Me and my wife stayed in Istanbul for more than a month. We lived in three different apartments, one of which was a "couchsurfing" experience while the other two were Airbnb-stays. That means I am able to compare different hosts. I will give you an honest review of how my experience with Ilir has been.
The check-in and the communication have been flawless. Ilir contacted me a few days before our actual stay and gave me detailed instructions about how to self-check-in and about were our room was located. There are several different rooms inside of this apartment each of which is named by a certain color. We stayed in the "green room".
"The room":
The room itself is as shown in the pictures. It consists of a full-size bed, a mirror on the wall, a small desk, a chair and electric sockets. It also comes with a medium-sized cold light on the floor and a warm ceiling light. Now let's talk about the things you can't see on pictures: The room often has a sour, wet smell. The view from the window is one of the walls of the building. It looks run-down and partly dirty. There is bird feces on the window sill and a big air exhauster right it front of the left window. Opening it is unusually hard since you have to lift the weight of the entire window and secure it with some sort of metal hinge. Even for me as a man it wasn't easy to do but for a woman it would be impossible. The window's insulation is partly not attached to the frame anymore. The wall is all you see in front of you. No nature or buildings are visible. The bed is not super uncomfortable but also not very comfy. The mattress is either old or doesn't have good quality since you can feel its springs quite strongly underneath your back. The pillows were hard and the inside was destroyed. To me it didn't matter much but my wife said they made her uncomfortable. What really disturbed my sleep was that the room is very hot and only cools down at night after several hours. It was November but the room felt like it was hot summer at night even though the heater was turned off all day and night. And I know it's normal in Turkey that the muezzin sings a prayer in the morning. I lived there for about a month before I arrived at Ilir's apartment, so I was used to this. But this apartment seems to be very close to one of the loudspeakers so the singing was incredibly loud and would definitely wake you up at 6.30, even though I used earplugs for sleeping. What's positive is that Halil gave us another bigger mirror without us asking for it. Also you can lock your rooms door.
"The bathroom":
The bathroom has a beautiful mosaic design, has a clean sink, a mirror, a small cabinet for your toothbrush, a clean toilet and a spacious shower. It has two shower heads, one of which is a rain shower. Hot water is available. The first two days we were there the toilet flush did not function as it should be. After this it was fixed. Overall, the bathroom is nice and clean. A problem was that there are five different parties living in this apartment, four guests and one owner but only one bathroom. In our case we had 6 people staying there at the same time. So in the morning we often had to wait because the bathroom simply was occupied.
"The kitchen":
The kitchen is really not good. The cooking utensils are severely damaged. The coating is mostly scraped off which impairs their functionality and is likely to end up in your food when you are using it. The pots and pans are a disaster. This is something that other guests possibly didn't even notice since a lot of tourists don't cook for themselves but since my wife and I live a very healthy lifestyle we cook our food ourselves every day. The little oven in the kitchen was very filthy and even cleaning it for a long time didn't fix that. In the end we didn't use this little, microwave-shaped oven to bake our potatoes but would cook them with water instead. And whatever metal device you can see on the picture like a toaster or oven is not there anymore. The kitchen also doesn't have any good knives. One is so blunt it's hard to cut things with it while the other one is nothing but a breakfast knife with a plastic handle. There are a lot of breakfast knives made of metal though but nothing useful for cutting vegetables or bread. What was really good were the washing machine and the dryer. Both fully functioning and able to clean and dry your clothes properly. The dishwasher also is working.
"The living room":
The living room comes with a small dinner table and two chairs which make the dining area. It's too small for that many people. There is a cozy couch and a big HD TV available as well as a huge bookshelf with a lot of books in it. The apartment overall and especially the living room are nicely decorated with a lot of paintings. The floor is very clean and comes with a somewhat slippery carpet. There are a lot of DVDs available too but we didn't check them out.
The location:
The location of this apartment is really bad. The surrounding area is dirty with trash bags in the streets everywhere, damaged street infrastructure and a bad smell like feces or a drain. Also it's incredibly steep so it can be hard to walk there. But the bigger problem is that it is very poorly connected to public transportation. You either have the option to walk for 10 minutes, take the tram for a few minutes and walk again for 20