This review was originally about their rental business, but the same people work for both companies…read moreand there is overlap. Don't do business with the Palmieris. Buckle in because I'm about to take you on a wild ride through my experiences renting for a year from Liz and John.
I'm sure they'll offer some half-hearted reply attempting to contradict what I say in this review, but at the end of the day I have the texts to back it up. I also believe I was a good tenant: I paid my rent on time and never missed a month.
I lived at 3403 Dawson with four other people during 2019-2020. I'll give you a quick rundown of the landlords: John and Liz work together, but John mainly supervises renovations while Liz deals with tenants. Liz would randomly perform spot-checks of the house under the guise of coming in to "collect our rent checks". When we said that made us uncomfortable and we were more comfortable putting them in the mailbox for her at the front of our house, she said that was unnecessary and the random audits continued.
However, we realized that when she came in, sometimes she'd turn our AC up. You see, they had written into the lease that they'd pay for electricity and air conditioning, so these spot-checks were opportunities for her to adjust the thermostat to try and save some money.
Speaking of their electrical penny-pinching, when my roommates and I wanted to get a fish and five-gallon tank during quarantine, Liz told us the only way they'd allow it was if we agreed to pay them $20 a month "to offset the rise in their electricity bill". For those of you who haven't ever owned a fish, a five gallon fish tank is about the size of a small bowl and doesn't use power.
One day, we came home to find our beloved porch table missing. Only after asking Liz if she saw anyone stealing our table did we find out that they had brought a truck to haul away the table because the neighbor didn't like the way it looked. I'm not kidding. The table wasn't exactly something you'd find at a three-star Michelin restaurant, but we were broke college kids and it's all we could afford. Call me crazy, but I believe if you're going to have the balls to silently destroy your tenants' property, you should probably have the decency and integrity to at the very least tell them.
Here's my absolute favorite story about these landlords. While we were juggling college classes during quarantine and the pandemic, Liz asked us to move out a few weeks earlier than our lease end date because they wanted extra time to perform renovations. What had actually happened was Liz had made a mistake: she had promised the next group of tenants that they could move in early before asking us. We said no, and John and Liz pestered us until finally we agreed to meet in person to discuss it. When we told them we had already made plans to move out on the last day of our lease, they showed their true colors. Liz stormed out of the house and slammed the door yelling something about how "karma is a b****" and we'd "eventually find out". John took a less-explosive approach and tried convincing us that technically the dates on our lease were wrong, and that we needed to "go by what they said" and not the legal documents.
When that didn't work, they tried holding the fact that they gave us $200 off our rent in the month of April over our heads.
Finally, about a day later John offered us $2,000 to move out early. Although we had already made plans with moving companies, we were broke college students and we decided to agree to their terms but ask for it in writing. After being shifty about putting it in writing, not a day later John went back on his word and decided he had changed his mind: no more deal. You be the judge of what that implies.
Say what you want about John and Liz, but I will say they're good at one thing: pretending they're someone they're not. For landlords that spent the whole year pretending they were the only good landlord in Oakland and reputable people of their word, they made us realize that they were just like every other slumlord in Oakland.
