This is going to be a long thorough review, so bear with me. Here's the quick rundown first off:
Pros-
Quite a few properties listed for reasonable prices, the properties are well-taken care of for the most part, and the company is very prompt returning phone calls. Manager is a former contractor, quick and good at repairing homes. They were willing to work with me when my roommates were all out of town, and allowed me to do the deposit in installments.
Cons-
Most of the staff can be very passive-aggressive, will blame tenants for any problems, exhaustive paperwork process. Tend to lose paperwork and/or forget things. Our experience with the company was not good.
Now the long version-
My fiance and I found Kelley Rentals when we were looking for a house to move into together with our friend. All of us had jobs, met the income requirements, and had references from previous landlords. BUT, my fiance was traveling in Europe, and our friend was visiting her family, so getting us all to sign paperwork and get deposits together was a serious headache.
Here Kelley Rentals was great, they were patient and let us work it out. They negotiated a pet deposit, and let us pay the deposit in installments as I got money transferred from my fiance and friend out of town. We were also told at the time (it was a three bedroom, and between the three of us we only used two of them) that if we wanted anyone else to move in, we could have them go through the application process to be added to the lease (we did have to sign a one-year lease and all of our names had to be on it).
As my fiance and friend got back in to town, we all moved in to our big awesome house.
Now here's where the bad started. About a month after we moved in, we had a friend looking for a place. We had the spare room. So we went through the process to get him on the lease. He had just moved and didn't have a job, but he did have a trust and made more income on it than we did. Still, they grilled him and asked for every shred of paperwork possible (some of which they lost and/or asked for again multiple times). They asked his family to come in and vouch for him, and more or less said to his face that they didn't believe him. Then, after another month of that, they said to us that "the owner of the house didn't want to add anyone else to the lease."
Something that, if true, they should have checked before letting him even apply. And if not true, was just a convenient way to say no without argument.
Here's a few of the other incidents we ran into:
- We caught the owner of Kelley Rentals standing in our driveway taking pictures of the front of the house. When asked if we could help with anything, he pointed to a dent in the front of the garage door (which had been there before we moved in and had been specifically mentioned on our walkthrough.)
He was very angry, said that we should have told him about it immediately. I reminded him that it had been there since before we moved in, to which he said "Well, we have hundreds of pictures of this house. If that's true, I'll know soon."
He blamed us immediately and was very rude about it. He called out a repair man to check it out, who told us that it was a bad dent, a serious hazard and that he would contact Kelley Rentals to see if they wanted to fix it.
We didn't hear another word about it. When he got back to the office the owner must have seen that the dent was in the pictures and that it was HIS responsibility, not ours. We never received any apology for his behavior, the intrusion on our privacy, and the dent was never fixed.
- One month I sent in the rent check a week early. It was dated for the date rent was due, but I hadn't collected rent from the roommates yet. Their accountant cashed it as soon as they received it. While this was partly my fault, there was zero accountability on their end. I received an angry call, was told I had to bring in rent as a cashier's check, and pay their bounced-check fee (as well as my own) on top of rent because THEY cashed the check a week too early.
- When we moved out, they blamed us for a missing screen door that had never been there. They took $100 screen door out of our move-out deposit and have refused to contact us about it or send us their pictures showing the door was there when we moved in.
They also charged us $60 for cleaning costs after we'd had the carpet professionally cleaned and spent three days cleaning the house.
- We had to buy a fridge for the house. When we moved out, we offered it to the company for less than we had paid for it. They had three weeks to decide if they wanted it, but they didn't tell us they didn't want it until *the day* before new tenants were moving in. We had less than 12 hours notice - on a work day - to get the fridge out of the house.
*They did let us close our lease early, because we allowed them to show the house immediately after giving our 30-days. That was nice. read more