The Commons at Prospect Hill

Pros: 1. Nice location 2. Relatively new appliances (but they were beginning to need more maintenance) Cons: 1. Ridiculous rent increases. Their annual rent increase was higher than median rent increase in the area. They also increased the parking fee by 25%. 2. They required 90 days of notice to move out. All other apartments we looked at required only 60 days. 3. After you gave them the move-out notice, they would show your unit to potential tenants, which was very inconvenient and disturbing. 4. Poor maintenance: some gym equipment was broken and never fixed; once a heavy rain caused both elevators to stop running for a few weeks, and they were very slow to repair them 5. The businesses on the first floor were disturbing. The F45 gym made lots of noise and vibrations sometimes. The businesses occupied the backyard parking lot. They caused lots of false fire alarms that evacuated the whole building. 6. The management was very slow in doing repairs. Steve was a great guy, but it seemed like only he was working on maintenance. If there was something that he could not handle, they needed to hire third-party vendors, which was very slow (e.g., took two weeks to fix a small issue of our dishwasher). 7. They charged $500 for painting and cleaning when we moved out. Theoretically we could clean by ourselves, but they threatened that "it must be professionally cleaned or we will charge you the price of hiring a professional cleaner". So we just paid the money for peace of mind. We had only minor damages to the paint, which we believe were normal use, but they still charged us to hire third-party painters, without explaining what exactly was fixed. Overall, this place was overpriced and unprofessionally managed. The living experience did not match the price or the "luxury" label.

The biggest problem with this place is that there is only one person to contact about this property. No one else holds this person accountable. And that person (Gina) is extremely unresponsive. The internals of the building is a mess. The design/experience is distressing and lousy, too. The elevator is often out of commission, dirty, and smelly. If you decide to pay and have a parking space, keep in mind that there isn't a staircase to go to the basement/parking lot if you live in the West building. If the elevator is out of commission, you must take the stairs to the 3rd floor, where the only hallway access is, and walk over to the East building, then take 4 floors down to the basement. Irritating and tiresome if you have groceries, etc., to carry. The lights in the staircase were out the entire time I lived there. This reflects how the management does not care about the people who live there (trip hazard comes to mind). Also, the security alarm goes off constantly in the lobby (they are false alarms, and every time no one is there to stop it until a whole day passes). Speaking of noise pollution/hazard, this building is located right next to the McGrath Highway, and the windows are not soundproofed or, again, subpar designed. Good luck if you're a light sleeper. Another pain point was that if you have a guest or delivery, you can't let them in from your room - you have to go downstairs to unlock the front door, even though the room has an intercom. To make things more ridiculous, there isn't an intercom installed at the front entrance of the West building where I lived, so the guest/delivery person has to go to the East building to ring the bell. So usually, the person is gone by the time we get to the front entrance. It causes a lot of tedious, unnecessary redelivery attempts! It claims to be a 'luxury' apartment, which is far from the truth in my opinion. The trash room and the disappointing gym are only located in the east building. So think about those mentioned above and imagine if you had to do this every time. I wish I had known these things before moving in and being confined to this place. They didn't return any of my security deposit. They make up stories and make it very tedious to get it back. It's a waste of my time so I just let it go. But I have to say something to someone, so I wrote this review. I've lived at several large apartment complexes without a problem, and this is my first time not getting my security deposit back.

The management makes living here a horrendous experience. They will ignore any issues you have and nickel and dime you for everything. First of all, why is there a brokers fee for a "luxury" building. No other luxury buildings do this. It's clearly just a cash grab. Secondly, you will constantly get passive aggressive emails from management about things people are doing wrong. Yet they provide no prior guidance and reasonable solutions. E.g. the trash room was too small for everyone's recycling and was very full. Did they want us to just store our trash in our rooms? Additionally during our time in this building, we had an issue where a loud noise started happening in one of our walls. It was extremely loud, and would wake us up constantly. Management tried to gaslight us by saying it was the bathroom fan. We had to fight them for over a month. They would barely respond to any of our messages/calls and any response was basically deflection/fluff. Eventually they called an electrician who found it wasn't even due to anything in our unit. Lastly, as we moved out, we were charged over a thousand dollars for "paint." This is clearly not an accurate charge, if there were other damages they weren't properly billed. We've reached out for clarification but no response as of yet. Save your time and energy. This place isn't worth living in.