Burnette & Co. Realtors

Review: I contacted Burnette Realtors about water damage and mold in my room a week ago (Monday August 26, 2013) and they have yet to have someone come out and take care of it. The damage is spreading and I have been unable to sleep in my room for the past week due to health concerns; I can't even sit in my room for 30 minutes without my sinuses acting up. I understand they have a long list of maintenance requests but due to the nature of water damage and mold spores, I would expect for this issue to be at the top of their list. My room is unlivable. Also, every time I contact them, they are rude and respond with a smug attitude. I just need this to get done.Desired Settlement: Maintenance should come out here as soon as possible and take care of it, not wait until they reach it in their list of maintenance requests. This is a health concern, as well as a health violation, and should be taken care of immediately.

Review: The August before my Junior year in college (2011), I signed a lease to an apartment in college managed by Burnette Realtors. The following January (2011), the unit was sold to individual owners. This did not change anything for my three roommates or I, aside from where we sent our rent checks. When it came time for us to move out the following August (2013), our owner began to go through the process of reviewing the unit and making the appropriate cleaning assessments. The $240 non-refundable cleaning fee was used to clean the apartment, but our security deposit was also used to take care of routine cleaning. Per our lease, the security deposit (one month's rent) was only to be used for damage done to the apartment. When our owner came to us to tell us about the cleaning she was having to do, we notified her that those damages were done to the apartment before we moved in, and we had noted these damages on our initial walk-through paperwork with Burnette's. She never received this paperwork. Even though it was not my responsibility, I took it upon myself to reach out to Mr. Charles Burnette to personally ask him to send the paperwork. After several unanswered voicemails and emails, I finally got a hold of him on his personal cell phone. He was very rude, and clearly stated that "it's not his problem." After explaining my situation further to Charles, he agreed to send someone to the warehouse to find this original paperwork. I emailed him several times to remind him, as well as spoke to him on the phone multiple times to ask about this request. He was simply uninterested because the matter no longer affected him. However, as a recent college graduate, an entire month's rent means a lot to me. He ignored my requests multiple times, and never followed through with sending this paperwork. My roommates and I were punished for his mistakes, even though we followed all correct procedures and took excellent care of the apartment. This was not my only problem with Charles and Burnette Realtors, but this is by far the most financially severe.Desired Settlement: I want to warn other renters about Burnette's before they get into the same situation that my roommates and I did. Burnette Realtors is a terribly managed company, and they do not care about customer service or ethical practices. Legally, Charles should provide the apartment owners with all of the necessary paperwork, which would result in a refund of my security deposit.

Business

Response:

These tenants signed a new lease with the current owner who manages their own unit in August 2012. We do not manage this property or work for that owner. Any complaints that they might have should be addressed with the owner of the property.

Review: I was going to live in one of their apartments this school year, but after signing the lease last spring and paying my portion of the security deposit one of the girls I was going to live with backed out. From there we all decided not to live their this year and we were told that if we called and gave them our mailing address they would mail us refunds for the security deposit. The other girl who had paid already received her check in the mail sometime at the end of the spring semester. My mother and I have both called multiple times about it since the spring. Often there would be no answer or call back to our message. Every time they did answer we were told that they would look into it and call us back by the next business day, which they rarely did. Most recently she called on Wednesday December 4th and Thursday December 5th, with the same response. We told them that if they did not have the refund sorted out by the next time we called we would be filing a complaint because it has been almost nine months since my lease with them fell through. That seems like more than enough time to find their records of receiving and cashing my check #[redacted] dated 3/13/2013 for the amount of $621.24 which cleared the bank on 3/20/2013.Desired Settlement: I really just want them to apologize for the runaround they have been putting us through and give me my money back. If we had lived in the apartment and moved out without damages that money would be returned to us. I see no reason why that would not happen since we didn't live there and couldn't possibly have caused any damages. It would be wonderful if they paid us for the time that we spent trying to get them to simply refund my security deposit, which I would estimate to be around 10 hours when factoring in time spent worrying about it, researching options I had and actually attempting to contact them.

Review: My roommates and I experienced broken windows and a broken oven at our residency. Work orders for both issues were placed but neither were acknowledged or acted upon for months. Our broken window work order was changed to completed but upon returning to the residency we found no repair had even been attempted, they had merely changed the online status of the work order. The window took nearly 6 months to fix and the oven nearly 2 months.This negligence led us to speak with the office and ask on 4 different accounts that we needed these to be fixed but each interaction was with a new employee and no records of previous visits were ever documented by them. When they opened an online payment portal we decided this would be easiest to pay rent because we were not at school at the time to make payments easier for us, yet the system was down after they said it worked and by the time our rent check made it to Burnette's that month they charged us a late fee. When we told them we should not be charged for their system being down and their negligence towards fixing our work orders they blatantly ignored our requests and have continued each month to double the late fee until it now sits at nearly $900. On top of that they have since charged us another round of rent ($1400) on the apartment even though our lease ended on July 30th. [redacted], the main contact for the realty office spoke with one of my roommates about negotiating the deal down to a reasonable number when the owners of the unit were in town one weekend but never showed for our meeting so we explained our situation to the owners upon their arrival who agreed that Burnette's was in the wrong but never heard back from either party about a solution.Desired Settlement: We have sent Burnette's certified mail with an offer to have each of the 4 residents pay $75 towards the late fee equalling $300 and that be taken out of the $1400 they still hold as our security deposit. We will still honor this offer if they choose even though we as tenants do not feel we have done anything wrong to deserve the late fees.