1236 St Marks Avenue,

Brooklyn, NY 11213

The apartment is nice.

The landlord and his wife are intrusive and ride. The neighborhood is dangerous and the block is dirty with trash everywhere. You also don’t have your own electricity box so the landlord can charge you whatever and he likes to tell you what lights to use.

Stop being so intrusive, rude and nasty to your tenants.

Newly renovated...that's about it.

The landlord is an absolute menace and if you value being an individual with any sort of autonomy at all, this place will be your worst nightmare. The rat infestation was somehow the least unpleasant thing about this place (and I mean rats on the kitchen countertops, leaving droppings all over your appliances etc.) This is an example of when having your landlord live in the same building as you goes very wrong.

Marcus, the landlord, has absolutely no respect for privacy or having reasonable discourse. There were multiple occasions where I was accused of having someone stay at the apartment (which is fully my right as a paying tenant) because he "saw someone on the cameras that didn't look like me leaving the building" (the person, by the way, was me, but just with a headscarf on). I'm not sure if he just sits and watches the cameras all day, but he would accuse me of the most random, bizarre things like my dog peeing on the sidewalk near the apartment, when my dog was just sniffing around. There was also never a single time of the dozens of times he needed to enter the apartment, that he would give proper notice. Usually, it was only a couple hours before and he would demand to be let in for various arbitrary reasons if we told him we weren't home or available. He will also absolutely lose his shit if you don't respond to his texts within 5 minutes. Usually with blowing up your phone with calls and texting you demanding a response. On one occasion, he messaged at 5am with the amount for the utilities (we split utilities with him and there's no recurring set date that we're given the bills). Within a few hours that same day, he was raging over the phone because I hadn't found the time between waking up and starting work that morning to send him the money.
If the banality about absolutely everything wasn't enough, the cherry on top was getting berated and being accused of "wasting his time" when I informed him I would be moving out...with 2.5months notice. In the weeks following, he also tried to completely lie and gaslight us about the lease terms, insisting that we would not be receiving our security deposit back because it was "not a security deposit, but a broker's fee" even though we explicitly signed a no broker's fee lease. When told that that's not what the lease stated, he—in his usual condescending offensive tone—said we were incompetent and misunderstood the lease. Got the lease checked with a lawyer in case there was an off chance we were having a stroke and misunderstanding the very simple terms laid out in the lease. Of course he was clearly and loudly wrong.
All this is to say, is the place nicely updated? Sure, that was the allure when we signed as well. But you will absolutely pay for it with your sanity and if you so dare to move to Manhattan into your own place, he will patronizingly wonder out loud to your roommate where you would even be able to afford in the city before concluding that it's "probably Chinatown". Still probably one of the milder things of all the offensive things he's said. Good luck to the next tenants!