This bad review rating of 1/5 is my warning to all prospective renters thinking about renting from individual owners who don't use a management company in this building, BEWARE in particular this anal-retentive (and thankfully now ex-) landlady D. Chan in unit 1408 of Bldg A. DO NOT apply for the apartment that is unit 1408 if you're looking on Craigslist or Zillow or the building posting board!!! It's become clear to me that my hellish and awkward move-out process is in part thanks to individual owners' nickel-and-diming habits and also lack of knowledge on proper Hawaii landlord-tenant guidelines (there is a handbook for this- https://cca.hawaii.gov/hfic/files/2013/03/landlord-tenant-handbook.pdf). BTW, the condo building itself was fine, I'd rate it 3.5 / 5 as a single renter who doesn't care about amenities or swimming pools and gym access etc.
Anyway, I left the apartment in fantastic condition and spent hours with my boyfriend cleaning it, having been a no-pets, no-kids, single dweller in her 1BR for 2 full years and left no holes in the walls or even paint chips anywhere and all appliances in perfect esthetic and working condition. I replaced the stovetop drip pans which was totally above-and-beyond on my part because drip pans underneath the electric burners CATCH DRIPS AND GET RUSTY WITH NORMAL USE. I even let D. Chan and her annoying Chinese mother slide when I asked them in Feb 2018 to check on a moldy smell coming from the bedroom A/C split unit every time the unit was turned on - she and her mother refused to get someone to look at the A/C, instead grumbled in Chinese (which they thought I couldn't understand - but I can and did!) that the smell was from ME, LOL!!!!!! I knew my lease termination was coming up soon after that so I didn't bother fighting them about it despite their personal insults.
I moved out last week and left the place nearly spotless, D. Chan had the nerve to send me a (non-itemized) vague set of emails about some DUST on the blinds and windowsills, a few small fingerprint smudges, and even took out the empty dryer machine lint filter and then took a photo UNDERNEATH the slot where the empty lint filter was, then said she'd withhold part of my security deposit. Who even takes a picture of the slot UNDERNEATH the lint filter? Mind her, when I first moved in, she hadn't even cleaned out the NORMAL lint in the lint filter itself! I wish I had been just as anal-retentive as her and taken a photo of the fuzzy full lint filter when I first moved in just so I could have thrown it back in her face. D. Chan was CLEARLY just using me to detail her apartment so she doesn't have to hire a cleaning service inbetween tenants, while threatening to withhold a part of my security deposit . Normal wear and tear is written into every single standard rental contract, and it certainly was written into mine as well, and it became so clear that this individual landlady has NO REGARD for what "normal wear and tear" encompasses. She also tried very hard to get me to pay for a professional carpet cleaning when she had never written it into the contract in the first place, citing "I always do that when a tenant has been in my apartment". Legally completely in the wrong, and I immediately said so! I threatened to take her to small claims court and let the judge decide if "a few grey grout stains in bathroom" or "light dust on blinds" are TRULY "damage or excessive grime" warranting SD withholding but my idiotically nice boyfriend told me to calm down, and that he would help me detail and do everything asked of us as if we were a professional cleaning service JUST SO I could get my full SD back in person without additional hassle and anger. Long story short, the landlady and her mother in Unit 1408 are pretty awful, sneaky landlords, serving up a side of foreign-language-insults to their tenants in addition to getting out of potentially harmful-to-health complaints from tenants (eg: the moldy bedroom A/C smell) and then turning around and threatening to withhold part of a security deposit based solely, and incorrectly, on normal wear-and-tear conditions.
As mentioned in the beginning of my review, the building itself was fine, I'd rate it 3.5 / 5-- no amenities to speak of, has an annoying unassigned-parking situation and has a cockroach problem as every building new or old in Hawaii apparently has. The management and security office staff have never given me cause for complaint and have even been very courteous and nice every time I approached them to borrow a dolly or if I had a general building question, but like most of the staff in these buildings they aren't the brightest bulbs in the lot and basically keep their jobs just based on niceness, it seems. If I had an opportunity to buy into this building as a landlady, I probably would. Until then, BYE FELICIA to anal-retentive and annoyingly underhanded landlady D. Chan and her mother in unit 1408 of Building A!!! read more