Never Again!!

Posted 4 years ago

Edit: Not sure why the home condition is ranked at a 5. I would give it a 3. Please be aware of Cary and her affiliated property management companies: Cornerstone Properties, SW Properties, etc. It appears that Ms. Estes has placed her company under several names, I assume so that she is able to distance herself from any complaints that arise. We rented a home from her on the east side of southern Ohio. We had a variety of issues: -False deposit deductions (for example, they charged $50 to clean the kitchen floor. We swept and mopped the kitchen floor very well before leaving the house, The kitchen was extremely small). -Excessive rodents (once we began moving our things, we found a ridiculous amount of rodent droppings. It was so bad, after vacuuming the droppings, we threw our vacuum in the garbage as we did not wish to transfer such filth into our new home. You could smell dead rodents inside the walls of the house. The rodents came in through the multiple holes in the foundation). -Broken items and hidden filth upon move-in (for example, there was a microwave above the stove top. One night, after a few weeks of cooking, while preparing dinner, the top piece of the microwave fell on the stove top. Underneath the refrigerator and stove looked as though it had never been cleaned). -A drive way made up of dangerous ditches that are covered with gravel upon move in. The rain washed the gravel away, revealing the large ditches (when we asked to have the issue fixed, we were told to send our children out to collect large rocks to fill in the holes). -the use of cheap laborers who are unable to properly execute installations and repairs leaving the tenant to deal with multiple break downs of electrical wiring, heating systems, etc. (Sometimes they would show up drunk). -Foundation of home is being held up by broken pieces of wood and a couple of bricks (the foundation is obviously caving in). Cary does not speak to tenants as if they have autonomy, she "tells" you what you are going to do and she expects you to do it. We gave her push back several times regarding some of her requests. The theme of her business appears to be for Cary and her company to pay as little as possible toward property maintenance. She attempts to leave as many costs as possible on the renter. She wanted us to leave utilities in our name until her "helpers" were able to "get the place ready". She told us if we did not have the carpets professionally cleaned, she would take it out of the deposit (although we did not notice until after signing the lease, the carpets were pretty stained upon our move-in, and showed no obvious change of condition upon our moving out). We asked her to provide receipts of the previous professional cleaning, she did not. She illegally paid our water bill with our deposit money (the bill was not even due, yet). After we vacated, we received no deposit back. Besides the usual moving preparation that we began over a month before leaving, after moving our stuff out of the house, we spent 3 days cleaning and preparing the property for our vacancy. We even bought little things like air filters and a new toilet latch for the place, even though these things were not necessary or were falling apart when we moved in. We also decided to have the carpets professionally cleaned as to avoid conflict. We wanted to leave the place in better condition than what we found. None of that seemed to matter, as it appears the main concern for Cary was financial gain. I say all of this to warn you. Be sure to inform Cary know about every little thing that is wrong with the property, anything you could possibly be charged for. Don't repeat our mistake and think this is a decent landlord and because you want to avoid being the complaining tenant, thinking just because they obviously did not seem to care much for replacing the broken things the last tenant left behind, they won't try to hold you responsible for those things, you will be proven wrong. So, make a complaint list, and submit it to Cary's email, write down every detail of when you make a complaint, and make sure you get pictures of everything. Do not expect that your complaints will be looked after, but if you have documentation, they may be less likely to falsely charge you in the end. FYI, we filed a claim in small claims court to retrieve our deposit, but no one showed up. They simply don't care.

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