This apartment locates in the heart of downtown Montreal, with only few minutes walk to pharmacies, grocery stores, restaurants, clinics and metro station, etc. The host is very friendly and usually responds within an hour. For the service I would give 5 stars, however, the building itself unfortunately has a lot issues.
First, this apartment needs to work a lot more on maintenance. I have lived in many old apartments in this neighborhood for over 10 years. Living in an old apartments is not an issue to me. The issue is that this place is not well maintened. It must be at least 3 years since the last time this room was painted. There are a lot of cracked and peeled off paints, holes and dirts on the walls everywhere in this room.
Second, the cleaness absolutely needs to be enhanced. The day I checked in this room, the fist thing I did after I put my luggages down was to take out the sweeper from the closet and swept the floor myself. Not only that there were dusts and rocks on the floor, 2 out of 3 trash cans in this room still had garbage in them. Thankfully at least the linens and bedsheets were washed.
Third, as the reviewers of other rooms in the same building have mentioned, this apartment has problem with bugs. In this room it's ants and cockroaches. Luckily, I don't cook often. Moreover this building uses gas stove and I am afraid of fire. I never cooked in this room during my stay here. Since I never left food in the kitchen, the insects stopped showing up 2 months after I stayed here.
Fourth, the heating system is controlled by central system and there is no way to adjust it. On windy days this room can get a bit cold.
Fifth, this building has open ventilation system. The result is that whenever other tenants/guests smoke in their rooms, second hand smoke spreads around. In this room it would come from the ceiling of the bathroom.
All the issues I have mentioned up until now are in my acceptable range actually. The last issue that bothered me most was noises that came practically from anywhere in the building, such as the footsteps of people who live upstair, water running in the pipe when people take shower or flush their toilets, conversation of people while they talk. On top of this, the weird infrastructure of this building adds more noise on daily basis. There are 2 rooms on each floor located at the end of the hallway on one side of this building, their entrances are strangely behind the emergency exit door. As you all know, emergency exit doors usually have this automatic door closer installed. So whenever people pass through an emergency door, it makes this super freaking loud BANG sound that spreads through the entire building. Unfortunately, not everyone is thoughful and most people just let the door slam. This can happen again at strange time, after midnight or super early in the morning. Especially when someone moves into one of those rooms, you would just keep hearing this BANG BANG BANG sound until people are done with moving.
I extended my stay once and stayed almost 4 months here. I highly regreted of extending my stay later because 2 neighbors moved in afterward and made the situation worse as they both had weird schedule. The person who lived above this room didn't seem to sleep at night and often walked around and dragged furnitures at 2am, 4 am 6am etc. The other one who lived next to me often talked with his family/friends until 1am. If he was close enough to my side of the wall, the conversation was clear enough that I could even transcript the conversation.
Lastly, the host should really update the photos and the description of this listing. This room doesn't look exactly like the photos shown. They have changed furnitures and never updated the photos. The photos show that there is a small black dinning table and a couch. They don't exist in this room. Instead there is a giant brown dinning table for 4 persons and a desk. A desk is useful. But a giant dinning table for 4 persons in a studio room for maximum 2 persons is not that useful. Other than furnitures, there is also no hair dryer in this room, whereas it is listed as one of the amenties in this room.
In summary, the location is great but the building has a lot flaws. I highly recommend the landlord of this building to do something to improve the quality of this building. For a listing on airbnb, I definitely expect a room with much better quality.