Apartment Review for The Villas Parkmerced

They give you a great sales pitch, but things start to go wrong from the moment you sign the lease. Move in day was a mess. My roommate and I showed up to move in after confirming our move in day a week before and the morning of, to have someone tell us we weren't supposed to move in till the next day. When we finally got to the apartment we found they hadn't finished preparing it. Plastic sheets were still strewn across the apartment along with gatorade bottles and paint shavings. Our closet doors were taken off and in our respective bathrooms. What's worst, because we moved in on the Saturday of a three day weekend we were told no one would be on staff to fix it until Tuesday. So we ended up doing move of the fixes ourselves. We started getting three day notices the next month for the amount of our security deposit and pro-rated rent. These checks had both been turned in (why else would they have given us our keys?) but didn't get cashed until 3 months later. Rent must be paid with a single check, because their accounting gets confused by more then that. I found cashiers checks were simplest since they often waited 15 to 30 days to cash the checks. Be sure to get a reciept, because "lost" checks are frequent. On my move out day, I was sitting in the office and watched as employees removed checks from the drop box chuckling while saying "they didn't get a reciept." I had to fight two eviction suits while living there over lost rent checks that the management could never locate. Neighbors aren't much better, I lived on a first floor tower and was often disturbed by large objects (cans of paint, chairs, couches, alcohol bottles) being dropped from upper floors to the ground. Often times this dangerous debris can be left on the ground for over a week until the staff cleaned it up. The towers are locked by code access, but often times codes stop working or the system jams making it so that you have to wait for someone inside to open the door. Parking spaces are expensive if you don't get one included through a promotion at the time of lease signing, and street parking is difficult to find around the towers (especially at night). <P>