I am actually a person that moved here because I thought it was one of the nicer properties with a gated community within the radius from work that we needed. Let's start of by saying, that to get you to lease, the office staff is extremely nice and willing to work with you. Until you sign that paper that locks you in at least a year....then it changes. At first your thinking, "How bad could it possibly be? or What kind of standards does this guy and his wife have?" Let me take you through the journey of our how our adventure at Colonial Grand started:
First: When we signed, we gave a check for the deposit and were told we could move at the beginning of April. Saying that the last tenants had put in their 60 day notice and were moving into a house. Then 3 days til we move in and out of our old place we get a call saying that the last tenants were needing more time in that apartment so they extended their lease and told us we couldn't move in until they move out. I was like, seriously?!?!? After talking to the front office they asked me to go talk to my current apartment and ask for an extension and that they would help offset the cost, IF they could get that approved by upper management. Let me say, I flipped on this lady at that "IF" statement. First, you are going to tell me that my apartment, which I have already signed for, won't be ready until they move out after you agreed with us that we could move in that date then you're saying that IF upper management approves to pay my other apartment's extension that I will need to do that. Note: If that ever happens to you anywhere you probably don't want to live there for 12 months. I have learned this lesson the hard way!
Next: We finally get over the hurdle of the move in date. The resolution - they had to go back to the current tenants and say after we've signed someone we can't grant you an extension. So we get our keys and go to walk into our apartment and were astonished by what we went in there to. First the carpets hadn't been cleaned and in the bedroom there was a stench that smelt as if someone had ferrets or something in a cage. The carpets were stained everywhere and all along the sides of the walls there was a black line. Dents and holes in the wall hadn't been patched up. Sockets were broken and the kitchen was still outdated compared to their model which is what we thought/told we were getting. On the patio there was a hole in the ceiling (that took almost a month for them to come patch.) Doing the walk through we figured out that the dishwasher didn t work and that also took over a month to fix. They kept blaming the long maintenance times on the fact that they were short-staffed. But what kept happening thanks to online ticketing is I would open a ticket for something to be fixed and next day it would be closed or marked as done. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt by giving them a day to maybe come out and work on it. A day went by and I opened up another ticket, which got closed that night as well without the work getting done. So I did this a third time and it happened again. I went to the front office to take this matter up with them and they totally backed up the maintenance staff by saying, They close them out at the end of the day, so their software won t show long ticket times . I was blown away that they didn t even help me out but rather said that their maintenance staff is allowed to do that so upper management won t know how long their ticket time is. Sounds like lying to me!
Once their apartments are cleaned up, they re not bad. They look great and we like the apartment. But if you ever have a need for maintenance or need to talk to the staff you might not want to live here!!!!
The last and final straw for me is the trash problem. They only have one trash compactor for the whole community. Which happens to be on our side. It s a compactor and constantly is overflowing because people don t know to hit the compactor button when it s full. Probably because it takes so long and people are usually throwing trash away on their way out. That s something they didn t think about when they had this brilliant idea to have one $25,000 compactor (that the tenants pay out the butt for.). It doesn t get emptied enough therefor a serious collection of trash begins at the start of every week and at the end. I have tried talking to the office staff about this and then even went to corporate, and got the cold we don t care shoulder both times. I have actually emailed the office staff with a line just as your corporate office, you won t help me or make things better and I never even got a response to that line. It s almost like they didn t even care that I pointed out to them that neither their front office or corporate office care enough about their tenant to listen to them. She just ignored it just as their corporate office did me. This place is a joke! So this is my attempt to save anyone the misery of living here. I almost recommended this apartment to a co-worker and I am so glad they didn t end up moving here. Would have made me feel really bad knowing how extremely bad this place is. Think about when you live in an apartment. It s inevitable that you will always have office staff to deal with so choose wisely. Don t live here! They won t help, as a matter a fact they will only make your life even more miserable.
PLEASE: DO NOT LIVE HERE. If the management style changes in any way, while I am here (April 2013) I will update this.
