When I first saw Sterling I was very excited. With the computer room and the tanning bed and the cute apartments, I thought I had it made. But I ran into a fair amount of problems when I moved in. First, I signed up for a two bedroom apartment, I just wanted one roommate. I had just one roommmate, but I was put in a three room apartment (they used the third room for storage). My roommate was assigned to the bigger room (which I had been expecting), so my room was much smaller than I had expected. When I went over the office to complain the girl reviewed my lease and found that I was being charged for the larger room and so she had to rewrite the lease. I would never have known this if I had not viewed the apartments the year before. My bed was broken when I moved in (the box spring was entirely cracked in half), but since I was bringing my own, it didn't really matter.

Pet rent was another fun thing. I had to put down almost five hundred dollars in pet deposits and pay forty dollars every month for two cats. Only a partial refund was available and it took forever (almost six months) and threats of legal action to get the small refundable portion back. I kept calling Eric and he kept assuring me the check was in the mail and two weeks later, having not received it I would call again.

The apartment itself was okay. I liked the washer/dryer and the furniture was fine. It was pretty quiet, at least in my building. The shuttle was nice and I never had trouble with parking and I never felt unsafe.

A couple other problems that were unique to Sterling were:

roommates: I was paired first with a girl I didn't know. She was fairly irresponsible and never did her share of the cleaning in the main living area. I once left the trash in the trash can after taking it out all of the time to see how long she would let it sit there. Three weeks and some days of horrible smell later I gave in and took it out. She was fairly quiet, but constantly had her friend sleeping over on our couch and receiving mail at our apartment. She dropped out of school sometime in October. The annoying this is that that left me to cover the entire electricity bill for two months which I had expected to be sharing with someone. In January a new roommate moved in (Sterling gave me no warning) and she was fifty years old. I am not kidding. As this is a complex mostly geared towards college kids, I was amazed. This woman had a fondness for deadbolting me out if I was out past eleven at night. So the moral of the story, probably better to know the roommates you agree to live with because you never know who you are going to get.

Apartment staff: Eric and everyone in the office were fairly nice, but clueless. As I lived in a three bedroom with one room being used for storage we had no access to the third room. One night the fire alarm started beeping (the battery was dead) and of course I couldn't get to it to shut it off or replace the battery. I was awake all night and called the office first thing to ask them to repair it that day. I had to call repeatedly and about half an hour before the office shut down I walked over and stood there until I got a maintence guy to come with me. I couldn't believe it took that much effort to get such a simple repair done. The maintence staff also entered our apartment whenever they felt like it to go into the storage room with no warning. There were at least two times when I had to go running into my room and shut the door because I wasn't fully dressed. I didn't really like the fact that random guys could come bursting in anytime they felt like it without even knocking.

All in all, they are fine apartments, but it is more the hassles and the expense that go with them that make them not really worth it in my opinion. If they were more professionally run they would be much better.

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