Oakwood was great - very friendly management, people who stayed around that time would recall the manager --, a very friendly guy; --------, the extremely sweet office person; and ----, the always readily available, ever smiling maintenance guy. A bunch of us moved in together and the Oakwood management gave us some great move-in incentives and referral bonuses, and free covered parking. And there is really nothing wrong with the apartment community - great location - close to the lake and walkable to Idylwood Park and Marymoor Park. As for the comments about the ------- family (------, her kid ----, and her family) though they do hang around outside and the kid is a noisy brat, they were pretty harmless and actually very nice people.

In comes Archstone who are on an apartment community buying spree in the area - they now have four communities just in Redmond - Lakeview, Hill, Park, Microsoft Campus; and out goes Oakwood who wanted to get out of residential communities and focus only on commercial complexes. And there is clear change - there are niceties like externally repainted, reroofed apartments in the entire community, a website (myarchstone.com) where one can set up autopayment of rent and utilities bill through a bank account, lodge maintenance complains, etc. And the comments about no 24 hour turnaround as per the Archstone guarantee are true - a few of our requests used to take a few days for them to even get to, though they had more than one maintenance guy now (---- in Oakwood used to be much more prompt handling everything alone). Archsone also brought with it competitive, supply-demand based pricing, which means rents would differ based on when your lease started and ended, again something that gave renters/renewers more options - we infact had a lower renewal rent for one of our 12-month renewals than what we were paying for the previous term. However, with a big company like Archstone, there are set rules and the management would have to abide by them - no flexibility on any front. That was acceptable, but the office staff including the manager are pretty haughty and arrogant - in some cases with certain people (including us), they were plain rude. That is the single biggest complaint with this place now. As long as you do not have to deal with the management often, you will be just fine.

Move-out experience: Again they were not very flexible and did not accommodate any special requests during move out - like staying a couple of days extra would mean paying the whole of the next month's rent at the month-to-month lease rate. While signing the lease termination agreement, they giave us an option to have a pre move-out inspection of the apartment, but the rude lady at the office gave me such attitude when I actually asked for it to be scheduled. They gave us a huge sheet of potential charges if we did not clean the apartment's every nook and corner, e.g. not cleaning the heating vents would cost us like $5 for each vent. This was good and got us to clean the apartment up thoroughly, but we were still expecting them to charge us a huge amount like large apartment communities do and were mentally prepared for that; but to our pleasant surprise, they just charged us $20 which we thought was just the right charge as per their sheet for the things we had not bothered spending the effort cleaning. Deducting this $20 and the final month's utility bill, they sent us back a refund from our initial security deposit - very much appreciated.

That sums it up - in many ways, my one and a half years at Oakwood were great; the one year with Archstone was close enough except for the horrible management people. Since Archstone is a huge monopoly in Redmond, they also have a say in the pricing in the area and so rents for new people is pretty high these days, especially their 1b-1b is simply not worth the price. You can go a little farther out from Microsoft campus in Redmond like in downtown Redmond or Avondale and find similar quality apartments for much more reasonable rents. And yes, wherever we have stayed or whatever we have seen (and we have seen a few communities in the Redmond-Bellevue area), nothing beats the available closet (walk-in and wall) space that Oakwood (yeah, that is what we call it still for old times sake) have here in their 1000 - 1100 sq ft 2b-2b apartments.

Have fun making your choice! :-)

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 09/19/2007
Couldn't agree more about "the horrible management people".

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