuinely good news, but it is a snapshot, not a guarantee. It does not cover the wall cavity nobody can see into, it does not cover damage repaired years before the current owner ever listed the house, and it does not cover pests outside its narrow legal definition. Cockroaches, rodents, and general ants fall outside the form entirely. Only wood-destroying insects and wood-decaying fungus count.
Inspection cost across the Atlanta market runs roughly $50 to $250 depending on property size and crawl space complexity, and who pays is entirely a matter of negotiation in the purchase contract rather than a fixed rule. Sellers cover it more often than not, but there is no statute assigning the bill.
Where the Three Clocks Actually Diverge
This is the part that never makes it into generic explainers, and it is the reason this document causes real friction at closing tables rather than just paperwork annoyance.
| Clock | What it governs | How long it runs |
|---|---|---|
| Retreatment guarantee | If an infestation is found within the guarantee window that wasn't disclosed on the original report, the issuing company treats it free | 90 days from the report's issue date, under state pest control rules |
| Lender validity window | How long a WDO report can be used to satisfy a lender's funding condition before a fresh inspection is required | Roughly 30 days, and it resets with every new contract period |
| Bond transfer deadline | The window a buyer has to formally transfer an existing termite bond into their name before the seller's coverage lapses | Often 30 days from closing, though the exact number lives in that specific bond's contract language |
None of these three windows are required to line up, and nothing in Georgia law forces the parties involved to reconcile them. A report issued in good faith in July can still be well within its 90-day treatment guarantee in September while simultaneously being useless to a lender because the closing slipped past the 30-day validity mark and triggered a new contract period. A seller's transferable bond can be entirely valid on paper while quietly voiding itself because nobody filed the transfer paperwork inside its own 30-day post-closing deadline.
Buyers tend to assume a transferred bond means the house is covered, full stop. It rarely means that. A bond, even a good one, is a service contract, not an insurance policy, and it typically excludes wood-boring beetles, drywood termites, and wood-decaying fungus even when it faithfully covers subterranean termite retreatment. Arrow Exterminators, the Atlanta-headquartered pest control company that has operated in the region since 1964 and runs a dedicated service center on Roswell Road in Buckhead, has made this exact point through its own realtor relations team: a transferred bond is not the same thing as a clean bill of health, and conflating the two is one of the more common misunderstandings buyers bring to a closing table.
Why This Shows Up More in Buckhead's Older Pockets
Buckhead's estate-era construction is not a marketing phrase. Garden Hills traces its roots to a 1923 development and marked its hundredth year in 2025, with its oldest sections carrying historic district status since 1987 and more than 750 single-family homes built across a build-out that ran from the mid-1920s through the early 1940s. Landmark homes like the Swan House on Andrews Drive, built in 1928, sit on Buckhead Heritage's own registry of the neighborhood's oldest structures, a reminder that a meaningful share of the district's housing stock predates modern foundation waterproofing, treated lumber standards, and the pier-and-beam alternatives that make wood-to-soil contact less of a given.
Decades of mature tree canopy compound the issue. The same oaks and hardwoods that make Garden Hills, Peachtree Heights, and Tuxedo Park feel established and shaded also drop the organic debris that state rule defines as a textbook conducive condition for infestation. None of this means an older Buckhead home is a bad bet. It means the inspection is more likely to surface a conducive condition worth documenting, which is exactly the scenario where getting the timing right on all three clocks stops being a technicality and starts being leverage.
The Move That Actually Protects a Closing
The fix here is not complicated, but it does require treating the termite letter as a scheduling problem rather than a single checkbox.
- Order the inspection late enough in the process that its 30-day lender validity window comfortably survives the expected closing date, with a buffer for the delays that are common in competitive Buckhead transactions
- If the home carries an existing bond, request the actual bond documents at listing, not at closing, so coverage tier, renewal status, and transfer deadline are known quantities before anyone is under time pressure
- Confirm in writing, directly with the pest control company, whether the bond is tied to the property or to the current owner, since only property-tied bonds transfer cleanly
- Treat a clean report as a snapshot worth pairing with the home's full treatment history, which shows whether a past infestation was resolved years ago rather than leaving that question open
A Few Direct Questions
Does a clean termite letter mean the house has never had termites? No. It means no active infestation or visible damage was found on the day of inspection. A resolved infestation from years earlier will not necessarily appear on a fresh report.
Do cash buyers need one? Not by law, but in practice nearly every closing still includes one, since it protects the buyer's own interest regardless of financing.
Who is responsible for a failed inspection? A failed report does not automatically end a transaction. Treatment is arranged, a reinspection is completed once it clears, and a fresh Form 100 is issued with its own new 90-day and 30-day clocks attached.
Buckhead's older neighborhoods reward buyers and sellers who treat these three timelines as something to manage on purpose rather than something to discover the week of closing. If you are weighing a purchase or a listing in Garden Hills, Peachtree Heights, Tuxedo Park, or anywhere else in Buckhead's historic footprint, Shanna Bradley can walk through exactly how these dates line up with your specific timeline. Book an appointment before you're the one staring down a report that expired four days too early.
