Charles J Mayer Structural Pest Control Operator

This guy was the WORST pest inspector ever! He cleared the house for sale, saying it was free from any pests, and no sooner had the escrow closed than termites were actually HEARD munching away in one of the closets.
Then, when asked by the buyer to refund the money set aside as a credit in escrow of $ 15,000 he said «NO» claiming that the money was his. When asked by the buyer what he planned to do for $ 15,000 he said he’d spray with timbor. Ha! Any termite company will do that much for less than a few hundred bucks, and this guy wanted $ 15,000?!
Finally after much, much, much negotiation, he gave up a few thousand of the 15 he wanted to keep and the buyer contracted a real contractor to remove the infestation and rebuild the closet. Now, there are no problems. But this thief still kept over $ 7K for doing a shoddy inspection and then tried to strong arm the buyer into doing a shoddy remedy of the infestation.
SCAM ARTIST. STAY AWAY. REALTORS BEWARE!!! This guy should lose his licence.

My husband made an appointment with this company over a month ago. Today they were supposed to come out at 9am, and no one showed. When I called, the receptionist didn’t know what was going on, so she took my information and said she would call back. She called back about 45 minutes later and said the appointment had never been authorized, so they cancelled it. I checked with my husband who said he did authorize for inspection verbally when he made the appointment over the phone. I then called the receptionist back who said we needed to send them a signed authorization, which no one had ever told us about. I will not be doing business with this poorly run company.

LONG & SHORT: Charles gave the home we bought a negligent inspection. Refused responsibility, lied about what he did and didn’t know, his staff was rude, and we basically had to threaten small claims court to get a resolution, which still took weeks longer than it should have. I don’t recommend using Charles for your inspection report.
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THE LONG STORY:
We bought a house in Oakland this year, and Charles Mayer had been the company/​person who did the pest inspection on the home. After moving in, it turned out we needed to do some roof work, and so we budgeted for some amount of wood rot that would need fixing as the roof was replaced. Our roofer — who was a really awesome roofer, Marcus from Reliable Roofing — went above and beyond and showed us a huge amount of rot that was not only up there covered by roof boards, but that would’ve been easily visible from the ground by a trained inspector that Charles completely failed to call out. The cost for this ended up being DOUBLE what we had budgeted for wood replacement, which was insane because we had already budgeted quite a bit for that.
As soon as we discovered this, we called Charles directly. His staff were very rude to us until they realized this was a potential litigation situation, at which point they became flustered and said he’d call us back. He phoned us about a day later, showing not a huge amount of interest in helping us solve the problem. We finally got him to come out and take a look at the situation, but the roofers had to be continuing their work since discovering this (the house had no roof!), and although we saved ALL the damaged wood and had photos very clearly showing that the damage would’ve been very visible from the ground, Charles was fairly adamant that since he didn’t see the state of the house before the roofers started working, he basically didn’t believe us that he should’ve found this. This, in spite of the fact that he showed us a Terminix report he had on him RIGHT THERE that day that indicated easily visible rot on that side of the house– that, the ONLY side of the house he had not indicated any rot existed.
To put this into more perspective — Charles had not poked any of the eave boards coming off the roof to see if they were stable. There were no poke holes. Charles indicated he never poked eaves that high — but this was a 1 story house. If you had a 2 – 3 foot pole, they’d be easily accessible, and my understanding (based on discussed with realtors and roofers) is this is a standard in the industry. Not a single poke took place. And if he had poked them, several would have just crumbled immediately. Some boards were even visibly only attached by bondo; this was a major screw job. And sure, the previous owners are the ones who did the bondo and some other terrible things to the house — but we were relying on Charles Mayer to call these things out, because we are not licensed inspection professionals.
Beyond that, Charles entirely lied to us when he said we should’ve called him to get him to fix the rot. He said he could fix the rotten wood without replacing the roof — something about removing the wood and sliding new wood in. The roofers we’ve discussed this with since have just laughed when they heard that; there is no such reliable method as he describes. You would have had to take off the entire roof to replace the boards, thereby seeing all the rot and how it was a much bigger job. But Charles attempted to downplay the situation by outright lying about how he would’ve fixed this rot for less money, clearly trying to suggest he didn’t owe anything for his negligent inspection.
To be fair — the rest of the inspection was accurate. The problems underneath the house were noted. The problems on the other sides of the house/​roof were noted. But this one longest side of the house, that had 100% wood rot on the roof, was entirely disregarded in Charles’ inspection. And then when confronted with this reality, he denied. Even when he had a Terminix inspection report that he had in his hand PRIOR to his inspection that clearly said there was rot on this side of the house.
Ultimately, after weeks of insisting he did no wrong, he gave us some money to help pay for the additional costs — about ¹⁄₃ of the amount it cost us to fix the rot beyond what we had initially budgeted. I am glad he had the integrity to at least do this, but remain shocked at not only his negligent inspection report but also his refusal to accept accountability until we essentially threatened him with legal action. Completely ridiculous.
Also, he should train his staff to not get argumentative with unhappy customers; not cute.
All in all, this was at least resolved. But I don’t recommend using this service for your inspection.

I used Charles J. Mayer for my pest inspection prior to purchasing my house back in November 2011. Charles was gruff, and curt, not outright rude, but certainly testier than I want when I’m the customer. He was thorough, & he took time to explain things. My house had some brown-​rot in some of the siding. Charles quantified the issues, then he mentioned that his company does this type of repair work. He provided an estimate of over $ 45,000 to replace what actually amounted to 32 siding boards. This estimate seemed a bit high but I was new to this arena. This year I addressed all of the house’s exterior deferred maintenance issues. Even with proper permits from The City of Oakland, and using the original, fairly pricey clapboards, & removing anything that was even remotely questionable, the siding portion of the repairs, again including the permits, labor, & materials, was about $ 40,000 less than Charles’ estimate! $ 40,000!
This work was done by a GC that builds 6000+ S/​F homes in the Los Altos hills, certainly not an amateur. Charles’ ridiculous estimate hung over my head for nearly four years. Once I was ready to correct all of the structure’s exterior deferred maintenance woes, it became clear that Charles’ estimate was disingenuous at best. My GC and his crew (s) ripped off the 3 layers of roof, added plywood, added paper, installed a 50 year architectural shingle, and fixed all the siding dry rot correctly, I also hired a top notch painting contractor to do a 3 color paint job for the entire exterior of the home, & added new fascia style gutters for $ 17K total for everything, and it’s all top notch work. All of that work was still $ 28,000 less than Charles’s estimate for just the siding repair!!!

We were buying a home which came with a very clean pest report from John MacDonald. After finding several pest issues not on the MacDonald report, our home inspectors recommended we get our own pest report. Charles Mayer came out and inspected the home and found dry wood termites, subterranean termites, and wood boring beetles. (Once he pointed them out, they seemed really obvious to me.) His estimates did seem high, and we landed up having the repair work done elsewhere, but he did an exemplary job with the inspection and saved us a lot.

They repaired termite damage and dry rot in our laundry room and exterior. They did an admirable job, BUT failed to use TREX for the exterior steps. This was specified in the contract. The office gave me a very hard time and finally agreed to replace the stairs with Trex. So far they have not come back to do this and it has been 2 weeks.
The comment that sticks in my mind is that «the stairs would only need to be resealed every two years» …and THAT was why we specified Trex instead of redwood. I would even go along with pressure treated wood, but they used redwood.
I would think that given the written contract they would have followed it. I would hate to go to court to get them to fix the stairs, but will if necessary.

If you love your neighbor, stay away.
I never worked with them my neighbor did.
Well, where should i start ?
1^st, enjoying my back uard wasn’t possible without earing discusting burp.
2^nd, they let trash in my property that they never cleaned up.
3^rd, they blocked my driveway almost everyday.
4^th, they are absolutly not nice. When i asked then to move their car from my driveway they’ll just be rude and block it again the next day.
The younger people working there are maybe a little nicer than the oldest, and their restroom doesn’t stink that’s a plus, but they don’t need to buckle their pants in the street nobody want to see that.

We recently purchased a house which came with a very clean pest report from another inspector. When our home inspector started noticing obvious evidence of pest activity not on the report, he advised us to get our own report. Our realtor called in Charles, who showed up punctually and found extensive evidence of dry wood termites, subterranean termites, and wood boring beetles. The damage added up to about $ 15,000. That inspection was one of the best money we’ve ever spent. I agree with previous posters that his repair estimate was high, so we had someone else do the work. As an inspector, he was thorough, and went out of his way to explain the pest evidence to the homeowner, who was not happy about the report, but finally acknowledged its accuracy.

I had an inspection scheduled today and the inspector did not show up on time nor did he call to let me know he was running late (He did not show up at all). I called the company and the office manager was very nice and found out the status of the inspector for me but the lack of courtesy and communication was a big turn off.

Charles did an excellent pre-​purchase inspection on my future home. We almost decided to skip the pest inspection, since our seller provided us with a «clean» report from Gressett. We thought we were golden, but my agent recommended hiring Charles to double check. Good thing! He provided evidence of foundation damage that I could see myself, entirely missed by the previous inspector.
Thanks to Charles and our general contracor inspector, the sellers will be fixing the damage prior to selling us the house. He also identified several other problems the other guys missed. I would absolutely recommend him, and will most definitely use him again.

I’m not sure about these people. Our real estate agent contracted with them when I was selling my house. They originally estimated $ 9000 to do the repairs and pest work that needed to be done — about $ 5000 of that was for pest work and $ 4000 in repairs. I got my regular contractor (who is very good) to do the repair piece for less than $ 2000. When the actual bill came for the pest work, it was about half the original $ 5000 estimate. However, they tried to double bill me for the original inspection fee, which I had already paid. I know it can be hard to estimate exactly, but to be off by 100% it’s hard to feel like they know what they are doing.

Wow! What a wonderful inspection! I can’t thank Charles enough for his descriptions of how we can improve things.
We are in the middle of a huge overhaul of our house, new foundation to new roof. We plan to sell once the reconstruction is complete. Charles pointed out weakness in the current structure — it’s all about water — and gave us great advice on how to proceed in a way that will make this house water tight for the next occupants. They will be be very lucky because we got his advice while the stucco is still off the house.

It’s been about a year since we used Charles Mayer. We purchased our house in late Spring of 2009, and Mr. Mayer came out to do our pre-​purchase pest inspection. He was a bit gruff, but thorough and seemed to know his business. He indicated that there were some dry rot issues at several of the corners, and provided us with a report and a quote. After we bought the house we had enough cash to do a couple of the repair areas, so we called him up.
On the plus side, they were able to fit us in quite quickly. On the other hand, they did NOT actually schedule a day or time to come out. I happened to come home from dropping my son off at childcare and two guys in a truck were sitting outside the house. Annoying but I guess it worked out.
The work took about a week longer than they stated, and I feel that at least part of this delay was because the workers tended to stretch their lunch hours, seemed to run out of necessary items, etc. on a regular basis.
They also «forgot» to do the earthquake strapping on the repaired areas — luckily the Berkeley city inspector caught this, so they had to tear down the chicken wire and put the strapping in.
There were also some minor issues with invoicing that were resolved satisfactorily.
All of that said, they did do good work in the end — they used good materials, the workmanship was solid, and they re-stucco’d and primered the repair areas and did a nice job of both.
Not 100% sure if I’d use them again, but I’d definitely ask them for a quote if I was going out to bid on pest repair work.