Whose Nest Is It?
In a converted house or a purpose-built block, the wasps are usually going into something that is not inside anybody's flat. Soffits, eaves, the roof void, the brickwork and the common stairwell are almost always the freeholder's or the management company's responsibility rather than an individual leaseholder's.
That is worth knowing before you pay for anything. A leaseholder who arranges and pays for a nest in the communal roof void has usually paid for something the service charge already covers. A nest genuinely inside the demised flat — in a boxed-in soil pipe, say — is a different matter.
Getting Permission Without Losing a Week
The practical problem is that a managing agent works to a timescale and a wasp nest does not. A colony sitting over a communal entrance in August is a stinging risk to everybody using the door, and that is the argument that moves an agent fastest: not the nuisance, the liability.
What helps is ringing with the specifics already in hand — where the entrance is, which elevation, how high, and how many people walk under it daily. We are happy to speak to an agent or a freeholder directly and to invoice whoever is paying rather than whoever happened to call.
Access, Parking and Height
The part of a flats job that actually takes the time is reaching the entrance. Most are treated from the ground with an extending lance, which covers a surprising amount of a three-storey building, but somewhere to stand and somewhere to park are real constraints on a block with permit bays and a narrow frontage.
Where the entrance is above what a lance reaches, or over a flat roof with no safe standing, it becomes an access job as well as a treatment and we will say so on the phone rather than turn up and shrug.
Neighbours and Timing
Wasps treated at one flat do not move next door. A colony is tied to its nest; it does not relocate when the entrance is treated. What neighbours will notice is the short spike in activity as foragers return, which is worth mentioning to the people either side beforehand so nobody panics at it.
If you are a tenant: tell the landlord or agent in writing, today, and keep the message. It costs nothing and it settles who pays later.