If I could give them negative stars, I would. I rented from them for almost three years in Schenectady. This company is either grossly incompetent or willfully negligent, it's hard to tell which.
This whole thing started when the property owner moved property management companies. Their way of telling me this was by taping an unaddressed, unsealed envelope to my door with a form letter that didn't contain the date, my name, or my address. I was convinced it was a scam, and the original property management company told me not to worry about it. Then Doug calls on the first of the month demanding rent. I had paid rent to the original company already. He threatened me with eviction. He tried to get me to sign a second lease with his company. He refused to have a call with the other property management company to sort this out. It took a full day of calls back and forth to get this solved.
It's incredibly hard to get a hold of anyone. If you call, it's rare anyone answers and when you leave a message it's even more rare anyone gets back in touch with you in any way. They don't really have direct emails. Texts aren't answered. Pre-pandemic, I'd show up in person which was slightly more effective. I generally abide by the "you catch more bees with honey" approach, but that doesn't work with them. I had to resort to yelling and being generally annoying to get anything done.
Have a maintenance emergency? The emergency maintenance line goes immediately to voicemail! And they may or may not get back to you in a timely fashion. Case in point, the boiler for my furnace was leaking all over the basement. I had turned the heat and water to the boiler off, so the house was getting cold. I called probably 4 times in an hour, finally had someone call back and say they may not be able to get someone out to fix it that day. The low over night was in the low 20s. I made a stink and got someone to come that evening.
Getting any maintenance done is a colossal pain. You put in a ticket and 9 out of 10 times it gets ignored unless you consistently remind them to do it. And sometimes that doesn't work. Example: I had a steam pipe in the basement with a slow leak and a radiator in another room that had rusted out and had to be shut off. They told me in January that it definitely needed to be fixed but that would require shutting the heat off for a few days, the pipe should make it to spring and I should put in a ticket then. I did that in May, and then was ignored. I reminded them, put in new tickets, called, emailed, and showed up at the office repeatedly for the next 4.5 months. I got everything from "It's on our radar" with no other information. To "radiators are too expensive we don't want to do that, we might put in an electric space heater." Interestingly, that was not allowed in the terms of my lease. In October, when my house was in the low 60s, I went in and had to raise hell and remind them that they are legally required to maintain my heating system. This finally produced some action. A neighbor had an extra radiator laying around so I even procured that piece for them. They finally got around to it.
And to top all of this off, it took them 81 days and countless phone calls on my part to get them to return my security deposit, and then they still withheld some. Which is illegal. According to NYS law they have to provide an itemized list of deductions and the remaining security deposit within 14 days, and if they fail to do so they forfeit any right to withhold any of the deposit. I never received an itemized receipt. I am fully convinced that had I not called them incessantly I never would have gotten any of the deposit back.
In summary, if you are a renter, avoid renting from this company if at all possible. If you have to rent from them, expect that you will need to constantly be bothering them to get the most basic of things done. If you are a property owner, know you are taking the risk that they ignore maintenance issues which could end in property damage. read more