It was always a tale of two managers when it came to Octagon. On one hand, they were a highly responsive landlord, answering calls and emails immediately, and were often fine if they were notified a check was slightly held up because one roommate had a bad month. On the other hand, there was a lot of finger pointing when it came to issues in the apartment, and their lack of flexibility for move-out was infuriating.
Upon move in, mice were quickly an issue. My roommates had long back-and-forth battles about how it was handled, with the blame often being pointed to tenants, saying the only thing that could be done was to keep the apartment cleaner. They would send someone over, who would drop off new mouse traps for us to lay out wherever we pleased, instead of singling out an issue. Once I moved in with the roommates, it didn't take me long to find a gap in the floorboards that their "exterminators" had always missed, and it was clearly a source of most of the mice entering. Once we asked them to fix it, there was no more issue. It unfortunately took that level of self-starting to fix a rodent problem that existed for multiple years.
For whatever reason, the lease didn't end on August 31st, but instead, a couple days before that. I hadn't signed this original lease, I'd come in on a sublet and stuck around, but I hadn't given moving out much thought at the time. As most people know, moving anywhere else in Boston likely means a September 1st move-in. We were told we were out of luck for figuring out what to do in the interim few days. It was a hassle, but it's what we'd signed up for. Well, what we hadn't anticipated was an August hurricane shutting down Boston the weekend we were due to be out, shutting down the MBTA, making it unsafe to drive a moving truck, and knocking out the power in our building. Let me tell you, moving a couch down a flight of stairs at 10 PM with no windows and no emergency lighting is not exactly the safest action in the world. Despite asking for some leniency to deal with the time constraints the hurricane had caused, we had to be out at 8:00 AM sharp, despite the power still not being on. Not that they were going to do anything at that time, there was still no power to do anything, and no tenants to move in for days. But we would have a huge chunk taken out of our security deposit if we couldn't get the last of our belongings out by 8:01 AM.
When a corporate management company oversees you, there's certainly the upside of fast responses. The downside is the colder approach that inevitably comes with it. Since then, I've stuck to landlords with far fewer properties that can afford to have a bit of empathy for the problems everyone inevitably goes through with their living situation. read more
