Apartment Review for Vantage Point Apartments - Little Rock, AR

Overall Vantage Point is a typical aging, lackluster apartment complex that fleeces outbound tenants to supplement revenues. We lived in Vantage Point for about 18 months. In that time the front office staff and maintenance staff changed at least a half dozen times each. If you live there for long you'll understand why nobody wants to work there: hostile tenants (and rightly so, in my opinion). On arrival, the apartment was deplorable. The carpet looked like a complete train wreck. A couple cabinet drawers would not open, or would fall out when pulled. The sink in the master bathroom would back up. Sliding closet doors would not open or close properly. We made note of the problems on the form and turned it in. Aside from the obvious gripes there were a couple more subtle problems. There are half-size washers and dryers in each apartment's kitchen. The plumbing to our washer's drain was connected to the kitchen sink. So every time a load of clothing was washed and drained, water would gurgle and splash out of the kitchen sink's drain. The washer itself would make the most awful noises, and its electronic control panel would frequently display an error on the LCD readout, leaving the clothes to sit there for hours all soapy after I'd gone to work. The dryer's output vent was not connected to any external source, meaning that all the lint produced from the dryer would pile up behind the washer unit below. This is a violation of fire code, but irresponsible management would rather claim ignorance and sweep it under a rug than spend money to fix the problem. The lint would form a thin layer on everything in the kitchen and posed a nuisance to anyone with respiratory problems. The first weekend that we lived there, the water heater went out. Since it qualified as emergency maintenance, a friendly maintenance man was there in a timely fashion and replaced a faulty component in the heater. He said that the heater itself would need to be replaced soon and that he would put in a work order to do so, but he advised that I not hold my breath waiting for it. Oh how right he was. Over the next several weeks we noticed a slight cockroach problem. The bugs went unnoticed for the most part. We would sometimes see one every few days. However, at this time there were hardly any tenants living in adjacent apartments to fuel the cockroach problem. This would later change for the worse. Within a few months the water heater went out again, on a Sunday. A maintenance man (different one, of course) came and said he would replace it but that it would have to wait til the following day (Monday). I have never taken a shower quite as cold as the one I took that night. Then that summer the air conditioner went out. It took a couple days for a motley trio of HVAC contractors to arrive and fix it. The air conditioner itself is a split-system unit, so the condenser is outside and the "cold side" is indoors. Ours was in the ceiling behind an access panel. When the contractors fixed the AC, they left the pan that collects condensation at a tilt, so water began leaking from the ceiling. Another maintenance man came to "fix" that. The day after, the ceiling in the pantry began to leak. We had dirty water dripping all over food. The maintenance man returned, apologized, and this time fixed it for good. Eventually the washing machine gave out and had to be replaced. We got a slightly newer one, but we could not lift the lid entirely out of the way thanks to the dryer being mounted above with about six inches of clearance. When the old washer was wheeled out, it left a stream of some dark greasy mystery fluid. Carpet cleaners were sent out a couple days later to try to clean it, but with little success. We had already discovered that any attempt to clean the carpet was futile. Our last six months in the apartment were the worst. Additional tenants moved in around us. One apartment above us had a large dog that was kept on the balcony at night so neighbors could listen to it whine and howl all night. The tenants would sweep the dog's feces down onto our back patio. Another apartment above us would frequently cause water to leak into our bedrooms and closets. The first time it happened, maintenance notified me that it had come from a toilet upstairs that was left overflowing. Oh great, toilet water dripping onto my clothes. These water leaks caused a lot of damage to the ceilings and paint. We left several messages notifying the office that we had continual leaks. During our last visit from maintenance we were told the ceiling in the master bedroom would have to be gutted so the source of yet another leak could be repaired. We never heard from maintenance again. The additional tenants also served to fuel the cockroach problem. By our last week, the cockroaches were running so rampant that stopping them was impossible (God knows we tried). It is said that for every one cockroach you see, there are a thousand you don't. If that's the case then I can affirm without exaggeration that Vantage Point has hundreds of thousands, at least. The failure icing on this sadness cake came after we had moved out. I fully expected to be screwed out of the security deposit since I know people who work in the rental business and they explained how declining operations like Vantage Point make their money. What I did not expect was to see a very hefty bill on top of what the security deposit supposedly took care of. The bill was for "damages". Water damage and replaced carpet. The front office had conveniently lost the form we turned in, no doubt thanks to the turnover in inept office staff, so any disputes against these charges were a case of he-said-she-said. Rent at your own risk.