This property looks nice and the apartments themselves are nice (but nevertheless overpriced). The problem is with the overall management and the office staff (and I am not even addressing here the fact that they now allow apartments to be shared by students and other people who will litter in the hallways and elevators, put their junk mail in your mailbox everyday, etc). I will just give you one example here of a recent interaction with the office staff, and you can draw your own conclusions:

Two weeks ago, I received the form to make my lease selection for the next year. As I am looking to move out soon, I opted for the most expensive one which was listed as a 30-day notice no minimum stay option. Yesterday, I found at my door the new contract to sign. The first page (with the monthly lease listed looked fine) so I thought "yup,they made the change" and I started signing. Luckily I still decided to very carefully read all the small print on the other pages because I would have been screwed out of a lot of money. It was a 60-day notice lease rather than the promised 30-day notice one and it had a 4-month minimum stay instead of the promised no minimum stay.

Thinking that no serious company with integrity would make such a serious mistake that could literally cost a resident thousands of dollars, I assumed that maybe I had made a mistake and checked off the wrong option on the form two weeks ago. So I went to the office and asked to see the form. There were one senior and one junior staff member in the office at that time. The junior member went to look for the form but took a very long time to find it. When she finally found the form, she said "just return the signed contract and you're all set." Hm, they really wanted me to just sign without reading too carefully' So I pointed out that the contract that I had received did not match the option that I had selected on the form. The staff member got very nervous, started telling me to stop talking and that she would cross out some things then in the contract because she forgot to change the standard contract.

When I pointed out that the problem with that explanation was that she obviously did not forget to move the monthly rent to the highest possible category so how could she then forget to change the corresponding terms (especially one that would make it impossible to leave), she told me that I had to stop talking to her. I tried to let her know that when it is about thousands of dollars they should have been more careful and that this type of serious mistake is unacceptable and gives the place a bad reputation. She literally told me that no it was not unacceptable to her (apparently she did not understand that it is unacceptable to the _resident_).

I then asked her to just print a new contract with all the correct information. She responded by saying that their software does not allow them to change anything else other than the price. Now, seriously, which company uses software that allows one to change the price of the lease without any chance at all to change the "advance notice" and "minimum stay" conditions accordingly'' That makes sense only if all they care about is the money, even if it means tricking the resident. When I pointed that out, this junior staff member started crying.

The senior staff member then came from a back room and she too told me that I should stop talking. I pointed out to her that given all the circumstances it did not look like it was a mistake and that even if it was a mistake the right thing to do would have been for the junior staff member to apologize instead of crying and telling me to stop talking. To my surprise, the senior staff member was also unprofessional because she told me that there was no need for the junior staff member to apologize because "it was a mistake." I then asked her what she thought apologies are for (they are for use when one makes a mistake! no one ever needs to apologize when they did something right). She insisted that the office can make mistakes without having to apologize for them -- in my opinion, this reflects disrespect and rudeness to the customer.

And that's just one example. Try dealing with their questionnaire every year asking if you want automatic payments to be a possibility, and year after year you say "yes" only to find out that they never make it available and instead prefer to charge you extra and refuse to accept your personal check when one of your rent payments (even if you paid 60 already on time) is 1 day late....

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 09/15/2007
Yes, they even tried to make us pay for our rent payments without a personal check, because the one we put three payments in the envelope [our version of an automatic payment], and there was an emergency in our family, and the check for the month that was 2 1/2 months away did not go through, but the first two did. She told me she was doing me just a big favor by allowing us to continue to use personal checks. And your mention of the lease issue -- that is not unique; they try to do that at every turn, sneaking things in. They did when signing the lease, too -- including the fact that they won't let you look at the lease until you come to sign it, and won't let you take a copy to peruse, because they say it costs them money, and that it's their work and don't want it being copied.

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