Nest

I have serious concerns about how Nest handled a repair and billing issue.
My condo had a leak that caused damage in one of the units they were managing. My compliant isn't about covering the leak, but their lack of communication during the repair and request for bill.
10/2/19: Nest discovered the leak and contacted me to confirm the source from my condo. I immediately left work, met their contractor, had him resolve the leak in my unit, and paid him for his service. He gave me a quick view (less than 5min, no pictures) of the damage in their rental unit. He did not discuss what would be involved with repairing the unit. I contacted my insurance to determine what was needed to initiate a claim.
No contact or follow-up.
10/7/19: I was contacted by Nest (Colleen) and told the work was complete and she would be sending a bill. I countered stating that I had no information about the services or work that was completed without engaging my insurance.
10/15/19: I received a bill from Nest (Stefanie) and responded that this lack of communication throughout the repair process, put me in an uncomfortable position of paying for work that I neither agreed nor approved of. 10/16/19 (Stefanie) responded and acknowledged the lack of communication, but stated that the invoice is valid - no additional pictures or information.
10/21/19: The owners emailed stated their concerns about the significant time it took to discover the leak (this correlates to the severity and cost of the damage) along with the not receiving documentation about the repairs.
10/22/19: Nest (Stefanie) responded describing the gap in visits (12-days), emailing a picture of the leak, mis-defined the source of the leak, and requested direct payment, contrary to their earlier email.
This compliant resulted from how this company handled this repair, did not communicate anything during the process, and handed me a bill, demonstrating unclear and unfair business practices.
I would appreciate your help in resolving this quickly.

Nest-DC's CEO and employees -- Grace L and Stephanie W, in particular – engage in dishonest, unethical, fraudulent, negligent, absentee, and incompetent behavior as a matter of course. I was unfortunate enough to be stuck working with them for 2.5 years, as my co-owners in my 2-unit condominium building (for which I am the HOA President) hired Nest to manage their condominium and renters. By definition, though, this means that Nest was also co-managing our common elements of the property. A complicated relationship, for sure, but the problems didn't stem from that.
The first year, our co-owners wanted to rent their fancy penthouse apartment for a good market rate and hoped to find a renter willing to take a 2-year lease. Grace and Stephanie told them that this simply wasn't possible and that they could only get X dollars and a 1-year lease. What Grace and Stephanie didn't tell our co-owner was that they quickly rented their apartment to their personal friends at a discounted price. I, being their friends' new neighbors, learned this when chatting with them on their arrival. The amount of money that they charged their friends for this apartment was about 2/3 of what I get from renting individual rooms in my lower-level unit. That is, they gave their friends a fancy penthouse apartment for 2/3 of the price of what it costs people to share my condominium with me. And lied to their clients about not being able to get more money and a longer lease.
Their friends were nice enough, but they damaged the walls in our common hallway when they moved in and out of the house. Grace and Stephanie refused to take money from their security deposits to cover the costs of the damage. They tried to claim that renters are only responsible for paying for damage that they create on the inside of units -- not to the common areas. I asked Grace and Stephanie what would happen if their friends had thrown a chair through the front glass door of the building, and they said that their friends would not have to pay for that if that happened.
Because we live in a small condominium building, there are certain things that residents have to do that are different from an apartment building. For example, we have to take out our own trash out to our individual cans and then we have to wheel those trash cans to the alley for pick up on trash day. If either unit leaves their trash cans in the alley, the HOA gets a $75 fine from the city. This is just one example of a responsibility that differs. Others involve shoveling sidewalks, covering 80% of the floor area with rugs, parking in the correct location, and so on. Overall, these things are outlined in the condominium by-laws.
I asked Grace and Stephanie to educate prospective renters about the by-laws and other such matters and to be certain that they were willing to comply with these basic responsibilities before they signed their leases and moved in. If Nest didn't do this, I ended up having to educate my new neighbors about everything from where to park, to where to put their trash, to when trash day was, to how to operate their appliances, to what to do when the smoke alarm goes off and everything in between. After all, I live in the same house, and Nest doesn't answer its own renters' calls. Also, everything that the renters did wrong (like fail to take their trash out or park in my driveway) caused me immediate problems. So, I asked Nest to educate the renters. Then I asked again. And again. And begged. And, after 2.5 years, yelled. But they did nothing for their clients (owners or renters) other than collect leases and rent checks.
After their friends moved out, the rental unit was empty for a few months. When the new renter moved in, she arrived to a disaster zone. I only access the rental unit when I have to get up to the roof for HVAC maintenance, so I had no idea that Grace and Stephanie allowed their friends to move out while leaving the unit covered in trash. They had promised the new renter that it would be cleaned up by the time she moved in, but it wasn’t. Of course, the new renter was upset.
Moreover, Grace and Stephanie also didn’t bother to talk to the new renter about the various responsibilities associated with living in the condominium. They gave her a copy of the by-laws in a giant pile of documents and never said a word to her about them. So, when the new renter arrived, she found a trashed apartment and immediately had a lot of questions for the only person around – me, in the apartment downstairs. When I ran her through the basics, like having to take the trash out to the back and then to the alley on specific days, she was even more upset.
And, ultimately, the new renter flat-out refused to comply with the by-laws. For 1.5 years, she refused to take out her own trash. Though she was a renter and didn’t have permission, she hired AT&T to install security cameras that patched video to her personal cellphone on the outside of our condominium building, pointed at the front door and my personal back doors. She had holes drilled clear through the walls of the building. And her boyfriend stayed up all night making construction-level noise on what I was told was an “night-shift, work-at-home job” that somehow involved work boots and heavy labor.
The noise was so bad, I almost had to move out of my unit. I was pregnant, and during my 1st trimester, her boyfriend kept me up until 4am at least 3 nights per week. And woke me up repeatedly the other nights. Because I couldn’t move easily and was begging Grace and Stephanie to enforce the by-laws on their renter, I stayed. But, under incredible stress from the constant noise and Nest’s gaslighting, I went into preterm labor and gave birth to my baby 8.5 weeks early.
The gaslighting. When the first security camera was installed, I spoke with my co-owners, and they and I agreed that we did not want a security camera installed on our building – especially one that was patched to a renter’s cell phone instead of being owned and operated by the HOA. We told Nest and the renter that the security camera needed to be removed and the wall of our building repaired. The renter protested that she couldn’t afford to do that. Then, a week later, she had the second installed. She was paying $70/month to AT&T for the service, plus nearly $1,000 in equipment and installation fees.
I continued to contact Nest about having the security cameras removed, and Grace kept delaying, week after week, in making any actual plan to have them removed. Then Grace announced that the security cameras had been removed! Except when I stepped out the front door to look, they were exactly in the same place they had been for over a month. I said “No, the cameras are still there.” And we ended up in a mind-blowing argument in which I sent pictures of the security cameras still on the house and Grace continued to repeat the fact that the renter had told her that they were gone. Nest’s offices are only about a 10 minute walk from our building, but Grace absolutely refused to send anyone to actually look at our house and the unit that she was renting. It was just easier for Grace to lie than to do deal with her renter, so she lied brazenly, shamelessly, and against all evidence put right in front of her.
The same gaslighting recurred when the story shifted to “Well, the renters says the security cameras are turned off.” And I would send pictures of the cameras with the green lights blinking. They would sometimes turn red for a little when the renter saw me taking pictures, then I would go into the building and come back out a few minutes later to find them green again. I had pictures of all conditions, and Grace simply fell back on her lies.
The same gaslighting recurred yet again over the matter of rugs. Our by-laws require a high percentage of coverage with rugs, as is very common in by-laws, and the noise in our building is notoriously bad. Plus, the renter’s boyfriend was conducting heavy labor all night, including the distinct sound of work boots clomping, balls dropping and rolling, and cords being dragged across hardwood floors.
First, the renter said she had rugs and Grace reported this as if it were true, without any verification. When I had to go up through the rental unit to the roof for HVAC maintenance, I saw that there was only a single 5x7 rug in the entire 1,600 sf unit. I told Grace that, no, this didn’t come anywhere near complying with the coverage requirement. She then told me that she worked with the renter and that the matter had been remedied -- that she had personally verified the rug coverage -- and that the matter was resolved. But I had to go up for HVAC maintenance again. And lo and behold, nothing had changed at all.
I asked Grace why she was lying to me, but she had no shame. She said that furniture counted as rug coverage and that she had visually estimated that the renter’s furniture met the requirements. First of all, furniture is not part of rug coverage – rugs have specific noise-reducing properties. Second of all, she used one of the bedrooms as an example of how the coverage was sufficient. She claimed that because the bedroom had a twin bed in it, that was an example of the 75% rug coverage requirement being met. The room was 162sf, the same as one of mine, and a twin bed is just a tad over 3x6 or 18sf. That’s 11%. Grace pretended that definitions and math meant nothing and just kept repeating that the rug coverage requirement had been met because she said it was. I later found out that she never actually stepped foot into the apartment – it was her colleague who visited. The noise problem went on for a whole year – swallowing the length of my pregnancy – and the rug coverage was never met. Grace never stopped lying about it as her way of avoiding dealing with the situation.
The security cameras did eventually come down, and our co-owner asked Nest to coordinate the repair to the building walls. They asked Nest to get 3 quotes from contractors, so that the HOA could compare repair methods and prices, which is our standard practice for repairing common elements. We do it all the time. We go on Angie’s List or Home Advisor, and we ask for 3 companies for quotes. It’s not only our standard practice, it’s a standard practice throughout basically all contracting in all industries. I’m an architect professionally and work with over 100 property managers just like Nest, as it happens, and I can tell you that it is completely standard. Yet, Nest said it was “impossible” to get 3 quotes – even though our co-owners were paying them and would be paying for the repairs, so wanted to make sure they were getting a good price.
In the end, Grace pretended to try to get 3 quotes. She said she would try, then came back and said she was only able to get a response from one handyman. She attached the quote to the email.
I opened up the quote, and it had almost no information on it. No description of work, no description of the handyman’s qualifications. Just a price, a logo, and a website. “Roost, LLC.” The logo was in a similar style to Nest DC’s logo, as was the name. I went to the website. It was a fully blank, white screen with nothing on it. I looked up the WhoIs domain ownership information. The website was owned by one of the employees of Nest DC.
Grace had pretended to try to get quotes from 3 contractors for the repair to our building for comparison, then claimed that no one had responded to the inquiry except for 1 contractor, and then pretended that that 1 contractor was a third-party entity. When in reality, she was trying to get our co-owner to hire her own, new repair company without our co-owner realizing it.
The problems with Grace went on and on. Over 2.5 years, I literally spent several hundred hours having to correspond with them, and the vast majority of that was due to the fact that Grace and Stephanie’s normal course of business was to lie and defraud their clients.
As a real estate professional, I can say that Grace started out with absolutely no core knowledge of how to care for properties or abide by housing law. As far as I can tell, she was a 29 year-old with a marketing degree who saw an opportunity to sit back and collect rent checks. She created a nice, hip website. Then she quickly got herself onto a 30-under-30 list. And then she hoped to sit back and let the rent checks roll in.
When it became clear that she actually had to deal with things like housing law, tenant protections, condo by-laws, property maintenance, and emergency repairs, she tried to avoid it. Over the time we worked with Nest – despite the fact that property management is a 24/7-365 business – they simply did not take phone calls or respond to emails when it wasn’t convenient for them. Grace would leave town for weeks over the winter holidays and be entirely unavailable to her renters or clients, no matter the emergency. When she couldn’t avoid having to do work, she would just lie to try to make the situation go away. And when she saw an opportunity to defraud her clients in order to make herself more money or get her friends a good deal, she did. Without any shame or hesitation.
I’ve honestly never met a business person or even heard of a business person as dishonest and underhanded.

Nest manages the apartment we rent. It is a basement apartment. In the last 25 days (less than a month) this apartment has flooded three times. The floods caused $2000 in damages. We had to stay in hotels for three weeks. We missed work. We spent hours cleaning and moving furniture each time it flooded.
The first time it flooded the bedroom, bathroom, and laundry room in two inches of water. Nest took 48 hours to clean up or address the cause of the flood. The contractors cleaned up some of the water, but left the carpets sopping wet. It took another 24 hours to get anyone to remove the carpets. Over the course of the next week, Nest's contractors brought in fans, ripped up the baseboards, and tore holes in the wall.
Nest told us that the problem was fixed and we could move back in, even though there were huge holes in the drywall and the baseboards were still ripped up.
One week after the first flood, it rained again, and water started seeping under the baseboards again (they had just finished drying it with the fans). So we moved out to another hotel.
It took an entire week for them to send anyone to fix the problem. Contractors did work outside and inside. Nest told us it was safe to move back into the apartment.
That same night, the laundry room and bedroom flooded again. We went to a hotel again. We are back in the apartment almost a month later, with no guarantee that the apartment will not flood again. Nest has told us twice the problem was fixed when it was not. We want to be let out of our lease two months early because of this nightmare, but Nest is refusing, saying problem is fixed even though they did nothing after the third flood. They have provided us with no proof the apartment won't flood again and that there isn't any mold. The apartment smells and has pest problems. We've been having allergies and headaches in the apartment.

On top of this, Nest lied to us when we moved in about the apartment having central air (it doesn't) and have never provided any viable solution to this.