I lived in this apartment for 10 years, so I know all the pros and cons…read more
Pros:
- Close to BART station
- Some updated appliances
- Some friendly staff, maintenance staff and hard working cleaning staff
On premises Amazon locker inside the garage gates
Cons:
- BART trains are loud at night
- Fire alarms go off often and fire trucks come even in the middle of the night
- Trash bins are always full and overflowing. Residents tend to not throw away their garbage properly and leave it sitting inside the room with the garbage chutes.
- Cigarette smoke smell comes into the apartment from somewhere with residents smoke
-Takes a long time for hot water to come out
- Elevators break down often, and it can take a long time to get them fixed.
- Parking fee is extra (2 car tandem is about $150)
- Other than gas and electric, have to pay most utilities shared (in the neighborhood of $150 so it depends on your neighbors' usage more than your own)
- The last couple years the rent increases have been at the maximum allowed by the county
- Get a lot of pigeons that end up on the balcony and poop there
- A lot of ants, flies and roaches without any obvious pest control
We finally moved out because rent increased to the point where it didn't make any sense to stay compared to buying a house, which we were finally able to do recently. Toward the end, the laundry machine's pipe apparently clogged up. It sounded like they wanted to open up the wall to get access to it, but since we were so close to moving out we used our new house's washer to do our clothes. This kind of problem happened once before also the apartment above us. The laundry machine flooded and we had to run the dehumidifier for 3 days.
Things like window screens, blinds, etc. seemed to break or fall out fairly easily. That being said, because those aren't major issues, we didn't want to bother the maintenance staff to fix. They charged us for that when we moved out, even though they probably would have replaced it for free if we had reported it while we lived there. Above all else, they charged us for pest removal for a dishwasher we never used that was installed 11 months ago after they completed a renovation that we accommodated, and effectively forced us to do, threatening higher rent if we didn't allow it. During that they completely opened up the wall and the counter between the kitchen and living room, which feels like where they may have come from. There were also ants a lot and flies as well.
When we gave notice that we were moving out, we were asked to choose a time for a pre move out walkthrough, which we requested a Tuesday about two weeks out, thinking that it might be easier to figure out what we would need to remedy once some of our stuff moved out. They basically wanted to do it about 5 days after we gave notice, the Tuesday before we wanted. We had very little moved out, and they seemed to concentrate on the carpet and a few other incidental things. We went to the office to talk to them about it, but they didn't want to change the date of the pre move out inspection.
Since we left, we've tried contacting the office, "Equity Residential", where it seems to ring and the last two times we called, disconnected after ringing a couple times. We've also tried contacting one of their prior resident relations offices, left a voicemail with no call back. Also we emailed the office person "Amber" but she e-mailed us back saying she couldn't open the e-mail and just mentioning the balance we owe. It seems like it's easier to ignore us, because trying to withhold payment will do way more damage to us than any argument that we could make.
It's been hard to get a hold of a person to talk one on one with, which feels irresponsible. We lived there for ten years, and would hope we could get a little more respect and consideration than that, rather than being just another transaction for them.