Carriage Hills Realty are basically unneeded middlemen between the rental property owner and the tenant. In order to justify their existence, they nickel and dime you as much as they can legally get away with. Forgot to turn in your pool pass ** plastic tag with a diaper pin attached)? That's a $10 fee. Clean your apartment thoroughly every other week? You still have to pay for professional carpet cleaning (~$100) every lease term. That's in addition to the carpet cleaning fee you paid when you moved in ($115), which is in itself overpriced. Want to wash your car? Too bad, they removed all exterior spigots and lumped water, sewer, and garbage fees into your monthly payment. Want to negotiate your rent? Too bad, the owner sets rent, but you can't talk to them because you have to deal with Carriage Hills.
And when I say "deal with" Carriage Hills, that generally means waiting days to weeks for a response. Once I cancelled my lease and they knew they were not getting more money from me, their customer service and courtesy went out the window. I waited on average 5-7 days for email responses, I had to resend documents that they lost or forgot about, and I wouldn't call their responses, when they happened at all, friendly. You're better off just going back into their quite disorganized office in person.
Just before I was to move out, they would text to notify me that they'd be showing my apartment imminently without consideration of my work schedule or the fact that my belongings were scattered about during the packing process. In the lease it stipulates that they must give you 24 hours notice, but they don't abide by this. And when they did show my apartment, they paid no heed to me, you know, the person who lived there; they just barged in (with dirty shoes still on, I might add) and started opening my cabinets and doors. The prospective tenants were even shocked at the brazen disregard of common courtesy displayed by the Carriage Hills rental reps and apologized to me for invading my privacy.
And, the worst of all, their exorbitant cleaning fees that they don't charge you for until you're long gone. I cleaned my apartment thoroughly before I moved out, following their "Move-out checklist" to the letter (but of course, there's a disclaimer that it's non-exhaustive, basically a loophole so they can charge whatever they want), but they still charged me $135 for cleaning. Readers might doubt that I left the apartment in clean condition, but as an engineer who worked on Eglin with an eye for detail, I can tell you that it was as clean as when I moved in. As if that weren't enough, I was charged an additional $15 because whoever they used to clean the carpets after I left was more expensive than the deposit I put down when I moved in. When I had sewage back up into my showers and toilets (a problem that happened twice while I lived at The Oaks), they had no problem making me clean it all up myself, but any perceived speck of dust left after I moved out was worth 4 hours of overpriced cleaning services. My recommendation is to just not clean anything when you move out, since they're going to charge you for it anyway.
No, I take that back. My real recommendation is to rent elsewhere. I'd rather not support businesses that are so consumer-unfriendly and simply rude. Unfortunately, the draw is tough to resist when there are limited properties available and the ones Carriage Hills rent are themselves in good condition, but I urge you to try anyway. And if you do rent from Carriage Hills, just go in with your expectations set on paying a premium for everything. I fully expect them to post a review reply trying to defend their policies (as they seem desperate to do), and they'll probably even tack on their "thousands of satisfied tenants since 1982" bit, but I wonder... how many more thousands were disappointed and glad to leave? They certainly can't count me in that "satisfied tenants" category.
Carriage Hills Realty are basically unneeded middlemen between the rental property owner and the tenant. In order to justify their existence, they nickel and dime you as much as they can legally get away with. Forgot to turn in your pool pass ** plastic tag with a diaper pin attached)? That's a $10 fee. Clean your apartment thoroughly every other week? You still have to pay for professional carpet cleaning (~$100) every lease term. That's in addition to the carpet cleaning fee you paid when you moved in ($115), which is in itself overpriced. Want to wash your car? Too bad, they removed all exterior spigots and lumped water, sewer, and garbage fees into your monthly payment. Want to negotiate your rent? Too bad, the owner sets rent, but you can't talk to them because you have to deal with Carriage Hills.
And when I say "deal with" Carriage Hills, that generally means waiting days to weeks for a response. Once I cancelled my lease and they knew they were not getting more money from me, their customer service and courtesy went out the window. I waited on average 5-7 days for email responses, I had to resend documents that they lost or forgot about, and I wouldn't call their responses, when they happened at all, friendly. You're better off just going back into their quite disorganized office in person.
Just before I was to move out, they would text to notify me that they'd be showing my apartment imminently without consideration of my work schedule or the fact that my belongings were scattered about during the packing process. In the lease it stipulates that they must give you 24 hours notice, but they don't abide by this. And when they did show my apartment, they paid no heed to me, you know, the person who lived there; they just barged in (with dirty shoes still on, I might add) and started opening my cabinets and doors. The prospective tenants were even shocked at the brazen disregard of common courtesy displayed by the Carriage Hills rental reps and apologized to me for invading my privacy.
And, the worst of all, their exorbitant cleaning fees that they don't charge you for until you're long gone. I cleaned my apartment thoroughly before I moved out, following their "Move-out checklist" to the letter (but of course, there's a disclaimer that it's non-exhaustive, basically a loophole so they can charge whatever they want), but they still charged me $135 for cleaning. Readers might doubt that I left the apartment in clean condition, but as an engineer who worked on Eglin with an eye for detail, I can tell you that it was as clean as when I moved in. As if that weren't enough, I was charged an additional $15 because whoever they used to clean the carpets after I left was more expensive than the deposit I put down when I moved in. When I had sewage back up into my showers and toilets (a problem that happened twice while I lived at The Oaks), they had no problem making me clean it all up myself, but any perceived speck of dust left after I moved out was worth 4 hours of overpriced cleaning services. My recommendation is to just not clean anything when you move out, since they're going to charge you for it anyway.
No, I take that back. My real recommendation is to rent elsewhere. I'd rather not support businesses that are so consumer-unfriendly and simply rude. Unfortunately, the draw is tough to resist when there are limited properties available and the ones Carriage Hills rent are themselves in good condition, but I urge you to try anyway. And if you do rent from Carriage Hills, just go in with your expectations set on paying a premium for everything. I fully expect them to post a review reply trying to defend their policies (as they seem desperate to do), and they'll probably even tack on their "thousands of satisfied tenants since 1982" bit, but I wonder... how many more thousands were disappointed and glad to leave? They certainly can't count me in that "satisfied tenants" category.