We lived at the Grand Tower for a little over three years. And there are some good things to say, and a lot of bad things to mention.

For the money, it was a pretty good deal for downtown Los Angeles (if you don't count the crap). When you were inside your apartment, you could barely hear what was going on the adjacent apartments unless they put their subwoofer next to the wall and started playing it a 2a (and then proceed to ignore you knocking on their door to ask them to turn it down). There was one set of washer/dryer on each floor using the smart card system. You could get assigned parking (in theory). The security staff was friendly...and that's about it.

Maintenance would often enter the premises without the permission of the tenant ahead of time and often not leave the little placard that said they were there (as in, we walked in on them).

There are both single and double parking spots. Even though you pay to have an assigned spot, if you're a double parking spot be prepared for some trouble. They make money off of renting spots to people outside the apartment and if you leave your spot, they'll take yours in the day. As in, if you leave, there are one or two spots available. When you come back, there are no spots available. (What's the POINT in having assigned parking if its going to be given away if you go to the supermarket') And they only have one or two parking attendants for the whole building at a time so you're often waiting there for more than 10 minutes for a guy to move the other car somewhere else so you can get into your spot. This doesn't include the times when the parking staff parks their junk cars in YOUR spot so that if you want to park in your spot, you have to get out of your car and PUSH their car out of the way (this has happened more than once).

They clearly have different policies for people above the 15th floor and those below. If you're high enough, you'll learn of the cleaning staff's services or blatantly ignore the rule that says you can't have any dogs or that you're allowed to paint your unit colors of your choosing. You'll get your calls answered if you're above a certain floor. Oh, and even though you're not supposed to run a business out of the apartment, the personal trainer who hogs up all the gym equipment can get away with it because he gives lessons to the management.

If you want to move into a larger apartment, they make you pay $200 to do it, non-refundable. Its not abuot breaking one lease to start a new one, its just their processing fee to change the unit number on the lease. When asked, what if we were to "move out" and then "move in" -- would we have to pay, they just looked at us blankly and just repeated that they would charge us $200 to move into a larger apartment.

They're terrible at handling emergency issues. There was a pipe burst the day after Christmas in 2006 that affected multiple units. Help did not come our way until 8 hrs later while we were dumping out rank nasty water out of our apartment. They did not offer any kind of compensation or help with the things that were damaged. When we complained about the possibility of mold growing in between the walls, we were dismissed (and we found eventually did find mold). There was an electrical fire on president's weekend and we were without power for over 48hrs. Luxury apartment, right'

But lastly, its how we left. We gave them our notice in writing. We scheduled with them for our moveout inspection. No show. We reschedule. No show again. We try to do laundry before we leave to find that the smart card system used for the laundry was prematurely changed to a new system. They had informed us this would happen but we would be getting new cards before that would happen. Nope. So we had to buy a NEW laundry card, put cash on it, and upon our moveout, they refused to give us the money on the other laundry card back. They also took out money out of your deposit because we calculated our prorated amount on 31 days (as in that month) but they wanted to do 30 days so they could get an extra $40 bucks.

Look if you're paying a premium to live in a high-rise with a management team, they should at least come up to the plate when something happens. They were always rude and unwilling to cooperate, they often weren't in the office, and they scoffed at problems. There are always going to be problems wherever you live, but its how your landlord takes care of it often indicates how well you live there. So, if you're going to pay, would you really want to deal with this''

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