My husband and I moved into Woodchase back in August 2015 and left in the middle of July 2019. We…read morelived there for almost 4 years to the day, so I feel we have a lot of good experience with them to form an opinion.
WC hires their own maintenance staff, and they are the worst. They do an absolutely sloppy job with anything needing fixed including the several times flooding happened in the apartment upstairs causing our ceiling needing to be dry walled several times, and it just looked horrible. They also broke my personal wreath one time and just left it broken and it was never mentioned to me. I couldn't complain about it, because I was worried Christina (property manager) would raise our rent again (more on that below). They also left our apartment extremely dirty after our dryer broke. Lint was everywhere, and they vacuumed up none of it. A water heater had to be replaced in the neighbor above us (2019) and maintenance left the water heater on the stairs outside of their apartment. Well, the water heater started leaking water and it leaked onto the concrete outside of our apartment. It was the winter when we had those unbearable cold days, and the water froze over causing an ice skating rink outside our apartment. My husband slipped and fell, and maintenance was in no rush to get salt out to us until they opened the next morning. The "Emergency Maintenance" that is setup for afterhours is a joke. They tell you that they can't do anything until they open the next business day.
Christina is a pain to deal with. I would email Christina to let her know about things needing fixed around my apartment whenever something was needed, and she would ignore my emails. I would sometimes have to follow up 2 or 3 times (days later) for her to finally respond. Our dryer started smelling like something was burning. The lint filter was cleaned, and then our dryer completely stopped working. I wrote Christina about the issue, and she said she would send someone out. She let me know the vent needed to be cleared out (the one that runs outside), and it would be a few days. I never heard anything after a few days, and at this point I should have. I wrote her for an update saying we were without our dryer for over a week at this point. She said that the repairman who had come fell off the ladder and broke his nose. She never updated me about this or let me know but acted like I should have known. I also once wrote her about the maintenance people moving packages I had set outside for the mailman to pick up back inside my apartment. A few days later, we got notice that our rent was increasing. Less than a year later, we received yet another rent increase. I wrote Christina asking her why we received another increase in less than a year's time, and she stated they increased to reflect market value. No upgrades had ever been completed on our apartment, and with all the maintenance issues, I was over it. Good luck living in WC in the winter time when it snows and ices. They do not prepare for the weather at all even when they have the forecast and know bad weather is predicted. They do not put salt out to prepare. So when early commuters have to leave for work, it is likely you will be skating around and most likely falling, because the parking lot will be a sheet of ice. Once you pull out of WC, all other roads are completely clear. It was a night and day difference. WC does not use anyone other than their own staff to plow. When I wrote Christina about the weather issue and the lack of salting, she responded by saying "It was cleared when the staff came in this morning." The office opens at 8am. I was in shock that was her response to the situation. I let her know that if she wants to charge people "market value" for their apartments, I expect the driveways to be pre-salted. No response.
Parking is rare. There are not enough spots for the amount of tenants that live there. This forces people to park illegally throughout the complex, and then the Chesterfield police come through and will ticket cars. There is garage parking for an extra 60/month plus a non-refundable 200 garage remote deposit. Every time I would see the garages open, there would be a ton of extra parking spaces which goes to show you no one was purchasing them. If WC would lower their price, they might be able to help with the parking situation and get some extra money. It's a win-win for everyone.
If you want to get your full security deposit back when moving out, make sure you actually are there. When we moved into WC, the lady who gave us a tour said that carpets were replaced with every tenant. We found out on our move-out inspection that they only replace the carpet every 7 years.
My experience with WC was not good, and I would not recommend anyone to live there. There are much nicer apartment complexes in the Chesterfield area where you will actually get your money's worth with the amenities and maintenance.
