I am so frustrated with VOW and today the straw broke the camel's back.
We moved in back in October after being turned on to the complex by a friend who had moved in a month prior. We loved the location and thought the pools, pub, and golf course were nice touches and thought it would be perfect as a starter apartment for a young couple. We soon found out however that VOW is just really good and posing as luxury apartments and have been facing one string of small disasters after another since moving in almost a year ago.

At first there were teensy little problems that we were willing to overlook as we moved in as they were minor. Paint touch ups were sloppy, our sliding glass screen doors were weak and ripped shortly after moving in, the carpet was dirty in places....minor things that could be fixed.

Then it got cold enough for the heat. That was a nightmare. When we turned our heat on you could hear blades scraping together inside as it was trying to start....we literally had to beat on the side of the unit to make it start going "properly". However it was still quite noisy through out the winter and at times when it kicked on in the middle of the night it would start up so loudly that it would wake us up and made us think that someone was breaking in! We called maintenance and they did come pretty quickly but even though they worked on it I know that it never worked the way it should.

Then it snowed. VOW was very good at clearing the main roads of the complex but not good at all about clearing our parking lots so that we could get to those roads. I missed a day of work because snow had been piled up behind my car.

The cops were dispatched at least three times that we know of to our unit in the first several months that we lived there.We called ourselves twice. One time it ended in the arrest of a man who was passed out in a truck in the middle of the drive in front of our apartment and another time I had to file a report because my car had been broken into and things were stolen.

Whew....that's already a lot but I'm still not finished.....

When spring rolled around we had the lovely experience of battling a fly infestation. We don't know for sure how they got there but we can only assume its because our back door doesn't close properly and the seal around it is broken. We killed at least 100 over three days before we bought bombs and sprays to get rid of the problem.

Oh and remember how our heat was really bad...our air conditioning is no better. Every three weeks our air just stops working and we have to call maintenance to come fix it...each time they say they fix it and every three weeks they have to come back and fix it again. Now neither of us are maintenance saavy but we did notice that some tubes on our air unit are electrical taped together and sometimes we have ice develop around the tape...we figure that, that is more than likely what caused the leak into our downstairs neighbors apartment and caused her ceiling to begin to deteriorate. Now I will give maintenance some credit here as they did come to fix this problem even at midnight the night that it got really bad. However, we learned from our downstairs neighbor that was not the first time she had called about the leak...so why hadn't the problem been fixed before it got so bad' We also learned that every time we use the restroom she can hear us from her LIVING ROOM! Which as you can imagine makes us very uncomfortable!

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review today was the straw that broke the camel's back. We had a fire that started around the outside air conditioning units in front of our building. We had called maintenance twice in the last two days about our air not working again and they had come twice and it still was not working today. I had noticed late last night the smell of smoke coming from around our building but assumed that someone had lit a fire in their fireplace for some reason. Well, at about noon today the downstairs neighbor came upstairs banging on the door to get me out because her whole apartment smelled like smoke and when she went outside the whole floor bed was smoking and she saw a few small flames. When the fire dept. came the fire was handled and we were told that it could have been a mulch fire but also that wired coming from the air units were burnt and could have also been the cause. To their credit a few managers came out to our apartments and also two maintenance guys. However they made no real effort to answer questions about the fire or offer any reassurance what so ever. As a matter of fact I was treated as though I were a liar when I mentioned how odd it was that we have had a faulty air conditioner all summer and a fire just so happened to start under the unit. I was told that mulch fires happen and that was all it was....my thoughts on the air conditioning as the source of the fire were dismissed immediately and I was actually treated as though I was bothering them. So now we have new wires to our old, already faulty units and this issue has been swept under the rug...but I am now terrified that this will be a re-occurring problem and next time...it could be much worse.

We are very ready to move away from VOW. The location has been very nice but there is no way that it is worth all that we have gone through in the past year. I will agree that maintenance is very fast at getting to the problem but there is no reason why they should have to keep coming back to fix the same problem.

A note about the integrity of the staff at VOW: we were told that after 6 months we could move into a different apartment if we signed another year's lease. Ha! At our 6 month point we re-visited the leasing office and were told that not only had we been lied to by a sales rep but also that she was removed from their staff( no efforts were made to amend their employees indiscretion).....wonder why.... I mean we had seen her not that long ago at the pub on VOW property drunk out of her mind and spewing private information about the residents and properties of VOW. I was soon to learn that, that is common among VOW employees. It's not that I feel as though they should not use the resident's facilities, especially if some of them live there...but should they really be sitting at the pool with the residents drinking copiously and breaking confidentiality of the complex and its residents' I don't think so.

As you can tell I am very upset with my experiences here. We are a young couple of recent college grads so we don't have a lot of extra money and we pay nearly $700 dollars in rent alone for a one bedroom one bathroom apartment. Our electric bill is always close to $200 no doubt a result of our faulty heating and conditioning system. We are moving as soon as our lease is up in October and will never look back. There are several complexes very close to here that are much nicer and actually cheaper...we are currently looking at a 2 bedroom 2 bath apartment less than a mile away that is 70 dollars cheaper and 300 sq. ft larger and much better maintained. VOW had better clean its act up soon or they are going to be facing big trouble in the future.

Save yourself the trouble and look somewhere else.

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 08/13/2007
I agree as well. I actually can add a little to it as well. I called last week because the water, sewage, and trash bill went up 13 dollars. We now pay 58 dollars and it blows us away. I found out they take the WHOLE complex units and average it by your sq footage. I don't see how that is fair at all, but they seem to think so. I told them with the hike in rent each year along with this we will no longer be able to stay here. The staff actually told me its like that almost everywhere, and when I told them with rent increase with no updates to the building or property we were gonna have to move, she said don't want you to leave but good luck. We are almost outta here as well, much better out there.

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