First I want to make it clear that nothing of what I say here is exaggerated. Everything is true. I wish tenants had a place where they could report landlords so that the landlord’s credit was affected when they default on the rental agreement.
Le Cove—937 3rd street—is by far the worst place I’ve ever lived—and I’ve lived in dozens of places without really being particularly dissatisfied. Crooked contract, gunmen on our door at night, laziest manager ever.
For starters: We wanted the contract form June 1, but Nona with Wilshire Skyline (The property management company), said they would give the apartment to someone else unless we agreed to take it from May 25. Only afterwords did I learn that they didn’t have many applicants, so we would probably have been fine if we didn’t go along with that. That was about $3-400 extra they managed to squeeze out of us.
After signing the contract, I later discovered two things:
No one at Wilshire had actually signed it! It’s embarrassing to admit that I didn’t notice that. They had me sit down and read the whole contract right there. It took about 30 minutes. She said “Are you sure you won’t read the whole thing?” with an anxious look on her face. The plan, I realized later, was probably to make me too tired to notice that Nona didn’t sign it at all. You see, the problems in this contract was more about what it didn’t say. She just gave me a copy with my signature—neatly covered up in a folder. The document didn’t even have a line where she was suppose to sign!
It was a one year lease. That’s normal, however, the contract didn’t mention anything about the terms of early termination. I’m from a country where the lack of termination clause would be illegal, so I didn’t even think to check. We were essentially stuck for a year unless we hired a lawyer to argue our case.
When we moved in, the first thing we had to do was to hire professional cleaners. The place was so dirty that it was hard to breathe. That’s another $70 that we never got reimbursed, since the contract stated that we agreed to take the place “as is”.
We had to wait four weeks to get an internet connection, because some genius had buried the cable underneath the new but shoddily installed hardwood floor.
A few weeks after moving in there were two gunmen trying to get into our apartment. I watched through the peek hole—butt naked—as they were trying to open the door, knowing that my wife was sleeping in the bedroom. After that, we were terrified of being in the apartment. They didn’t try to get into any other apartments. The police never figured out what they were after. Maybe they had a beef with a previous tenant or something. We’d just moved to the city, so we didn’t know anyone.
There is a nursing home next door. On hot days and nights it gives of an unbearable stench of sickness and feces. Sometimes I would wake up at night, and it would be so bad that I didn’t even understand that it was a smell: it was more like a horrible sensation. In addition to the stench there was interminable moaning, crying, coughing, wailing and screaming.
There are no fans or vents or anything, so you have to keep the windows open. The apartment gets unbelievably dirty from the traffic outside. If you clean the floors it’s a matter of hours before it’s covered in dirt again. It’s impossible to keep clean. Dirty rain water seeps in through the bathroom window, and down the shower wall. It gets really nasty.
There’s a laundry card system, but the on-site manager, Andrew, is too lazy to hand it to you, so once every couple of weeks, you’ll have to go to his place to have it refilled. He’s not always there even though he said he would, and you’ll have to take a second trip. And if you have money left on the card, they’ll just recharge it as if there weren’t any money left on it. That’s another couple of bucks they nickel and dime from you every so often. When we first moved in, it took so long for the on-site manager, Andrew, to get us the card that we had to go to a laundromat. We didn’t have a car yet, so I had to take a taxi: another $15 or so down the drain. Sometimes, when we handed in the card it would take up to a week to get it replaced. The washer is really bad to: it can’t handle it if the load is unevenly distributed in the machine and just stops. For smaller loads, this happens like three times per wash, and you’ll have to run out and adjust it every twenty minutes or so.
When I signed the contract, Nona also asked me for a void check. She never said why. The contract states that the rent is suppose to be paid by check. So I did that. Every month. One day, however, the rent got charged twice! What had happened was that they had put the rent on auto pay without my consent, and the checks had just piled up at the managers home! Now suddenly, someone had cashed the check AS WELL as the direct deposit. We got that money back, but never the checks.
For some reason—I think it’s because of the nursing home next door—the garbage truck is driving around our block more than usual. On the worst days, it’s hanging around here for up to 4-5 hours at the time. The noise is unbearable. Even with headphones it feels like a small earth quake or something. If you work a lot from home—like we do—it’s pretty annoying.
Maintenance work takes up to four months to be completed, and every so often maintenance people locked themselves into our apartment without our consent—without us even having any maintenance issues in the first place; the “hot” water has to run for at least two or three minutes before it actually gets hot, and 5% of the water is pure rust; the bathroom doesn’t have a fan, so all our towels got destroyed; since you can’t really close the bathroom window—the ceiling fan is just a phony fan—the bath room gets super cold in the morning during the winter months; the kitchen closets and appliances suck; the manager never got around to putting our phone numbers on the caller so we had to go down and meet people at the front door; the handle for the garbage shoot is often missing, so you have to walk four stories down to throw out your garbage; the front entrance gets flooded when it rains; it’s not possible to clean the window exteriors, and they won’t do it for you either; the people down at the nursing home are smoking marihuana every evening—it stinks and sets of our fire alarm; the kitchen fan doesn’t have a vent, so all the grease ends up all over the cupboards, and eventually at the the ceiling fan. From there, the grease is distributed all over the apartment— leather furniture and all.
The apartment costs a jaw dropping $2,500 per month. You don’t get any quality for that: only empty status symbols like a fireplace and pool that doesn’t work. It’s just a short walk to the beach, but we weren’t interested in that: we moved here because it was close to our new job. It made financial sense for us at the time as we didn’t have a car.
When we moved out, they deducted $240 from our deposit for “repaint”. It didn’t say anything in the contract about repainting, and the walls were fine when we moved out. They won’t give us a receipt, work order, or anything. When I called them to confront them with it, they just ignored our calls. They also still owe us a laundry card deposit.
The on-site manager, Andrew, told us while we lived there that a new management company, BNB Asset Management, had “taken over” the management. It’s not new, it’s the same old company with a different name. That’s when I found all the one star Yelp reviews of the management company, Wilshire Skyline, who has changed it’s name to BNB Asset Management—trying to whitewash themselves after some serious lawsuits. Check it out: http://www.yelp.com/biz/wilshire-skyline-los-angeles
For some reason, Le Cove/937 3rd St doesn’t have any reviews on Yelp as of this writing. That’s almost impressive. Hopefully, this one will prevent others from having the same awful experience as we did.
BNB Management Reviews
First I want to make it clear that nothing of what I say here is exaggerated. Everything is true. I wish tenants had a place where they could report landlords so that the landlord’s credit was affected when they default on the rental agreement.
Le Cove—937 3rd street—is by far the worst place I’ve ever lived—and I’ve lived in dozens of places without really being particularly dissatisfied. Crooked contract, gunmen on our door at night, laziest manager ever.
For starters: We wanted the contract form June 1, but Nona with Wilshire Skyline (The property management company), said they would give the apartment to someone else unless we agreed to take it from May 25. Only afterwords did I learn that they didn’t have many applicants, so we would probably have been fine if we didn’t go along with that. That was about $3-400 extra they managed to squeeze out of us.
After signing the contract, I later discovered two things:
No one at Wilshire had actually signed it! It’s embarrassing to admit that I didn’t notice that. They had me sit down and read the whole contract right there. It took about 30 minutes. She said “Are you sure you won’t read the whole thing?” with an anxious look on her face. The plan, I realized later, was probably to make me too tired to notice that Nona didn’t sign it at all. You see, the problems in this contract was more about what it didn’t say. She just gave me a copy with my signature—neatly covered up in a folder. The document didn’t even have a line where she was suppose to sign!
It was a one year lease. That’s normal, however, the contract didn’t mention anything about the terms of early termination. I’m from a country where the lack of termination clause would be illegal, so I didn’t even think to check. We were essentially stuck for a year unless we hired a lawyer to argue our case.
When we moved in, the first thing we had to do was to hire professional cleaners. The place was so dirty that it was hard to breathe. That’s another $70 that we never got reimbursed, since the contract stated that we agreed to take the place “as is”.
We had to wait four weeks to get an internet connection, because some genius had buried the cable underneath the new but shoddily installed hardwood floor.
A few weeks after moving in there were two gunmen trying to get into our apartment. I watched through the peek hole—butt naked—as they were trying to open the door, knowing that my wife was sleeping in the bedroom. After that, we were terrified of being in the apartment. They didn’t try to get into any other apartments. The police never figured out what they were after. Maybe they had a beef with a previous tenant or something. We’d just moved to the city, so we didn’t know anyone.
There is a nursing home next door. On hot days and nights it gives of an unbearable stench of sickness and feces. Sometimes I would wake up at night, and it would be so bad that I didn’t even understand that it was a smell: it was more like a horrible sensation. In addition to the stench there was interminable moaning, crying, coughing, wailing and screaming.
There are no fans or vents or anything, so you have to keep the windows open. The apartment gets unbelievably dirty from the traffic outside. If you clean the floors it’s a matter of hours before it’s covered in dirt again. It’s impossible to keep clean. Dirty rain water seeps in through the bathroom window, and down the shower wall. It gets really nasty.
There’s a laundry card system, but the on-site manager, Andrew, is too lazy to hand it to you, so once every couple of weeks, you’ll have to go to his place to have it refilled. He’s not always there even though he said he would, and you’ll have to take a second trip. And if you have money left on the card, they’ll just recharge it as if there weren’t any money left on it. That’s another couple of bucks they nickel and dime from you every so often. When we first moved in, it took so long for the on-site manager, Andrew, to get us the card that we had to go to a laundromat. We didn’t have a car yet, so I had to take a taxi: another $15 or so down the drain. Sometimes, when we handed in the card it would take up to a week to get it replaced. The washer is really bad to: it can’t handle it if the load is unevenly distributed in the machine and just stops. For smaller loads, this happens like three times per wash, and you’ll have to run out and adjust it every twenty minutes or so.
When I signed the contract, Nona also asked me for a void check. She never said why. The contract states that the rent is suppose to be paid by check. So I did that. Every month. One day, however, the rent got charged twice! What had happened was that they had put the rent on auto pay without my consent, and the checks had just piled up at the managers home! Now suddenly, someone had cashed the check AS WELL as the direct deposit. We got that money back, but never the checks.
For some reason—I think it’s because of the nursing home next door—the garbage truck is driving around our block more than usual. On the worst days, it’s hanging around here for up to 4-5 hours at the time. The noise is unbearable. Even with headphones it feels like a small earth quake or something. If you work a lot from home—like we do—it’s pretty annoying.
Maintenance work takes up to four months to be completed, and every so often maintenance people locked themselves into our apartment without our consent—without us even having any maintenance issues in the first place; the “hot” water has to run for at least two or three minutes before it actually gets hot, and 5% of the water is pure rust; the bathroom doesn’t have a fan, so all our towels got destroyed; since you can’t really close the bathroom window—the ceiling fan is just a phony fan—the bath room gets super cold in the morning during the winter months; the kitchen closets and appliances suck; the manager never got around to putting our phone numbers on the caller so we had to go down and meet people at the front door; the handle for the garbage shoot is often missing, so you have to walk four stories down to throw out your garbage; the front entrance gets flooded when it rains; it’s not possible to clean the window exteriors, and they won’t do it for you either; the people down at the nursing home are smoking marihuana every evening—it stinks and sets of our fire alarm; the kitchen fan doesn’t have a vent, so all the grease ends up all over the cupboards, and eventually at the the ceiling fan. From there, the grease is distributed all over the apartment— leather furniture and all.
The apartment costs a jaw dropping $2,500 per month. You don’t get any quality for that: only empty status symbols like a fireplace and pool that doesn’t work. It’s just a short walk to the beach, but we weren’t interested in that: we moved here because it was close to our new job. It made financial sense for us at the time as we didn’t have a car.
When we moved out, they deducted $240 from our deposit for “repaint”. It didn’t say anything in the contract about repainting, and the walls were fine when we moved out. They won’t give us a receipt, work order, or anything. When I called them to confront them with it, they just ignored our calls. They also still owe us a laundry card deposit.
The on-site manager, Andrew, told us while we lived there that a new management company, BNB Asset Management, had “taken over” the management. It’s not new, it’s the same old company with a different name. That’s when I found all the one star Yelp reviews of the management company, Wilshire Skyline, who has changed it’s name to BNB Asset Management—trying to whitewash themselves after some serious lawsuits. Check it out: http://www.yelp.com/biz/wilshire-skyline-los-angeles
For some reason, Le Cove/937 3rd St doesn’t have any reviews on Yelp as of this writing. That’s almost impressive. Hopefully, this one will prevent others from having the same awful experience as we did.