Fair warning! This post is extremely long, but I thought it would be more helpful to be very detailed than just rant about my experience.

I would strongly discourage anyone from renting an apartment at the Gardens of Hillsboro Village. In my opinion, the only positive about this apartment is its location (which was one of the major reasons my husband and I rented there), but this is far outweighed by the long list of negatives. To summarize, the following is a list of specific things that happened to us during our 2 years (this by no means includes everything):

- One of our packages was lost (actually it s my belief that it was stolen by another tenant but I could never get management to give me the full story). The system for packages is that they are accepted by management in the leasing office and then logged into a book (you do not have any other option, however, as delivery personnel are not given access to individual apartments). Tenants are supposed to sign out packages when they come to pick them up, but that is never enforced and no one in the office checks before people walk out with a particular package. In my case, the lost package was mislabeled for another apartment. They eventually found my package, but when I complained about the system and gave them suggestions for improvement absolutely nothing changed.
- The gates for the parking garages were constantly malfunctioning (management was well aware of these issues, but yet they still advertise this as a perk of the community). On one occasion, the gate damaged our car. When we told management what happened, they refused to compensate us for the repairs. We eventually complained to the corporate office only to experience the joys of having at least half a dozen phone calls go unanswered. It was finally agreed that they would compensate us for the damage, but we never received the check.
- When we were out of town (out of the country, in fact) we mailed in a rent check which according to management got lost in the mail (my opinion: it was lost by management). In any event, we were forced to pay by cashier s check and pay an exorbitant late fee. In close to a year as tenants we had never been late on a rent payment and were only a few days late on this particular payment.
- At some point it was determined that the stairwells in a number of buildings were in need of repair. It took at least 6 months (probably closer to 9) for the repairs to even start and then when they did it was during the summer, which is conveniently the busiest time for tenants moving into and out of the complex. It caused major aggravation for a number of tenants moving (including myself). As I write this post, the construction has just finished its third week (management had estimated 2 weeks total for our building s stairwell) and there is at least another 2 weeks of work to go.
- We scheduled a walk-through of our apartment before moving out. Among the items that were found to be in violation was a light bulb that had burned out in the kitchen and a light bulb in the bathroom that was a white bulb when all of the other bulbs were clear. We would have been charged $3 per light bulb for this violation. Clearly this felt like a lot of salt in the wound to us.

In all of this aggravation, the one thing that was consistent each time was management s completely unsatisfactory handling of the situation. Basically, they know that they will have a steady stream of Vanderbilt students coming through year after year so they can afford to be completely unaccommodating to their tenants and moreover take advantage of them every step of the way. I would stay far away from th

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