Being one of those communities with income guidelines, we started the application process with them 3 months before the contract with the community we're leasing from was over because the approval process takes time.

For a starter, although the lady who took care of explaining the process for us and gathering the information and documents they required was nice, she was quite inefficient. She would forget to tell us about things she needed from us and would call every couple of days to say what she had forgotten about. She would ask us to fill out a form in a way and would say it was the wrong way and tell us how to fill it in another way once we send it back to her. All in all it took about three weeks for them to finalize everything and say that we were approved.

About a week later, we had to call to ask them for the exact mailing address of the place because we needed to plan our move (movers, utilities, postal service...etc) because they hadn't sent any communication after they said we were approved. When we spoke to the lady she said "Oh we didn't send you the move-in package!" (how organized!) So she sent the information in an email and we started preparing for the move-in date they provided.

Five days before the presumed move-in date, which was a Saturday, we called them to make sure that there would be someone to hand over they keys to our apartment and fix anything that might need to be fixed etc. When we called in th morning, a nice gentleman said he was a trainee and that he would have his supervisor call us when she was back. The lady who was the community assistant manager called in the evening and said she was sorry because the apartment would not be ready for us to move in because the occupant of our apartment to be decided she didn't want to leave when she was supposed to and coincidentally this "just happened on the day we called" and "they wanted to call and inform us" but it just so happened that we called first!

She started by telling us that it wasn't a problem and that we only needed to push our move-in date one week until the occupant leaves and they set the place! When we told that was impossible she started giving us "better" options like "why don't you move to Manassass (Prince William County) we have a sister community there and they have vacancies".

Our reply of course "no" because that meant changing schools for the children and because we've had been working on that with them for three months and they had to accommodate us since it was their mistake and poor management that caused all this so the assistant manager said she would have the manager call us to see what can be done.

A day later the manager calls starts reciting what they taught her in public relations classes and said that it would take a couple of months to evict the occupant who refused to leave (remember the assistant manager said the occupant was going to leave only a week later, now that has changed to the occupant not leaving at all!) and that she tried her best an found us an apartment that would be ready a week after our agreed move-in date. So we asked that we sign a contract for the alternative she gave us and she refused saying it was company policy not to sign until move-in day! Luckily we had planned one week of move-out/move-in overlap so we rescheduled everything according to their new date. Two days later, the manager calls and says the alternative apartment she had promised would not be ready until another week after the date she previously mentioned.

We started to go around all over Northern Virginia to try and find a place in a week's since we had informed our community we were leaving 60 days in advance as per contract requirements. We ended up paying application fees for a couple of places that couldn't get back to us before our deadline and we signed up a new lease at our community for an other year. We got lucky they haven't promised our home to anyone or we would have ended up without a home because unlike The Fields of Herndon our community management has a reputation to keep.

The sad-funny thing is that in our search for another place during the last week we contacted another Kettler (formerly KSI) managed community in a different city and they said they had a vacancy and we were going to see it later in the day, but they called about 20 minutes later to say they couldn't show us the place because the resident didn't want to leave anymore! So it seems that's how they do business in Kettler or KSI whatever you want to call it.

So if you want to save yourself the annoyance, headache and worry and if you value your time, and you're thinking of going to The Fields of Herndon remember this incident.

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 08/12/2008
Thank you for taking the time to post your review. It is really of great help for others who are looking for an apartment in the area.

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