My one year lease expires today and what a relief! My experience was very similar to the previous reviewer. The place looks nice from the outside and has a nice model apartment. Furthermore, the on site management really seems like they will be very easy to work with. However, once I signed the lease, things went downhill.

Due to previous occupancy, I was unable to see my apartment until the day I signed my lease. The overall workmanship seemed somewhat worse than I remember of the model, but overall, the place was clean with fresh paint and seemed to be in an acceptable state of repair, so I signed the lease. After signing the lease, I immediately returned to the apartment and turned on the air conditioning which was extremely loud (imagine living in an airport!). The maintenance man later pretty much admitted to causing this problem by installating a new high efficiency blower unit that the duct work was obviously not designed for, but said that they couldn??t do anything about it. The weekend that we moved in air conditioning compressor unit failed and the water heater began leaking water all over the floor. When I called the answering service to report the problems on a Saturday evening, I was impressed to get a response from the maintenance man on the phone within minutes. However, after two visits that weekend he still failed to find a lasting solution to the problem with the air conditioning until a third attempt on Monday. Meanwhile, we were living with the large amount of heat generated by the dehumidifier he had sent in to dry out the carpet after the water leak. There was a reasonably long list of small items that needed fixing when we moved in (ripped screens, fogged double pain windows, kitchen shelves that were not properly fastened to the wall, etc.). Each of the several times that I brought these as a typed list to the management, they accepted it and insisted that they would be dealt with within the week. However, only a few of the items were ever addressed.

The ??high-speed internet?? was a joke. It is advertised proximately with signs by the street as a feature of the apartment, but is really a $28/ month service offered by an outside company. By running their own cable TV service, they pretty much enforce this monopoly by preventing residents from getting cable modems. For $28/month the user is entitled to wi-fi connection for a single computer (not to be shared). The signal was very intermittent and network outages were typically at least once a week for an entire evening. Practical speeds from large, high bandwidth sites were never more than a 200kbit/s compared to the 4Mbit/s promised. However, it was often a struggle just to keep a 28kbit/s radio stream running. When I complained to the manger, rather than accepting responablity for the crappy service provider that she endorced, told me to contact the service provider. This company appeared to consist of a single guy who didn??t answer his phone and didn't even seem to have a website. After giving him a lump sum payment for a year of ??service??, I was never able to get a hold of him again.

The worst is yet to come. After a few months, some heavy folks moved in upstairs and began occupying the bedroom above mine. The floor literally groaned in agony under every step made which made it impossible to sleep for more than a couple hours as a time for the reminder of my residence there. I should point out that my previous apartment was in a Civil War area building with squeaky floors, but nothing compared to this. It was really unbearable and the manger insisted that they had already done everything possible to fix it (translate: everything within a price that we are willing to spend on you). We also heard a great deal of their television and little grandchildren.

I left before my sister did and just received word from her that the air conditioning failed again for most of her last week and that the manger scheduled someone to move in on the last day of our lease. Pool souls!

Clemson Graduate Student

User Responses
From: onmyownsc	Date: 05/04/2008
I have to disagree with at least one point made by this tenant: renters may use other Internet service providers other than the one the apartment building recommends. I did (used Bell South) and had no issues. As for "heavy people" moving in upstairs, in any apartments, when people live over you, you will usually hear footsteps (unless you live in a high-priced complex). I lved in a "bottom floor" apartment and could hear people upstairs walk from time-to-time, but I didn't want to live on the top floor - my choice, so my problem.

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