I don't know how I can condense all our issues into one review...
We rented a single family residence in a "highly sought after" neighborhood near Microsoft. Our first property manager, Carmel, was pretty on top of her game. The house was clean on move in, and when we had a dishwasher issue (previous tenants broke glass in it, which clogged up the line), she had someone out there quickly to fix it.
About five months after moving in, the problems began. Let me try to summarize -
1 - large tree limb falls on roof, causing damage. Call MacPherson's to find out our PM Carmel had left the company. We're told the branch manager, Cherie Haven, will take care of things. Takes a full month before someone comes to remove limb/fix hole in roof. Also took three weeks of waiting and another prompting email to "meet" our new PM Kim.
2 - toilet (which was improperly installed) leaks through the floor into laundry room.
3 - main water line into house fails due to age. Kim sends out a plumber a day later, but then won't answer her phone when he calls to get approval to do the actual work so he has to leave w/o fixing anything. Five days after that, Kim sends two different "contractors" to fix the line. As the break was under landscaping boulders, they remove the one boulder but then leave it on the side of the driveway - for the next year. We're told by Kim that we will not get even a partial-reimbursement for our $600 water bill because she called a plumber right away.
4 - we resign a lease, agreeing to a rental raise if we could get a new fence and dishwasher (the fence was rotting to the point that if you lightly pressed on a board, it could fall out - not great with kids. The dishwasher always had pink scum build up, despite everything I did - and we did not have hard water.). The fence and dishwasher are agreed upon. Several months later, parts of the fence were replaced.
5 - A new dishwasher is bought, only for it to fail three weeks or so after installation. Thus starts a four month saga that included two more dishwashers, several different "handymen", and eventually fixing the issue ourselves (air vent was clogged.) During this time, we're told to call the handyman ourselves to arrange things.
6 - I notice a water leak in the laundry room. I call the office and ask for Kim, only to find out that Kim has left the company. Once again, our account is in the hands of Cherie Haven. A plumber is sent and we discover the leak is actually coming from the bathroom upstairs. Plumber fixes the leak from around the shower faucet. Several days later, laundry room floods from bathroom. Plumber comes back out, finds yet another fault in the pipes, caulks and tightens everything.
7 - Our refrigerator stops cooling. I contact Cherie, who doesn't get back to me. After several days, I email her with how this violates Landlord/Tenant Act. She responds with an introduction to our new PM, Alberto. We ended up going without a working fridge for about two weeks.
8 - We noticed a puddle in the landscaping and realize that the main water line has failed again, in the area they "fixed" it the year before. This leads to a several week saga of getting the water line replaced, only for it to fail inspection, so it had to be replaced again, only for the guys to drill through the sewer line, causing the sewer line to clog up and back up into the house, flooding through the downstairs bathroom, rendering anything we used with water useless (washer, showers, toilets), which led to having a hole dug at the end of our sidewalk where raw sewage flowed, and left open for three days...
Plus we had the kitchen sink clogging up several times due to an old grease clog from previous residents, temperamental outdoor lights that never worked properly despite two different handymen working on them, a double oven where the top oven was rendered useless because of two issues (of which only one was fixed when we asked, and even then, it took months to get it fixed), and more plumbers crack than a person should have to endure.
Our final PM, Alberto, was actually quite good. We liked him, and would recommend him based on the four months we worked with him. Cherie Haven is beyond useless, and took weeks to fix major problems with our house when she was in charge. The Landlord/Tenant Act was violated several times while we lived there because of lack of water, open holes of sewage, non-working major appliances...all for the high cost of "desirable area" living. Between that, plus the branch manager not answering calls ever, plus the fact that we dealt with four different property managers in two years and were never told when one would leave, I cannot recommend MacPherson's to anyone, either as a renter or a property owner. read more