Yuxuan Ren
3 months ago
"Don't sign here, I lived here in a 3B2B unit for one year, and was charged for $1800 when moved out.
The apartment charged us $800 dollars to replace all carpet. When we moved in, the carpet is not brand new. They sent us a table that calculates the age of carpet in some unexplained way, and asked us to be responsible for the carpet life lost. No matter how much effort you put to keep it clean, they charge you anyways.
The management is also terrible. In last winter, there was severe weather in Houston, and one window in our apartment was cracked by the cold temperature. We informed the front desk about this and they told us someone will fix it. It turns out that nobody came and we were charged for $350 for the window.
They charged us $400 cleaning fee, $150 for cleaning and $250 for ozone machine. We cleaned our apartment for almost one week, left all windows open for one week to refresh the air, and still got charged. They expected everything to be brand new. They also said that the ozone machine is necessary to remove the “smoke smell”. We don’t smoke and your apartment will have “smoke smell” if you cook. We were also told that some cleaning fees are for pest control, even though we paid monthly pest control fee and there was no pest control when we lived there.
There is also no way to dispute. The staff of the Greystar is extremely rude. He ignored my emails and calls for 1 month. When I was finally able to reach him, he just sent me all the invoices, and then asked me to pay. He said that he only took care of the invoices and documents, which is saying that even the apartment charged you unnecessarily, as long as they have an invoice, you need to pay. He also refused us to dispute, and said that they will send our information to third-party collection if we don’t pay. After this, he hang up immediately and sent me a final reminder email about sending us to third-party collection. So in the whole disputing process, we were ignored for more than one month, only spoke with staff for less than 5 minutes, saw invoices for unnecessary charges, and received a final reminder.
My final advice is: Don’t sign here unless you are or you have a lawyer. If you have already signed, mark sure you take as much pictures and videos as possible, before moving on and after moving out. Make sure you have records for any communications with the staff. In this way, hopefully you will get charged less. To avoid the additional air cleaning fee, I would recommend to keep some air sample for your apartment, if you are able to do this and this costs you less than $250. If you haven’t done any of these, good luck!"