I lived in this complex for just one year, and couldn't wait to move out. We originally moved into a one-bedroom apartment in September of 2005, and while the apartment wasn't the best, it certainly seemed nice enough at first. At least until we started having trouble that required maintenance to come out and repair anything. Our first problem, the oven, never got fixed at all, even after we ignited a cheesecake in said oven in less than ten minutes. About two weeks later, the power in the entire apartment went out in mid-December, due to the breaker in the meter box itself not working properly. Even though we asked them repeatedly to do something about it, nothing was done at all for a week, leaving us in an apartment without heat when the overnight lows were barely above freezing. When they moved us, they still required an additional security deposit, even though we were moving due to their inability to maintain the premises.

Once I moved into a newly available two-bedroom unit, I had hoped things would improve. However, immediately, there were problems. Several of the outlets in the apartment were badly wired, rendering them unsafe to use, or too loose to even hold a plug in the wall. Two of the burners atop the stove never worked at all, and a third only worked occasionally, making cooking extremely difficult. We repeatedly pointed these problems out to the management and to the maintenance crew, yet nothing was done at all.

There were plenty of other problems, both inside and outside the apartment. None of the lights on the back stairwells worked, and we tripped on the stairs at night on more than one occasion, though luckily none of those falls ever caused serious injury. The pool was never open for the entire year we lived at Wellington Arms, nor was the weight room, both closed due to damage from Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and still unopened two years after the storm when we moved away. When we moved in, the fan above our stove didn't work, and someone came out to repair it about a month later, ultimately deciding to replace the entire hood. When the unit was pulled down, untold numbers of cockroaches and bugs fell free, all over our kitchen; I refused to even go in there for a week. Of course, the irony is that, while they fixed the fan, they installed a new hood that didn't even have a fan vent, rendering the repair entirely pointless.

The worst problem, the one that solidified the decision to move out as soon as the lease expired, was the air conditioning. It worked fine at first, but around Memorial Day, it stopped working. It blew warm air. We proceeded to tell the management crew about the problem at least weekly, usually getting told that someone would look at it either in a day or a week, but it took nearly three weeks for someone to even try and put freon into the system. In doing so, they blew the compressor, rendering the system entirely useless. Where it previously blew air at about 78 degrees, the temperature in the apartment quickly soared to almost 90. Again, the management offered all sorts of promises of work being done, but nobody came to look at it at all for nearly two months.

During this time, we were compensated a month's rent, but no other considerations were offered. The A/C unit wouldn't turn off even if we turned the thermostat off and up to 90 degrees, causing out power bills to soar above $200, a full $100 more than we were used to paying. Even after asking for credit just in the amount of our excessively high power bills, it wasn't granted. We weren't offered a move into a comparable unit with functioning air conditioning, even though there was one immediately next to ours.

Finally, shortly after Labor Day, more than three full months after our air conditioning broke, someone came out and enacted a useful repair on the unit. Even after that repair, our air conditioning wouldn't turn off and only cooled the apartment to around 78 (maybe 76 on a cool day), keeping our bills sky-high. We had still asked for further compensation for the several hundred dollars of electricity the broken air conditioner wasted, but we never got a response, even after we had moved out. I'm quite thankful to say we no longer live there, and are now renting from a company that (I hope) will prove to be more reliable.

I strongly recommend avoiding this apartment complex, as well as any others managed by Progressive Management in Pensacola; they're all in just as rough condition. There's a reason that they almost always have vacancies: nobody who can afford not to live there would. The neighbors we had (during the rare times we had neighbors at all) were quite loud, and nothing was done about it even after we complained about a child spitting on us from a third-story balcony! Don't count on the management to ever do anything, if you are unfortunate enough to move in here; just hope that you can live without until the lease expires, and move out as quickly as you can.

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 02/01/2008
Well written. I'm renting here as well and thankfully our lease is about up. It's 2008 now and the pool is still not open. We live in a newly renovated apartment that was horribly done. Everything leaks, underneath the kitchen and bathroom cabinets it is soaked moldy and stinks. There are watermarks on the ceiling where the apartment above us has leaked in the same spots. We've complained repeatedly but still nothing has been done. The roaches. I've never seen anything like it, they are everywhere . I've complained and complained about it but still nothing has been done. I even called pest control myself and had them come spray. The number has reduced but they still come in through the other apartments adjacent to us. It's bad you can actually here them at night. When we first moved in we had a roomate and no doors to the bedrooms. It took a month just to get doors and the contractor tried to make us pay for them. The ones they put up our splintering and falling apart. The linoleum in the bathrooms is peeling and coming up. The water heater only supplies 10 minutes worth of hot water. The rent here is about 600 a month. Not worth it I can't wait to get out of here.

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