Positives:
1. The house is as pictured regarding decor and layout and what the actual house looks like.
2. Sam was very responsive and communicative
3. The kitchen, living room, and beds were all very clean
4. The neighborhood was quiet
5. Accurate that it’s about a 10-15 minute car ride to a lot of places you’d want to visit in the city
6. Nice and clean appliances in the kitchen
7. Easy check in and check out process
Negatives/ things to consider:
1. As other reviewers stated (and I didn’t read, sadly), you are literally right next to a huge jail with barbed wire and everything. Our Uber drivers found it hilarious that this is where we were staying for our spring break trip
2. You can’t walk anywhere. I don’t think it says anywhere in the listing that you can walk places. So just know, you’ll be ubering or driving yourself where you want to go.
3. The showers and floors were not clean. Feet were immediately dirty which was pretty gross and uncomfortable. There was shampoo on the floor of the shower and hair on the walls. Able to immediately be rinsed off, indicating to me that it was even rinsed out between renters.
4. A/C cannot be set below 70 and this is not communicated to you until the check in process the day of. I’m 31 weeks pregnant and that was an issue for me lol.
5. You are on the first floor of a two story home and the second floor is also some kind of short term rental. The floors are wood/faux wood and you can hear the tenants above. During the day this wasn’t an issue but at 2:45am when they are getting home and walking around with heels on for 2 hours in the unit, you will absolutely not be able to sleep. Sam said they reached out but this issue did not stop and was a huge bummer and disturbance.
6. Our unit smelt STRONGLY of cigarette smoke and weed. I told Sam right away and they said they would investigate (I’m not sure what that entailed). I naively figured that this would dissipate and was a once off incident in the unit or the unit above. I was wrong. This unit had obviously been heavily smoked in and I even noticed one of the smoke detectors had a plastic bag wrapped over it while another one was just entirely missing from the hallway. The smell hit us every time we returned to the unit and we would eventually become nose blind to it. Pretty disgusted to discover that every single item of clothing and fabric smelt strongly of smoke when we returned home after the trip. Sam may have been surprised by this and it could have just been the tenant immediately before us but it speaks to poor property management that this wasn’t resolved before our arrival or that we were given some kind of compensation or alternative booking option. Those would have communicated excellent property management and this review would be entirely different.
7. There were several pieces of broken furniture or highly damaged furniture (broken dresser, broken kitchen table bench leg, very water damaged surfaces in some of the bedrooms, missing fan remote in a bedroom) . I notified Sam and they seemed interested in resolving the issue but we really weren't interested in furniture repair happening during our stay so we just asked them to resolve after we left. Again, maybe these were the tenants immediately before us being really hard on the unit or maybe this is an ongoing issue. Either way, poor property management in that it was not caught before our arrival.
8. The front yard was completely littered with trash and cigarette butts
9. The home sleeps 6 and has just enough cups, bowls etcetera for that amount. That meant a lot of dishwashing since the unit was so minimally stocked. Not necessarily a negative, just something to consider.
Tl;dr: home is as pictured, you will leave smelling like an ashtray, good luck sleeping with upstairs renters stomping around from 2:45-4:45 am, and enjoy the view of the jail. With all of our communication with Sam regarding concerns with the unit, I have been slightly surprised that no compensation has been offered.