Oscar
1/5
I rented an apartment from them in downtown Vancouver, and my only regret is that the previous owners sold the building to Real Asset Management. Since they took over, the building received almost no maintenance and was always dirty. The hallways were dark for around 6 months because they seemingly couldn’t find the time to replace a few lightbulbs, a basic necessity for their paying tenants to comfortably walk into their home after a long day at work, or delivery people to safely navigate the building. Multiple maintenance requests were made about it, among various other things, and just about all of them were ignored. On the rare occasion when they felt like a paying tenant’s concern was worth their time, they would still find a way to cut corners and fumble the execution.
In December our roof was collapsing because of a flood on the roof. On day one I sent them multiple pictures showing the damage that appeared overnight on the ceiling with the multiple cracks and openings forming, and essentially nothing was done. You would think something like that would require some urgency, right? On day two it was worse, with the paint starting to form bubbles from water that was starting to come through. By the end of the day water began pouring from multiple spots in the ceiling, causing further damage and resulting in pieces of the ceiling falling to the floor. My partner and I moved our things out of the way to prevent them from being damaged, and then made the choice to leave as it became unlivable. And after waiting all day for someone to come, I come to find out that they sent a maintenance person to an entirely different building. Later that night the owner finally decided to take it upon himself to come and inspect things.
On a separate occasion, we had a neighbor across from us that passed away and wasn’t found for a few weeks until we asked for them to do a welfare check on him. Instead of hiring professionals that are equipped to safely handle biohazard cleanup, the owner, who is a self proclaimed “man of the community” chose to clean the unit himself. He left the front door wide open, allowing the smell and other contaminants to spread throughout the hallway and into our apartment. He later boasted about completing this amateur cleanup in just two hours. Shortly after, a young couple moved in, and one day in passing conversation they brought up the smell and asked us about it, and that’s when they let us know that none of this was disclosed to them before moving in. Legally they may not have to say it, but when the smell is so obvious and stuck around for weeks, you wouldn’t expect them to try hiding it. But clearly their main concern was to get some money coming in asap to make up for the back rent from the previous tenant.
Despite these issues, they still chose to raise the rent while offering no incentives to justify the increase. For the same price you can find a place that actually takes care of their building and listens to their tenants when a repair is needed, and has amenities. And just when I think I’m done and won’t need to speak to them anymore, they wait out the clock to the very last minute before sending a paper check with the security deposit refund and somehow they found a way to write down the wrong name on it and casually dismissed it as a “simple mistake”. At this point, I believe that their approach to property management is defined more by recurrent simple mistakes and clear incompetence than by any effective service. I used to live in Philadelphia and dealt with literal slum lords, yet even they managed to provide better management than what I've experienced here. Others may have had different experiences, but these were just a few of mine.
