I stayed at this listing for roughly 4 months. While I think this listing is fine for a shorter stay (e.g. a weekend trip to Seattle), I can’t recommend for a longer term stay. I ended up needing to extend my stay from 3 months to 4 due to work circumstances, and looking back I wish I had found alternatives for my last month. Worth noting that for longer term stays, Basky the cat stays with the host, so I did not interface with the cat during the stay.
The good: location is awesome. Fremont is super fun, and this apartment is in walking distance to plenty of restaurants and cafes and cool things to do. Convenient to bus lines. Balcony is lovely.
The bad: unfortunately, a lot.
The first big frustration was in obtaining a mail key. After checking in, I noticed that I hadn’t been provided a mail key. I had a number of items being sent to the listing that I needed to access, so I messaged the host. The host was adamant that she could not provide mail access out of privacy concerns. I understand not wanting to provide a mail key to every short term guest, but in my booking request I was explicit that I was looking for a longer term stay while working in Seattle for a few months on an internship. Eventually, the host began ignoring my messages related to the mail key, and it took reaching out to AirBnb customer support and threatening to cancel my booking for her to acknowledge my messages. All in all, it was about three weeks after check in that the host finally agreed to give me access to the mail, at which point a number of important work related documents of mine had piled up. I was really frustrated by the host ignoring messages, and felt that if mail access wasn’t included with long term stays, it should have been made explicit in the listing—I’ve done a number of long term stays and never not had the ability to receive mail.
The fridge was full to the brim when I checked in, and the host told me that I could use whatever I liked and discard the rest. I understand forgetting to clear out the fridge, and the free beer or two I scored from this was nice, but I ended up having to carry over a hundred pounds of frozen meat and other food down four flights of stairs to clear out her fridge. With the fridge finally empty, it was pretty evident that her fridge had not been deep cleaned in years, and so I then spent over an hour deep cleaning the fridge—a pretty gross welcome to the apartment.
Internet outages were frequent. In fairness, I think this was the fault of the ISP (Xfinity) and not the host, but it rendered working from home impossible at times. I would recommend the host explore alternative ISPs.
The furniture was really cheap, and the entire couch actually broke during my stay (legs snapped) while I was sitting on it. I have no issue with economical furniture like IKEA, but the furniture all felt like it was about to fall apart at any moment, to the extent that it felt like a safety issue.
The smoke detectors in the apartment had their batteries removed when I arrived, which was also a massive safety issue. I went out and bought batteries on my own dime, but I was pretty sussed by the disable smoke detectors. I wish that I had been informed of this beforehand, as it was a few days before I noticed, meaning that in the event of a fire during the first few days of my stay, I would not have been woken up.
Kitchenware was also extremely cheap. Pots and pans in particular were so badly banged up and featured such massive dents they were almost unusable.
I paid a lot of money to stay at this listing, and was overall very disappointed with the accommodations. Again, I think this place would suffice for a short visit, but I really cannot recommend—especially at this price point—for a long term stay.