We strongly recommend against renting this home. It is in a very noisy (day and night) location, the host does not respect guests enough to clear out his own possessions, there is black mold on the washing machine gasket, and the family room bathroom has a distinct sewage smell.

Here are the specifics:

1. The description of the location is inaccurate and misleading. The apartment is not in the “middle of Soho”; it is on Broome St/Watts and W. Broadway, which is a major entry point to the Holland Tunnel. There is traffic going west towards NJ all day and night. At rush hour and on weekends the intersection is often gridlocked with horns blaring. New York may be a noisy city, but the home’s location at Broome and Watts Street is exceptionally noisy because of the tunnel and because of the Broome Street Bar across the street, which is noisy until about 2am.

2. The host’s personal belongings took up most of the room in the closets. The closets were full of his clothes, family photos fill the any counter space in master bedroom, and there was literally one empty drawer in the master bedroom and little hanger space available for guests. When we texted the host about this problem, he told us to move his clothes to other drawers, and then when we did that in the second bedroom, we found a drawer with dirty clothes and sand in the bottom of the drawer, which we then had to clean. The condition of the home was inconsistent with Airbnb’s rules on how hosts are supposed to leave their homes.

3. The house is not well maintained.

• The sink in the bathroom near the second bedroom was clogged, bulbs in all the lamps were out, and the deck was a mess with cigarette butts and dirt and no bulb in the sconce on the deck. When we told the host about these problems, he sent a handyman who spent about 4 hours in the house power washing the deck, changing lightbulbs, and cleaning the trap in the bathroom sink. That handyman left behind a 3-inch clump of hair from the sink on the bathroom floor and left the bathroom dirty (with dirty towels on the bathroom floor and his oil/water can on the scale in bathroom). When we told the host about these issues, he replied that his cleaning person would be over the next day. We had already put the dirty towels in the wash and threw the hair clump out in the garbage.

• The linens on the bed in the second bedroom were dirty when we arrived, and when we told the host about this the next day, he responded that there were other linens in the room – as though the problem was ours to fix.

• On her visit (three days into our stay), the cleaning woman cleaned the dirty sheets and duvet cover but did not clean the sink or floor where the handyman had worked in the bathroom the day before. She also emptied a drawer in the master bedroom by taking out our own clothes (after we had already cleared a drawer) and putting them in a different (bottom) drawer combined with the owner’s clothes. We had to search for our own clothes.

• The clothes washer rubber gasket around the door is covered in black mold.

• The floor of the shower stall in the master bedroom has black mold in the grout.

• The bathroom in the family room on the bottom floor has a foul smell - like sewage.

• The foosball table was broken.

4. It is not truly a 3-bedroom residence, and the bathroom situation is less than ideal. One “bedroom” has no door on it and has a fold out couch. The second bedroom is described as “1 queen bed, 1 small double bed,” but in fact it has a small double bed. The master bedroom has a bathroom without a door. (The host described the bathrooms to us at the time we booked as “beautiful” “a perfect arrangement.”

5. The host provided no advance instructions on how to enter the home; we had to text him for information the morning of our stay. The host left no instructions on the use of the TV and audio systems. The internet connection was spotty throughout our stay giving the following message: “No ethernet cable is plugged into the router internet port. Make sure that the cable is securely plugged into both the broadband modem port and the router internet port. After you have checked the ethernet cable, try again.”