The apartment is smart and clean, has really easy and convenient parking and is really well located to reach the train and therefore to reach Downtown etc.
Unfortunately we had a really stressful experience at checkin so I cannot give it a 5 star review. Firstly we found that communication was poor. I messaged to ask a question a few weeks before and it took 6 days to receive a reply.
On the day of checkin we realised it said we should receive an email the day prior to arrival with a lockbox code, but we hadn't received any email so I messaged to specifically ask for the code but got no response. We had our 11 month old and a 3 year old with us so planned to arrive at 4 promptly so that we had time to unpack and sort out their dinner, unfortunately despite 3 more messages from me with increasing urgency, we still had not heard from them so had no way of checking in. We spent over an hour on the doorstep trying to communicate through the Air bnb help options and the number provided on there but only got through to autobots or voicemail which as international travellers was piling on the costs. It turns out the apartment is managed by a management company ('Bob') and not the owner and they were not contactable it seemed despite it being a Friday and within working hours.
In desperation (by now two very tired and hungry children) we eventually knocked on the neighbour's door at the front of the building (I think there are 3 apartments inthe block) and someone came to the door. She is a permanent resident there and said she thought she had the same landlord so called the number she had and thankfully got through to the owner who looked up the code and got us in. I asked for some compensation for the many international calls we had had to take as we are not Canadian, and he eventually agreed which we appreciated. Despite being quite cool on the phone, he did then stop by and apologised which we appreciated and we felt bad for him that the company he is paying to use had let him down.
As it is so well reviewed, I think it's also worth mentioning a few other things that we didn't feel were quite right. Firstly the apartment was extremely hot. It felt much hotter than the outside temperature which was upper 20s. They had provided two fans but these did little to help and it wasn't until the early hours of the morning that with both fans on and all windows open that it started to feel comfortable. This was the case both evenings as it warmed up during the day.
The decking out the front is in really bad condition with screws sticking far out and caused my toddler to hurt his foot (although thankfully not as bad as it could have been). It was so poor we couldnt let our bsby crawl on it which was a shame. We also found two of the mugs weirdly covered in hardened salt (discovered while drinking tea!) and the hand rail in the bathroom was pretty damaged. These last two are not things that would alone be worth mentioning, but I guess we were just really surprised by the 5 star reviews. It turns out they're very concerned about maintaining their 5 stars so prompt you to leave one and we were pretty annoyed about the automatic email we received after this experience asking us for our 5 star review in exchange for the one they were leaving us.
If we'd have had good communication and a good experience at check in I would still definitely recommend this place, we just wanted to give an honest review.
As I said, thankfully the owner helped us out in the end, I think he perhaps just needs to swap management companies.