It’s a reasonable low cost place to stay to save some money during a San Francisco visit. Accommodation in central areas are very pricey and this is a low cost option if you don’t mind roughing it out.
The location of the property is great. A 20-25 min drive (weekdays) brings you to the famous districts and tourist spots. It’s also minutes drive away from the beautiful beach where we spent two glorious mornings running and watching the sunrise.
Parking was easy as the property has one designated parking lot for its residents. There was probably a grass patch or a tiny garden in the front of the house but years of neglect has turned it into a patch of dry and barren spot of soil.
There is nice big smart TV in the living room with all the major services like Yotube and Netflix on tap. Nice way to unwind at the end of each day.
Gene is not very responsive (days to reply) and totally ignored some messages I sent. Tone of messages were cut and dry, you don’t get the nice feeling from dealing with a warm and friendly host.
The place is not spotlessly clean. While the cleanliness of the toilet and kitchen is reasonable, the bedroom shelves were dirty we didn’t want to put our clothes in them.
The kitchen was reasonably equipped with some cutlery but really not enough for a family. For a property with with 3 bedrooms, sleeps 6, it had only two bowls, a few plates, mismatching forks and spoons, one pan and one pot. But like I said earlier, the place is still functional. Basic cooking condiments such as olive oil, soya sauce, salt and pepper were provided.
Lifesaver was the coffee machine which provided us with a nice daily perk in the mornings. The host was kind enough to drop by unannounced to leave us with a can of new coffee beans while we were out. No cleaning, no change in sheets or towels, just a can of coffee. I won’t argue about the rights of a host popping by to check on the property and am not sure what AirBnB’s policy on this is but I would think that it’s basic manners for a host to at least let us know he was planning to come by especially when we have our valuables and personal belongings in the house during the course of our stay. I feel that this will be an important consideration for folks whom are considering to stay here.
The property was aged and everything felt like they were recycled from a garage sale and placed at random purely for the purpose of serving its role of checking a box under “available amenities”. Nothing matched, and the sofa, the reading chair, the beds, the pillows and the rest of the furniture were old and worn.
TBH the ping pong table is a waste of space. Instead of placing functional furniture which may have cost more the host probably had a brainwave to recycle an old Table Tennis table he had or bought and create a unique selling angle for the property at the same time.
Bedsheets were worn (but no weird smells), pillows were flat. We stayed for 4 nights with only one towel for each family member to use. No washing machine provided so you need to come prepared.
This property is on the second floor of a property with other residents in the garage below. Here is my main gripe. The property has very thin floorboards which means that you have to constantly tip toe around the place after 10pm. Otherwise you get nasty banging from the resident below as his way of expressing his complaints. My family and I were quite disturbed by this. We felt that this property just isn’t constructed well enough to accommodate two families of residents.
This was originally the first stay out of two in the itinerary of our California tour. We were planning to check into Gene’s property again before heading home after a tour but our experiences described above prompted me to cancel the second part of our stay with Gene and look elsewhere.