Pros:
the facade is pretty and the floorpans are nice. that's it
Cons:
I know this sounds like a fabricated nightmare, but I swear this is all true. No one -- not the landlord, property manager, nor the real estate agent (Mike Jeneralczuk)-- informed us that there was no gas in the apartment until after we signed the lease. We didn't even get to tour the unit until after we signed the lease, as management/real estate broker lied and claimed that the tenants would not give them access to the apartment. When we finally got to tour after signing the lease, we talked to the tenants and they informed us that they were not contacted to give access to the unit until after we had signed the lease (revealing that management/the agent had lied to us). They did the same thing this year, which I learned when the new group of tenants recently toured our unit and informed us that they were told they couldn't get access to the unit as the current tenants were not responding to them (a complete lie once again). They also signed the lease without seeing the actual apartment due to their lies, and also signed the lease without knowing that the apartment has no gas (I informed them of this on their visit). Not only was there no gas in the unit when we moved in (and there is STILL no gas a year later)--our intercom system didn't work, half of the lights were out, our toilet didn't work, and our sink was broken, ALL when we moved in. We also experienced constant water leaks in the bathrooms (water dripping onto us and the walls completely destroyed, as pictured). The building's super is a very nice and helpful guy, who would often even refuse to take our tips, but he unfortunately lives in the bronx--it is also impossible to schedule him to come fix things (which is not his fault), as the management refuses to open the apartments for him/give him keys to the units so they require a tenant to be present to let the super in. The super is only available 9-4 Monday through Friday, which made it near impossible for us to get anything fixed as we all had 9-5 jobs and couldn't be home to give the super access. Until the last month of our lease, the block/exterior of the building was infested with RATS. To give you a better picture, my exercise each night coming home from work was running from rats chasing me. We complained about this for months, and the management did nothing until all of the tenants protested and put up signs to stop paying rent and they finally did something about it. This is only a fraction of the issues we experienced--a few other things are lack of consistent hot water, fridge and microwave breaking, heat only working in one of our four bedrooms, washing machine breaking, random people who don't live in the building smoking on the stoop/continually hanging out in the building's vestibule. It was genuinely a living hell and I cant wait to never return/talk to the management company again.
Advice to owner:
Listen to your tenants and actually respond to them in a timely manner. Provide your tenants with gas and hot water. Give the super access to the units so he can actually fix things.