Review is for 185 King Street North.
Pros:
- Large rooms with ensuite bathrooms
- Close to campus
Cons:
- Cost: I get that it is very close to campus, but the other cons below have begun to negate the pros above
- Poor management: not reasonable and don't seem to care about their tenants
- Not truthful: I've been living here for 3 years (out of convenience) and when I was first moving in one of the owners was telling me that there was free TV. When I actually moved in, they told me that I would have to sort out my own cable subscription and that the "free TV" he was referring to was that if I owned my own Apple TV I could use that...
- Deposits: In my second year here I paid $50 for the key deposit. I forgot that I still had the key and in my third (current) year went to return it. The building manager told me that I can only get my $50 back at the end of my contract with them and that I'd have to hold the key (to a different apartment's mailbox) until the end of my tenancy. Seriously poor security and management.
- Keys can be duplicated. Just a note for anyone who's super serious about security. They keys they provide are normal house keys, which means that previous tenants could have duplicated keys and kept them without Maison knowing.
- Internet: there is internet included but it's not the greatest. Also, they just started this new thing where you have to provide the MAC address of all equipment that will be using the internet. This means that every time a friend comes over, they will not be able to use the WiFi... absolutely ridiculous.
- Looks: not a big deal but something to note, especially given the fact that I'm paying $690 a month. When compared to buildings such as Luxe or Sage, it seems like they chose the cheapest materials possible for their building. All the walls are an ugly light brown, and the kitchen counter top feels like melamine. It kinda feels like the building was made in the mid-2000s, where as Luxe and Sage feel modern and premium for the price.
- Thermostat: again, not a big deal but something to note. In order to change the thermostat setting you need to contact management.
- Flooding: while this hasn't happened to me, two of my roommates this year experienced flooding in their room. When they told management, it took them a while to come deal with it and they told one of my room mates to "not leave things on the floor"... what?!
- Walls are paper thin (between rooms and between apartments)
- Parking: a rough calculation tells me that the building has max. occupancy of 220 people. There are roughly 30-40 parking spaces. If you want parking, either find someone who's subletting and doesn't need the space or put yourself on the waitlist more than a year in advance.
- Courtesy: before I moved into my room the previous tenant had posters up that removed paint from the wall. It was all fixed and repainted before I moved in, however whoever did the work didn't do any cleanup whatsoever. There was drywall dust lining the edges of the room, collected at the top of outlet covers, and is still in the carpet now (I tried vacuuming but not everything came out). When I walked into the room it was so bad that if I hit the carpet a cloud of dust would come out.
I'm not one to leave reviews, much less bad ones, but Maison seriously needs to realize that their students are their stakeholders, and treating us the way they are is bad for business. There's a lot of new apartments shooting up around WLU and soon supply with be greater than demand and they'll either smarten up or go out of business.
If your main concern is convenience or having an ensuite bathroom, then this may be your best bet. But having to deal with the s**t they pull sometimes is annoying. read more