We stayed in this unit for a little over 4 months.
It’s in a great location on a usually quiet side street in SoMa. It has good proximity to services. An occasional screaming passerby is really minimally invasive, particularly because it’s such a high unit with a reasonable amount of tree canopy providing sound dampening.
The double tandem parking is spacious for SoMa and it’s a convenient parking spot, particularly compared to others in the garage.
The host is generally communicative but can easily be overwhelmed and go dark. He has a tremendous amount of personal chaos in his life, and as a result, maintenance, and his willingness to engage in maintenance, is severely diminished.
What you see is, mostly, what you get.
And that brings me to really the two big issues with this unit.
1. Hot water. It does not have consistent hot water. The primary shower has consistent hot water approximately 70% of the time. Other hot water in the house varied from 0% availability to 50% availability with minutes-long delays.
If you stay in the unit for at least a week, at least one of your showers will be cold. And one will probably be too hot. And very little you can do about it on either end.
Many of the other faucets get little to no hot water. Sometimes for minutes at a time, sometimes it never gets hot. You know how hard it is to live for 4 months with no consistent hot water?
When asked about it, the host said that he was in contact with the HoA and this was an ongoing battle. He did have a plumber come out and replace some of the cartridges which did improve it from approximately 50% hot water to 70% in the Master Bedroom shower, but at this nightly rate, that just isn’t excusable.
We checked out two weeks ago and have been waiting for him to decide on what kind of credit to issue for the inconvenience. He’s not responded although he has acknowledged both our request, and the circumstances requiring it.
It has a beautiful view, the kitchen has been updated, but it is craving real maintenance that hasn’t been done in a long time. The ice maker doesn’t work, for instance. The kitchen faucet was broken and we purchased a replacement and installed it. He reimbursed us for that expense.
We also asked the host to upgrade his AV set up and he obliged. He spent the money to upgrade his receiver to support his new 4K TV.
2. The back bedrooms are so hot that you have to keep the shades drawn all the time or it cooks the whole house. And we stayed during the winter. Mercy upon the soul that stays through the summer; particularly with the aforementioned broken ice maker and lack of AC.
It’s a nice unit, it just needs more maintenance energy than the host has available to give it.
And for gods sake, fix the hot water.
It’s not reasonable to expect people to live without reliable hot water at $8k+ per month.