Received: from FARADAY.ECE.CMU.EDU by K.GP.CS.CMU.EDU; 25 Sep 87 13:36:10 EDT Received: by faraday.ece.cmu.edu (5.51/5.17) id AA14886; Fri, 25 Sep 87 13:34:50 EDT Date: Fri, 25 Sep 87 13:34:50 EDT From: Thomas Ziomek Message-Id: <8709251734.AA14886@faraday.ece.cmu.edu> To: bovik@faraday.ece.cmu.edu Subject: Landlord to avoid Herbert Harlsband Properties were my landlords for the last year. They are not as bad as some of the horrow stories you hear, but I would recommend avoiding them. There seem to be enough good landlords around that you probably don't need their kind of hassles. They aren't too bad with maintenance requests--most of our little things (such as exterior lights burnt out) were taken care of in 4-5 days. But a couple of more serious things (the worst was a leak from the apartment a- bove) took as long or longer to get action on. And when they do come in, the policy seems to be "do the least possible amount of work to make it passable". Judging from the quality of their work, and the fact that they once couldn't get a workman to our place for about 10 days because he was busy fixing code violations at several other buildings, I think it's safe to say that their apartments are not kept up as well as they should be. The electrical wiring is especially scary. _Old_ cloth insulation wire in some places, at least one outlet was disconnected, and they used the cheapest breakers available (a tap on the junction box and at least one would pop out, though I guess that's better than not doing so when it should). Basically marginal work all around. If you do rent from them, be careful with your security deposit. Make sure you have evidence of every problem that is there when you move in. I don't think they use security deposits for extra income, since our de- duction was on the moderate side, but they are very defensive about any in- quiries made afterwards. When I finally got to the boss man (underlings got tired of arguing), he was rude before I even said hello. He basical- ly refused to discuss our complaints, insisting that we sue him if we thought anything was wrong. I don't see any basis for this, since all earlier conversations with his staff were cordial. Final thing: they pull the usual tricks with unenforceable clauses in the lease, we didn't have any problems there. Tom Ziomek