July 15th, 2005
apartment update
Tell me how bass-ackwards THIS is:
Our future management company sends out lease renewals to tenants. If the current tenant doesn’t renew, the company assumes they’re moving out and RELETS their apartment. But what if the tenant decides, oh, TWO WEEKS before they’re supposed to move out, that they don’t WANT to move out? THEY DON’T HAVE TO. The company just “accomodates” the people moving in by putting them in a similar or better apartment, with rent discounts if necessary.
OK. Hold on. Isn’t the proper way to manage tenants completely OPPOSITE of the above method? Every apartment I’ve EVER lived in assumes the tenant is staying unless the tenant gives written notice that they’re leaving! That would seem to be the logical way to manage tenants, at least to my mind. But hey, what do I know about property management?
So we’re working on a solution.
The building has already reserved a different unit for us—same floor plan, five floors lower in the building. (We were supposed to be on the top floor, with no one above us.) I have two big issues with this: (1) there is an increased likelihood of noise, having an apartment above us, (2) the laundry and exercise room would have been ONE flight of stairs up for us; now they’ll be either FIVE flights up or a VERY SLOW elevator trip up. (The elevators are ridiculously slow.) I was hoping to avoid the elevators except when going OUT; now we’ll have to use them to go UP also, for laundry and exercise. (Mr. Angst suggests that the five flight trek will be a good warm-up for working out. I am not convinced. That also doesn’t improve the laundry situation.)
Our leasing agent is meeting with the regional manager this afternoon to find out what sort of additional “accomodations” they’ll offer us, since we’re getting an apartment that’s equal on a floor that’s not as good. In other words, what kind of monetary discount are we going to get? And then, I suppose, we’ll have to sign a new lease, or a lease addendum, since our current lease is INVALID.
After all of this is worked out, the apartment locator we worked with is getting a negative review from me about this building and management company. I hope they will refuse to work with them in the future. They specialize in helping graduate students find housing and I imagine this kind of crap is just what they’d like to avoid as they grow this portion of their business.
comments
That is so messed up. I can’t imagine this is the first time this has happened, either.
She actually told me she had another file on her desk in the same situation. I think she does leasing for several buildings, but still. She also told me about one guy who decided the DAY BEFORE his lease was up that he would stay, and the guy moving in didn’t have a place to go at all.
BBB, here I come.
Why would you want to stay in the building after all these problems? You city has to have some other options. I would not want to fund anyone related to this fiasco.
I guess part of the problem is you have already been on your home hunting trip and the timeline is short. Gosh…your post got me worked up too!
I have no desire to have anything to do with this company, but since our lease starts, technically, in two weeks, I am far from confident we could find something new that would be as flexible with our move-in date. (This company let us sign an August 1 lease, but only pay rent for the days in August that we’ll actually be living there.)
The one bright thing is that the lease has a very flexible subleasing/releasing clause, so we can sublet the place whenever we want, or even find someone to move in and sign a NEW lease. If after six months, we can’t take it, we can try and find someone to take our place.
Realistically, the building is fine. Their management policies are crap, which is what bothers me. But the building itself is still more than adequate and we got a good rent price. If that comes down even more, even better.
The locator service probably knew all about it… maybe I’ve just been burned by agents one too many times, but they get paid when you sign the lease.
And just a word of caution, as someone who has had to sublet two places in Your New City ™–it can be very difficult, especially in the winter.
Yeh, I’m not really banking on the sublet thing, but I like to keep it in mind, just in case. JUST IN CASE.
As for the locator, they’re relatively new the My New City ™ area, so maybe they didn’t. If they did, shame on them, and I’ll be happy to badmouth them as well.
If you have time, check the state consumer affairs or local county to find out about tenant rights. This way, you’ll know if it’s standard practice in this state or not (in case you decide to move elsewhere during law school).
OH MY GOD I will be moving elsewhere during law school. At the very least, when Mr. Angst finishes his degree, we’ll book it to a larger place for my third year. More likely than that is our moving to a better place NEXT YEAR as soon as our lease is up.
I don’t want to get all ‘lawyerly’ on you, but if you have a lease for say, apartment 5C, and the tenant there now is month to month (and hasn’t re-signed a lease), legally you have the right to possess that apartment on the start date of your lease. I used to be in real estate/property management, and from what it sounds like, you could easily sue for performance. If you have a signed lease with that apartment number on it, you have the PMs over a barrel; don’t let them get away with telling you this is your problem. Nail ‘em to the wall!
Well, actually, it’s not that the tenant is month-to-month. She just submitted her renewal LATE. So, the building thought she was leaving, and leased out the unit. Then she signed a new lease (they LET her sign a new lease) and we got the shaft.
Obviously, we have the upper hand, except that we don’t live in that city, our lease starts in two weeks, and if we decided to bail out of the lease, the chances of us finding something as good at such a good price at such short notice is pretty slim.
The funny thing is that, if when we signed our lease, the only unit available was the one we’ve been SHIFTED to, we would have taken it and been fine with it. It was only because we signed a lease for a “better” unit (higher floor) that we are upset.
By the way, they came back with a rent reduction. It’s not giant, but it’s a decent amount off. We’ll initial changes on the lease via fax next week.
I understand that logic completely. When we were looking for a house near school, we bought the first one we liked on the first weekend we looked. More choices = more regrets. If I never see the other stuff, I won’t miss it.
But you’re nicer than I would be about the lease(s). If I had a lease in hand that predates the current tenant’s renewal, I’d be holding their feet to the fire; it’s a pretty big oops on their part.
Oh I wasn’t nice. I had my complaint to the Better Business Bureau all written up and I was also fully prepared to get legal on them. (I do not roll over for this sort of stuff; I sublet an apartment from someone once, in NYC, and she shafted us on returning our security deposit, after we’d spent four months telling her creditors we were her roommates and she was out of town. So we got her evicted from her rent-controlled apartment. I am not nice when people do crap like this to me.)
In this case, the leasing agent was very apologetic and they did offer us something. If they’d come back with nothing, I might have been tempted demand my money back due to an invalid lease. But they did their best—or, the leasing agent did her best—and we do need a place to live.
Glad to hear you got a discount!
sounds like the apartment locator got the shaft. you obviously like the apartment and the management enough to renew the lease. yet you are giving the locator a bad review in order to force him to not refer people to those apartments agin even though he makes no money off of of your renewal and you get a discount to stay when you didn’t bother to let the management know your lease intentions. not very nice of you at all.
Galtexan, I was not renewing a lease. I was supposed to move into a new apartment, 1100 miles from where I was living, and I found out a few weeks before moving that the apartment I leased wasn’t going to be available because Someone Else chose to renew late.
It works like this:
Me: NEW lease.
Someone Else: late renewal.
Management: leased to me before they knew for certain that Someone Else was moving out.
The locator, by the way, got paid when we signed the original lease, so the locator is in fine shape. In fact, he’s in better shape than he might have been, since he got a commission based on the HIGHER price we originally signed for. Also: my telling the locator of my woes does not FORCE him to do anything. He can still show that property to people if he feels it’s a viable business opportunity for him.
Please read the entire post and thread before you accuse me of not being nice to people who do their jobs well. (People who don’t do their jobs well or who try to shaft me are another story altogether.)