My husband and I stayed in the apartment for nearly 5 weeks (May-June 2022). We have been living out of Airbnbs for the past 2 years, so we have a lot of experience staying in long term Airbnbs. Here is our pro / con list.
PROs
- Bob (the host) is awesome. He is so communicative, kind, quick to respond, and makes himself available.
- Location is great: you're 10 minutes from the main shops / restaurants on Chestnut, and 8 minutes from Palace of Fine Arts.
- The wifi was great.
- The kitchen was stocked with all the tools you could need for cooking.
- The area was quiet, so you werent being woken up throughout the night from noise or anything
- Plenty of closet / storage space
- Shower works great and gets hot
- Heater + A/C in the unit works great (and we only had to use it a few times).
CONs
- The couches and bed were just horrible to sleep on. The couches are incredibly uncomfortable, and the bed had a mattress pad that was consistently falling off the bed and had a fitted sheet always coming off.
- Parking. The spot in front of the home is always free but you can only stay there for 2 hours at a time M-F during the day. There are patrol cops ALL the time looking at the cars -- we almost got a ticket on multiple occasions. So every 2-3 hours, we had to drive our car around the block and find another spot. Bob has said he'd help with a parking permit and provide us with documents, but it took weeks for us to be able to get the docs, and by the time they were going to be sent, we were moving out just a few days later.
- While homelessness is not a huge issue on this block (and it certainly is an issue in many areas of SF), we did have a homeless man sleeping on the front of our gate one night for about 6 hours, which caused us to not be able to leave our home (because the gate is the main way in/out)... On several other days, we had a different homeless man camped out under the window of the living room. Bob did all he could to help, but the SF police weren't in a hurry to come since they had bigger problems (understandable).
- The washer / dryer were very very bad. They were consistently not working (the washer dial would not keep spinning so a load could be in there for 3 hours if you dont pay attention and manually move it forward, and the dryer only worked if you put in a tiny load -- it also made the bathroom a steam room)
- The TV in the bedroom is tiny -- my computer (imac) has a bigger screen.
- You cannot have 2 people comfortably WFH in this home if they are both on video calls. We bought a desk for the bedroom (since there is a small one in the livingroom already) but it made the bedroom have no floor space.