We rented a property through Sunstar for two years in a high-end condo in downtown Vancouver. Sunstar's customer service and ability to fix major and minor repairs was horrible, if not criminal. It took over 75 emails and phone calls to get anything done, typically having to follow up over and over otherwise it'd be dead in the water. The owner, David Mak, complained it cost too much to send good repairmen to downtown. He also complained the unit had specialized items that were hard to get because it was a high-end unit, but that transferred into not even trying to fix them. Here are some of the issues that took over 75 emails/calls to get fixed:
--It took five months to replace a dryer that shrunk over a thousand dollars in clothes and in the meantime we had to dry our clothes on drying racks. Carson flatly told me I was wrong, that the dryer wasn't broken after a repairman had told me to my face that it was broken and needed replaced since it was 16 years old despite not getting a default signal. I had to do hours of research and talk to the owner of the repair company (who was in a different time zone) while holding a crying child to discover that a Sunstar repairman had cinched the drain pipe with the electrical cords for aesthetic purposes, but since water couldn't drain out it overheated and shrunk our clothes. Given his short, terse, disrespectful, and unhelpful answers (as well as basically calling me a liar when he or other Sunstar employees would never come to inspect anything at the house, just tell us we were wrong), I asked never to have to deal with him, but David Mak kept putting him in charge of "solving" issues.
--It took a year and half to get an A/C unit in our bedroom. The condo came with a HVAC but the building turned off the air in the winter months. Sunstar didn't tell us the condo heated up in the winter because of the sauna and pool directly above us, only referring to the A/C unit in the other bedroom as something we might not want to put in the garage in the winter despite asking why. We lost a ton of sleep having to sleep in 25 C/78 F heat and it became a big issue because of having a second child we didn't want the newborn to sleep in such hot conditions given SIDS concerns. Threatening to move is the only thing that prompted action.
--We had two ant hills in the front yard with THOUSANDS of ants coming through a crack in the window sill, across the living room (past our newborn) and into the kitchen. Tammy wrote just to buy raid as it wasn't their issue. We spent over a hundred dollars on raid and took weeks to kill the ant farms on our own.
-A shower head had so much calcium built up that only a few of the streams worked, and those that did came out thin and hard that your skin felt like it was being ripped off. Tammy told us to buy solution to fix it, which we did over the course of weeks without results. They sent out three different repairman in the course of two years, to include one who drilled holes in the shower head (which worked for a month then the calcium sealed the holes again) rather than pay the money for a replacement.
--We noted several of the lights weren't working and were unique bulbs, or two of the lights had issues with electric surges and kill the bulbs we put in there every two weeks. When we moved, Sunstar charged us $90 to replace light bulbs, half of which we pointed out in our initial walk through and wrote about in an email when we moved in saying they weren't working. They didn't care to fix them during the two years, but had to be fixed when Debby wanted to do showings.
--It took 18 months to talk to anybody from Sunstar in person, first David when the owner was inspecting the condo and then a couple months later with Debby when she wanted to show the apartment as it was finally in Sunstar's benefit. Debby noted in the conversation that her allegiance was to the owner and she put the owner first before the tenants (even though the tenants are the paying customer and you should treat both equally). That was super telling as it explained the lack of customer service and actually getting anything fixed.
--We thought we turned a corner with Debby at the end because she is nice in person; we even found someone from our work as the next tenant and did multiple walk throughs with them since Debby was n vacation for multiple weeks. I even spent several hours scrubbing the garage floor, which wasn't done for us, for the new tenants since I knew them. We didn't receive a finders fee, but our thank you was the charge for the light bulbs and requiring full walls to be painted when the condo was full of spot paint jobs when we moved in an existing nail holes/3M hangers.
--The list above is only a part of the issues.
Highly recommend you stay away from Sunstar, even if they do have properties that look nice on the surface. read more
