As mentioned in a previous post, Helwig provides property management and realtor services. Mine will focus on the management side.
tl;dr, they're a fine company, if nothing goes wrong.
We were tennants living at one of the apartments managed by Helwig. We lived in the apartment for 2 years and 3 months, and one time in that period we were 3 days late giving our rent check as we were on vacation, and forgot to send it before hand. (Be sure we received a phone call promptly telling us about this, to which we paid that day.)
When we first signed the lease we were told that a board on the roof deck that had bowed up would be replaced, instead it was just incorrectly nailed back down. It then pryed back up through the nails and broke in the middle. It was however replaced right as we moved out. Wasn't that big of a deal, but was just the start.
Throughout the first year, we didn't really have any issues, besides small things like the heat not working, and having no hot water, but those were simple fixes.
In Dec we came home from vacation and one end of our kitchen light was dangling by the wires, the other end ripped the drywall screws out of the ceiling. We emailed them on Dec 27th to please fix. They emailed back and said they contacted the owner. Nothing was fixed until Jan 15.
On Jun 2, our air conditioning unit broke, and our apartment was at an extremely uncomfortable 80 degrees. We emailed management to please fix. An HVAC company came out and refilled the leaking unit with freon. On July 9th it went out again, and I had to follow up on two occasions to hear anything back from them. The HVAC company came back out on Jul 14th to refill with freon. Doesn't seem like a long time in between but when the apartment is 86 degrees, and you go to sleep in your car so you can have the air on, its seems much longer. On Jul 24 the air went out again, and they finally agreed to replace the unit. Aug 10th we had to follow up as the air was not working, and then again on Aug 20th as we did not recieve any response from Helwig. They finally replaced the air conditioning at the beginning of September, when we told them we would be leaving the apartment.
During that same summer, the pipe for the bathroom upstairs was leaking and everytime the toilet flushed, water would fall into the ceiling below, leaving a water bubble and large colored spot in the ceiling of the 1st floor bathroom. We told managment about this when we noticed, but they ignored it and was never fixed. Technically not our problem, as it had no effect on us, but figured we would try to help out the landlord before bigger issues arose. Oh well.
We came home from work one night with the entire bottom floor smelling of chemicals. We pinpointed it to the freezer, to which the ice maker had somehow melted, and burned marks into the side of the freezer. I had to use an oven mitt to disconnect and remove the ice box as it was too hot to touch. We told management about this...they told us they think the freezer door was probably left open, and did not fix anything.
In Aug, we were in the process of purchasing a house and told them that Sept would be our last month, as we were month to month in our lease. The lease stated that we were to give 2 months notice, which they let us out a month early due to all the issues we had with them. They had someone rent the apartment the next month so no money lost anyway.
After all of this, we thought we were finally done dealing with them. Then we received a bill from Peco for the apartment for the month of October. Peco had not switched our names off of the apartment, and back to the landlord like we had asked them, who would have had to pay the amount if they had done it correctly. When we asked Helwig to pay us back for the electricity that was used at the apartment during that time, they refused and told us we were over-reacting.
If you're going to use them as a management company, just hope nothing goes wrong. read more
