My wife and I moved into our Shorewood Heights apartment in June 2007: we forcefully terminated our contract with Shorewood Heights in January 2008. We thoroughly enjoyed the campus and surroundings of Shorewood Heights on Mercer Island. We rented a ground floor, 2 bedroom/1 bath garden apartment in one of their older buildings. We had moved from Elliott Bay Plaza (another Riverstone managed property) from Belltown, downtown Seattle just the previous month. After having spent 2 years at Elliott Bay, we very much welcomed the serene surroundings of the Shorewood Heights location.

Our experiences went downhill very quickly at the onset of the first time we would need to request service, ANY KIND OF SERVICE, from the management and maintenance offices at Shorewood Heights. We discovered that unlike Elliott Bay Plaza, the Shorewood Heights Management office did not seem to heed the same importance to their Riverstone managed maintenance ticketing system. Visits in response to repair tickets easily tended to average around a week or longer.

Interactions with the management office were as bad, if not worse. A call in to the management office would typically result in an apologetic response from the answering individual, followed by assurances that resolutions were soon to be provided. The trouble was, resolutions were seldom ever provided, and were never in fact provided by the dates promised. Worse yet, it seemed that Shorewood management staff would never record interactions with us. Every time that we would be forced to call into the office to inquire as to why promised obligations had gone unfulfilled, we would be confronted with yet another member of staff, thoroughly unaware of our circumstances, to whom we would need to re-educate in full the status of our current situation.

The fate of our willing agreement with Shorewood Heights was sown in August 2007, when the toilet in our 1 bathroom apartment broke down. This prompted us to call the Riverstone maintenance hotline immediately, requesting that an emergency ticket be placed, considering that we were now left with no bathroom facilities in our home. Several hours passed with yet no contact from the maintenance staff. The next morning came and passed, with yet no word from staff. By mid-afternoon, after resorting to using the public restroom facilities at Shorewood Heights several times, we resorted to contacting a member of the executive staff of Riverstone Corporation, to inform them of our serious complaints. Upon receipt of sincere apologies and the request from this executive of Riverstone Corporation, we decided to give Shorewood Heights another chance to rectify the situation and improve their level of customer service. Further investigation, on behalf of said member of Riverstone executive staff, yielded an explanation that maintenance staff claim to have spoken to us the night of our maintenance request, receiving clearance to address our repair later the next day: this explanation was a blatant falsehood.

In the four months that elapsed between this interaction and our decision to terminate affairs with Shorewood Heights we observed zero improvement. We continued to observe the same level of disorganization, apathy, and general chaos first three months of our experience. One one occasion our garbage disposal which we reported immediately to the maintenance hotline; we were left with rotting food in our kitchen sink for approximately five days before a member of maintenance found the time to attend to our problem. On another occasion our dishwasher broke down during Christmas week, while we had family visitors staying with us: we were initially promised this would be repaired by a specific date, which again as usual came and past, prompting us to call the management office yet again. We eventually heard back from the management office that maintenance claimed to have spoken with us already, indicating that it would take longer than initially promised: again, a blatant falsehood.

While the location of Shorewood Heights is wonderful, and the rent levels very reasonable in comparison to downtown Seattle, we found our experiences at Shorewood Heights to have been one of the most miserable experiences we've had renting yet. We would thorougly discourage other renters from doing business with Shorewood Heights. SEk1KnECheF1ATXbXtrZ

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