I lived in this apartment for a whole month and wanted to list the pros and cons for future guests’ reference, especially for those who will stay long term.
Overall I’d recommend this apartment.
Pros:
- Great location: Walking distance to wholefoods, Safeway, banks, Stanley Park(!!), all the awesome restaurants on Robson st. (Also means lots of food delivery options) and department stores like Pacific Center, HR, Nordstrom etc. Very short driving distance to ski resorts.
- Gated indoor parking, secured building and smooth package/food delivery. Since this is not a big building, there are less residences and less risk of contact. I barely run into other residences of the building. However we did run into someone without wearing a mask in the elevator about twice.
- Professionally managed with 1 to 1 cohost to answer questions and issues. The response time for my cohost is around 2 hours. Not the fastest but my cohost Jordan is responsive. We had internet interruption at the beginning which greatly affected my WFH experience. Jordan provided me with alternative wifis for temporarily switching over, which greatly helped solve the issue.
- Move in ready for long term stay. TV, full kitchen, landline, dishes and utensils are provided.
Cons:
- The noise: since the apartment is located on a busy street, there are quite some traffic going on. The windows look to be double pane but at night the sound of buses, cars, beeping sound from pedestrian traffic lights are very clear. Ear plugs are definitely essential. We can also hear neighbour’s kid crying a few times. This isn’t a big problem during the daytime.
- Parking is not free and it’s falsely described in the post. We were charged extra outside of Airbnb. We had no choice but to pay for the fees because finding parking in that area is not possible.
- The apartment is exactly as shown in the picture with all the furnitures and decors. It is a small apartment with a double size bed and a relatively small kitchen. This could be a problem for some people.
- The company sent someone to replaced the modem, which was said to take just a few minutes. We ended up being locked in the bedroom for more than two hours while our laptop were running out of batteries in the middle of a work day.
- The managing company has a LONG price list in the room to warn you. They charge a lot of money for different stuff. Like if you lose the keys they’ll charge $150-250, late move out charge is $60 per hour etc. I don’t think it’s legal. Feel threatened and not good about all the rules outside of Airbnb, especially in a city where tenants are well protected. We personally were not charged extra besides the parking fee as we did not have any of the listed issues.
- When we move in, we were asked to provide detailed information containing sensitive personal identification info such as passport number(why?), driver’s license number(why??), addresses, credit card information so that they can charge you for additional cost etc. It might be a standard process for the managing company for safety or whatever reason. But to someone who works in the legal field, this definitely crossed our line. We did not provide the information.