Apartment Good Management Bad
Pros
The apartment is very big has a king sized bedroom, and a very large bathroom with dual sinks for both me and my partner. The apartment was also painted and clearly cleaned when we arrived and the floors look like they were buffed the apartment also has very large windows and the neighbors are extremely friendly helpful, informative, and generally just very accommodating. There’s a Building group chat where people can connect to ask questions get help swap furniture, and basically just talk to their neighbors about the apartment.
Cons
Besides the paint, dust and uneven floors that have gaps in between the slats, the small kitchen that does not have a large enough fridge for full groceries and the fact that all of the cabinets are very high up or out of reach, which makes it hard to cook a full meal. The biggest issue with this apartment building is maintenance and management. The management is a large company and they clearly just don’t care about the tenants here the week that I moved in I had to chase them down to even get keys to the building, and I noticed immediately that there were quite a few broken appliances to start the vent fan over the stove did not work and so when I reported this to maintenance, they came to “fix” it by putting wooden pegs between the vent and the fan which forced it to turn on, but this doesn’t actually solve the problem because now the vent air blows into your face and blows out the gas stove when it’s lit. Also when I moved in, I immediately noticed that the fridge had a terrible mold and rotting food smell to it. I reported this immediately and 3 to 4 weeks later. Still haven’t had it replaced. The Super has seen it and looked at it a couple times and I and my partner have asked for details and ETA and have just been brushed off or told that they’re still dealing with it. It’s basically unusable and so we have not been able to buy fresh food or cook any meals and so we’re living off of snacks and whatever we can buy or take out which is not how we normally like to live. There were also just a couple other smaller issues in the apartment like exposed nails The dishwasher rack would fall off of its rail and some lights that were flickering or out when I arrived, these have mostly been fixed, but their solution was to just caulk the exposed nails, put a zip tie on the rail of the dishwasher rack and replace the bulbs that were out or flickering and this hasn’t actually solved the problem for the lights because they still flicker and so there’s clearly a wiring issue going on here that they don’t want to address. So overall, while maintenance and management tends to be responsive they don’t actually replace the appliances that clearly need to be replaced. They put the tenants off for months at a time when they really should be addressing these problems within a week and they make everybody go on a wild goose chase to get even the most simple things fixed, and their fixes are very temporary Band-Aid solutions not actual solutions. I’ve also heard from other people in the building that they have gone without AC or gone without working fridges or had massive holes in their floors that need to be fixed for months and they’re still waiting for responses from maintenance and for management. Besides the maintenance and management problem, the building itself is in a slight state of disrepair the exercise machines in the gym. Don’t really seem to work most of the time and the gym is just old and clearly falling into disc repair. There’s also lots of scuffs and dents all over the walls as well as pieces of the ceiling falling in the elevator is rickety and the lights don’t always work on it and the HVAC in the hallway on my floor is just a shell. There’s no actual machine in there so I’m not really sure what that’s doing beyond this. The signing of the lease and the engagement with the realtor was very sketchy. The realtor said that all of the fees for gas water and heating were fixed or were within the rent but they weren’t. There was also a very sketchy $85 fee to use the in apartment washer and dryer which seems ridiculous because we’re already paying for energy and water regardless, and the lease itself had a lot of protections for the landlord that we had to really iron out with the management company.
Advice to the owners
Fix the actual problems in your building I know this is going to fall on deaf ears, but just pushing people off and charging an exorbitant amount for apartments that are barely subpar is just an incredibly disgusting and inhumane way to treat people get organized with your maintenance hire another Super and actually provide them with a Budget so that they can fully replace broken appliances and stop slapping Band-Aid fixes on everything there’s a lot of really kind and respectful and eager to please people that live in your building and treating them so badly is just such a disrespectful and dishonest way to live, and it will definitely reflect on online reviews and will continue to sink the apartment.
Great apartments if nothing every breaks, but it always does.
Pros
The location for this building is perfect. It's so close to the the train and there's lots to do. The apartments themselves are big for being in a relatively new building in Williamsburg.
Cons
The management is absolutely horrible. You can only get ahold of them for 8 hours, 4 days of the week, even if there is an emergency. So if there's a leak in your apartment (which I had multiple times) or your heating breaks, you better hope it doesn't happen at 2pm on a Friday because you're stuck like that until Monday morning plus the few days it actually takes them to send someone. For months, I had a huge flooring issue where floorboards where basically standing up at a 45 degree angle as well as unaddressed mold. I finally had to make reports to 311 and management ended up fixing it on the last day possible before the city was going to take action against them. I would absolutely never recommend this building to anyone.
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