The reason I gave Eric’s East Harlem listing 2 out of 5 stars is because he was extremely responsive and the location wasn’t bad. It was close to the subway line and a short walk to Central Park. But that’s where the praises end. My friend & I stayed in Eric’s home for a long weekend, but we ended up checking out a day early. Note: long post ahead.
The trip started off with a few hiccups, on the day we arrived, we were lugging all of our bags, in the rain, to the 7-11 location where the keys were. It was a bit out of the way. I did all of the pre-work for KeyCafe (created an account, verified everything, etc.) but when it came time to get the key, the app told me that the keys were still checked out. I had to call Eric and let him know the situation. He called KeyCafe and got it sorted out. It took about 8-10 minutes to get the issue resolved. Once we had the keys, we lugged our bags back towards to apartment. The apartment is accurately described in the description. I will say I was disappointed when I asked Eric if he had a TV/DVD player, and he said no. But there were both in the apartment, but the DVD player didn’t work. So we ended up signing into my Amazon Prime account and streaming a movie. I will call out that the walls are pretty thin, so you can hear the neighbors pretty easily.
About an hour into our stay, my friend went to the restroom and the toilet broke, it was just the chain on the flapper. An easy fix, but nonetheless, we had to quickly come up with a solution as it was pretty late at night, so we ended up tying dental floss to the handle arm so we could flush the remainder of the evening. We let Eric know and he scheduled a plumber to come the next day, while we were out. It was resolved the next day with a new chain.
The second day as we were entering the apartment after being out for the day, the doorknob basically fell apart in my hand as I was entering the apartment! Yikes! It was concerning to us, as what would happen if it fell off while we were in the apartment? We’d be locked in! We let Eric know, and with some back & forth, he said he would schedule a locksmith to come the next day while we were out again.
On the third day, we woke up to no hot water! We let Eric know and he said he would send out another plumber to take a look while we were out. Because we were trying to see as many things as possible in NYC, we didn’t wait around. We ended up boiling some hot water in the Keurig and basically taking a sponge bath so we could get going. When we came back to the apartment 6+ hours later, the hot water still wasn’t on and the doorknob still wasn’t fixed. Even though he said that both the plumber & locksmith had visited that day. He reached out to some neighbors and found that the cold water wasn’t isolated to just his apartment, rather the entire building didn’t have hot water. At this point, my friend and I decided that enough was enough, and that we should probably check out a day early and find somewhere else that had working hot water and doorknob.
When we checked out, we had issues again with KeyCafe. We returned the keys and for some reason it didn’t confirm in the app that they were returned. Which led to a call from Eric & KeyCafe customer service, an hour or so after we had left and got settled into our new place.
Eric did refund us our final night, but not before he tried to guilt us by sharing the money he had spent to do all of the fixes that weekend, and how he was losing money - which I thought unprofessional. Not quite sure why he expected us to stay in a place where there’s no hot water and we hadn’t showered in 24+ hours. In my honest opinion, I’m not sure this house should be on the market, at least until all of the things have been fixed, the toilet, kitchen faucet, and the doorknob, and the hot water situation has been resolved.