Apartment Reviews for Harbor House Apartments - Ann Arbor

Harbor House Apartments are located near University of Michigan and Briarwood mall. The grounds feature spacious green space for dog exercise, jogging and walking. Community amenities include a coffee bar, clubhouse, fitness center, picnic and grill area, pool, volleyball court sauna and hot tub, tennis court and offer ongoing planned community activities. Individual apartments are billed as luxury and can include fireplace, vaulted ceilings and other architectural details like crown molding. Resident reviews praise the lifestyle and amenities at Harbor House.

When we first moved into our apartment in December of 2008, the management was awesome. A guy named Steve is the one who drew up our lease, and he even pulled some strings to store the apartment's washer and dryer so we could put our own expensive washer and dryer in our apartment without having to store them ourselves. Every once in a while if we'd be walking around the grounds and Steve would see us, he'd greet us by name. We were very impressed with him remembering us, and it made us feel more at home. We resigned our lease around August of 2009 and Todd is the one who helped us that time. We told him we were interested in getting an extra garage parking space since we have two cars. This normally costs $50 a month for the extra space, but he gave it to us for free and wrote it in as such in our lease. We were very pleased with this.

Since then, the management has changed. The apartment complex ran a special where if you resigned your lease in February, they gave you a $100 Visa gift card. We always pay our rent a week in advance, and are very good tenants. We decided to ask the current property manager if we could get one gift card for each of us (two people). We weren't expecting them to say yes, but we thought it couldn't hurt to ask. When we asked, the property manager looked at us bewilderedly and said, "What? Two cards, as in each one $50?" And we said "No, two $100 gift cards." She literally looked at her coworker, held her hand to her mouth, and burst out laughing and said, "Hahahaha--that's cute--NO." It was rude and we felt like she could have handled it much better. As we said, she could have graciously said, "No, I'm sorry, we can't give you two gift cards." And that would have been FINE. She is incredibly rude and unprofessional.

The maintenance is prompt and they have 24-hour emergency maintenance (they live on the grounds). The only recurring problem we have is leaky faucets. Maintenance is always able to fix our faucets at the time of the call, but usually a few months later they start dripping again. Also, within the past 4-5 months we've had at least 5 inspections while we were present in our apartment. Management always passes out a note telling us they are going to enter our apartment, but they give a range of days (for example, we will enter either Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday). We're fairly private people, and honestly, who wants to shower super-quick in fear that maintenance will knock on the door at the exact second you're naked and vulnerable in the shower? It gets very annoying when we are sleeping and maintenance is pounding on our door at 9 am (we work nights sometimes, so this is sleep time). We answer the door in our PJ's so they can look at the water heater AGAIN and the windows AGAIN. They had two pre-inspections for the state inspection of our furnace and windows and such. So many inspections and entrances of our home is not necessary! And there are no improvements to the utilities or construction. There haven't been many problems as far as the current construction goes, but with SO many inspections, we'd expect to see some major improvements.

In the winter time the windows leak heat and you can feel the cold seeping in. We asked the complex about better insulated windows, and they said that in the summer they were replacing the windows and they'd put us on the list. We were very excited to hear this. Summer came around and they came to look at our windows and said "Nothing's wrong with these. They're not cracked or fogged, so we're not replacing them." Apparently, they weren't replacing them with double-paned windows like we had originally thought, but they were just going through and replacing defective windows. Communication seems to be a big issue between management and tenant.

When we first re-signed our lease, there was no rent increase. However, since the new management has taken over and we resigned a couple months ago, our rent has increased from $1029 to $1059. The rent is going up for what appears to be new management "improvement". As a tenant, we feel like we should have a say in how resident money is spent. If our rent goes up and our apartment complex is making improvements, we should have a say in where that money goes.

The apartments are very spacious and the garage parking is a plus. They have a nice workout area on the upper level of the apartment office and they have a lit tennis court; however, lots of people from neighboring apartment complexes come over to hog the tennis courts alot, which gets pretty annoying as we are the ones paying rent here for the amenities, not them. It would be nice if the management could somehow enforce who gets to use the tennis courts, like put a padlock or a keypad on the entrance and only give the password out to tenants. They have recently put a number keypad on the entrance to our workout room to keep non-residents out. The tennis courts have yet to have such an improvement.

Overall, we would recommend Harbor House Apartments to someone looking for a place to live. We looked around before we renewed for the first time, and for the area, it is the best price for the amenities and spacious apartments. However, if you're looking to be treated with respect by the management, it seems as if those days have passed.