Two different bedbug stories, I'm not sure how relevant to you.
1. Years ago there were about six of us, all young and foolish, sharing a house. One evening I noticed a suspicious spot on my wall that turned out to be a bedbug. I proceeded to caulk or spackle all cracks anywhere near my bed that could possibly harbor bedbugs, and survived relatively unscathed. As far as I could tell, the bugs were interested in me, not my belongings, so if they couldn't easily get to me they'd go look for better prey.
It turned out that one of my housemates had recently bought, or found, or been given someone's unwanted mattress, and we soon had our suspicions as to why the mattress had been unwanted. My other housemates didn't want to bother bugproofing their sleeping areas so the bugs kept spreading from room to room. A couple of people moved down to the living room to sleep, and either they brought bugs down with them or the bugs managed to find them. I understand that bedbugs (along with skeeters and ticks) find their prey at least partly by smell, so they'd be drawn to rooms where people were sleeping.
I think our rental agreement had been for a year and was coming up for renewal. Pretty much everyone decided to flee so it wasn't practical for me to stay, but no bedbugs ever turned up in my new place that I knew of.
2. Years after that (and 3000 miles away), I'd become a regular at a hostel located in a national park. The manager appreciated my help with technical questions and had even started letting me stay for free. One night I noticed a suspicious-looking spot on their living room wall... that turned out to be another bedbug! I captured it, put it in a little bottle, and showed it to the manager the next morning. He called an exterminator, hoping it would turn out to be only a swallow bug or something (they had swallows nesting under the eaves) -- but no. It was your basic bedbug, part of an infestation in the men's dorm.
The next time I was scheduled to stay at that hostel, the dorm had recently been sprayed with pyrethrin and the paneling taken off the walls. It was going to be under construction (and officially closed) for another week or two but I volunteered to spend a few nights in it (with the windows open) and monitor for surviving bedbugs. Surprisingly, they let me! I moved my bed away from the wall, wrapped all four legs with masking tape, sticky side out, and made sure none of my bedding would touch the floor. I also went over the whole room with a putty knife, looking for loose seams in the wallpaper that had been under the paneling. I found only one seam with traces of breeding bedbugs, and those bugs were all long dead. I got up a few times that night and patrolled the room for prowling bugs. I saw none, nothing stuck to my masking tape, I didn't get bitten, and I didn't bring any bugs home with me.
Later, the hostel covered those walls with a layer of sheetrock with all the joints mudded smooth. The bugs didn't come back, as far as I know, nor spread to the other dorm in the hostel. Years later, under new management, there was a policy that guests had to use only the hostel bedding and couldn't bring any of their own.
(Enough TMI for you?
)