rev:text
| - I lived at The Fairways for over 10 years in 3 different apartments, so I know of what I speak. The turnover, from office staff to maintenance crew, has been on a pretty vicious cycle for years. Some helpful, some (most) useless.
The good: New siding and roofing. Large apartments with lots of storage in the kitchen. Great floor plans. Large patios and balconies. Convenient to a greenway, Trader Joe's and CVS. Short trip to 485 and Stonecrest. The grounds are kept in pretty good shape. I have read some reviews about the office manager and staff, but I never had a problem with any of them. Jacob was a rockstar maintenance guy, but I heard he moved.
The rest: They started replacing roofing and siding in 2012. Every day starting at 7:00 am, the pounding would begin and it wouldn't stop until dark. But you say to yourself that they are improving the property, so you deal with it (even though after the 3rd month of this, your hair is starting to fall out in clumps and your coworkers think you have some sort of drug habit because of your red eyes and glazed stare from no peace). The nails from these projects were left everywhere - I had nails/screws in my tires THREE TIMES! Twice I had to replace the tire because of where the puncture was.
Parking sucks, in particular at the front of the complex, which will fill with cars in the summer with pool users. If you want a spot, get a garage. There is plenty of parking, but a good portion of it runs through the middle of the complex's main street where there are no apartments.
The pool: The last summer I lived there, the pool was closed no less than 3 times. One night I went there and someone had shit in the pool. True story. That was my last venture to the pool. Every weekend smoking and drinking early 20's will take up one entire corner, while you'll have various renters who bring their 15 family members with them everywhere else.
The metal railings have been painted over and over - there has to be 10 layers of paint. The rust is never scraped off, just painted over so it bleeds through again.
The apartments are now over 16 years old, most of your appliances will also be 16 years old. In my last apartment there, the oven was generally 50+ degrees off, 2 of the 4 burners on the stove only worked sporadically, and the light indicating that burners were on didn't work at all. Everything stored at the back of the refrigerator froze solid. The motor in the freezer would occasionally make a high pitched squealing noise that gave me goosebumps and made my cat bite her butt.
You will have a huge deck/patio with a pretty good sized storage closet. The wood trim will be rotting away from the structure and fall off in chunks. The deck boards are warped and curved.
Your water heater, if it hasn't been replaced recently, will probably start to leak before it blows. Mine leaked for weeks without me noticing it and the water went under the baseboards into my master closet and ruined furniture and shoes. I was blaming my cat for peeing in my closet (which she has never peed anywhere but her litter box, but I couldn't figure out what the smell was), but it was actually the mold in the padding of the carpet.
The bathroom caulking, which has been shoddily done for years will turn black. That black is mold. I had to use bleach-based toilet gel to scrub it off, but since it is mold, it just comes back. I had a towel rack come out of the wall from normal use and the hole was patched with a blob of caulk and the same rack was remounted about 3 inches higher on the wall.
The price is right - cheapest in the area. Because they are such a bargain, your neighbors are going to be super fun. They are going to keep their dog on the balcony to bark all day. And if the dog is up there all day and never walked, the dog will also pee on their deck, which will stream through onto your patio furniture. They will stomp around day and night. Slam doors. Laundry at 3:00 am. Park behind your garage, pinning you in. One of my favorites was the person who used about 200 2-liter bottles as planters, strapped to their balcony railings. When the seasons turned and the plants died, they still kept the flower carcasses strung up in their non-biodegradable caskets.
The grass is lovely, it looks like a carpet of green - don't walk in it because hardly anyone cleans up after their dogs. And since almost everyone owns a large breed dog (many pit bulls), there will be poop piles the size of toddlers everywhere you turn.
If you want a good deal with a great location, this is a fine choice. Eventually the good deal and great location wasn't enough for me anymore and while my rent is higher now, the quality of living is much better.
Update: According to Yelp HQ, the other 4 reviewers for this property, with only 1 review, no friends and no other reviews are firsthand experiences, so I must be wrong.
|