Let me preface by saying this happened close to a year ago, but I held back from posting anything about it because I thought it might hurt my chances of getting any of my money back, now, close to a year later, I know the $4,200 my roommate and I put down on the apt is gone for good, so here goes.
Long story short - we signed on a lease which started December 1st. When signing the lease, we were given a sheet by the broker guaranteeing "no record of bed bug infestations in the past year." When we began moving in (on November 30th) we found two bed bugs within 2 hours of moving in. My understanding is that though the laws on bed bugs are new, it is illegal to rent out apartments with bed bug infestations. We reported it to our landlord and left the apartment immediately. We never stayed a night in the apartment which our landlord still has our first month's rent and security deposit for ($1,400 each) and resorted to crashing on friend's couches and subletting in another place to have a healthy place to live. The landlord sent the incorrect kind of exterminator twice (more or less a roach exterminator) and the issue was never approached correctly or taken care of. We have been told various laws: that the landlord has a week to a month to take care of the issue, it wasn't.
Because our landlord was a hot head who denied there was an issue, and refused to give any of our money back, our broker made a verbal agreement with the landlord to get us out of the lease. The agreement was that if he re-rented the apartment by January 1st we would get our security deposit back and get out of the lease but lose the first month's rent. This of course, seemed insanely immoral and illegal, but with no money for a lawyer and no free representation from the BAR Association (from being above the poverty line) we felt we had no choice. We had to at least try to get some of our money back and do whatever we could to get out of this horrible situation.
After a month and a half of angry threatening phone calls and sleeping on our friend's floors, the apartment was eventually rented out to another two guys, but we never got any of our money back as promised. We found out through our neighbor from the building we had stayed in touch with after moving out (they also had a tremendous amount of issues with the landlord both bed bug and non-bed bug related. The two new tenants apparently moved out within 3 days as well, and were planning to take the landlord to court. We also sent multiple letters threatening lawsuits against our landlord, both from us and lawyers we met with, but he never responded. Eventually when it came apparent that our land lord was not going to give us any of our money back and that it would probably cost just as much or more to go to court, we backed off, happy to at least be out of the lease.
We then asked Leiter Realty for our broker fee back. Our broker told us "I can't give it back, I can only apply it to other apartment rentals". After going back and forth quite a bit, we eventually threatened a lawsuit on our Leiter broker as well, he went back and forth for a while with our lawyer and he eventually agreed to give $900 back out of $1,400. Our lawyer took $200 of it, so long story short out of $2,100 we each originally put down, my roommate and I both got $350 back from the apartment we never stayed a night in - not the mention that massive amount of other costs that come along with a nightmare like this.
After putting all of my savings down on this apartment, I was forced to leave the city, and my roommate has still not found a permanent place to stay. There are a million details I have skipped over, but let's just sum it up as the worst moving experience of my life. It gets me angry just thinking about it and writing this up, so I'm going to end it here. So, would I say look elsewhere for apartment? Yes, that would probably be a good idea, unless you want months of sleepless nights, aggressive phone calls, lawsuits and crashing on your friend's floors GO ELSEWHERE. read more