Alara Cantebrea Crossing Apartments

I wanted to update my last review. I should have done this a while back but honestly I just forgot. Although I moved out about a year ago for personal reasons, I would move back here. The old management was horrible including the angry assistant manager, Angelica. But before I moved out Greystar bought out (I think) the previous company and they really did a 180! Everyone was so incredibly nice! When I had to break my lease they were all so extremely helpful and worked with me. They did have temps working there for awhile and they had no idea what they were doing, which was frustrating, but once the permanent staff was there, it was great. I loved my apartment. I had a one bedroom on the 3^rd floor by the pool. The only negative I could give is that they never did anything about the drunk loud people at 2am. Hey, I’m not a hater, if you want to hang out at the pool at 2am even though it’s closed, do it but at least consider there are people that live around the pool and keep it down. I liked that they had a security guard at the pool during the summer to prevent those people who don’t live there from coming in. The gym was small and some of the machines didn’t work all the time but that’s probably typical in all apartments.

I lived here for almost two years and all I have to say is make sure you document EVERYTHING, the charges they try to pin on you when you move out is ridiculous! They charge you a cleaning fee about 3 times in 3 different descriptions, they claimed I didn’t return my key or gate clicker when I did but I couldn’t prove it, and all sorts of other charges that were incorrect, their staff and management are at a high turn over rate so no one ever knows who talked to you or what’s going on. When I moved out I followed up a month later to make sure I didn’t owe it have a remaining balance and 6 months later I was contacted by a debt collections saying I owed over $ 1200. Completely upset and ruined with the process.

I need to give a shoutout to Antony. I was having a horrible morning and he completely made my stress manageable. He went above and beyond to help me out in a very stressful situation.

I am extremely grateful to the Management staff and and maintenance staff at this location. I was in a bind and needed my apartment ready 2 weeks a head of time and they all worked hard to make this happen. They were friendly, polite, professional and compassionate. This is exactly the family environment you all want to live in. If you are looking for a great community for an apartment home look no further. I thank them again and I am happy to join them!

Great place to live!!! Fabulous amenities and spacious floor plans. The staff is friendly and courteous. It’s the perfect location.

This place has the potential to be fairly decent, but all of this potential is ruined by incompetent management. Management changed hands 3 times in the 15 months I lived there (see edit). I finally became so frustrated with the problems I was experiencing that I was willing to sign a lease with another apartment complex in order to move out 3 months early, doubling my rent for those three months. A small price to pay to get away from this place. I’d give them 0 stars if I could. The positives are completely inconsequential compared to the negatives.
I’ll get the positives out of the way because it won’t take long.
— Beautiful pool area, and not constantly overfull with people.
— Maintenance was responsive and super friendly. I actually enjoyed my interactions with them. I’ll consider them justification for the 1 star I have to give the place.
Now, where to begin with the negatives.
— When we initially toured the apartments, we were told that they were built to condo-​specifications, including concrete between each floor. We were ensured they were very soundproof, which was important to my wife and I, since she is a student, and I often work from home. NOT the case. There was constant thumping on our ceiling from our upstairs neighbor going about his day-​to-​day business. I don’t think he was being intentionally loud, but him simply walking around would rattle dishes in our kitchen cabinets and picture frames on our walls, and it was non-​stop. We complained about this, and were told they could not tell our upstairs neighbor to quit walking around his apartment, never addressing the fact that we were lied to on our initial tour.
— Our building was INFESTED with rats. Not just small mice, but massive squirrel sized rats. Every night our sleep was interrupted by the sound of them scratching around in the gaps between the floors and in the walls. Every time we would go outside they would be scurrying around on the walls and on the balconies above us, and we would often see them running across the railing of our patio. After numerous complaints, they sent «pest control» which was a joke. He put two rat traps in the access panel to the HVAC system. They were un-​baited and this particular portion of the ceiling was completely sealed off from the rest of the ceiling, where the rats actually were living. I took the traps down and set them out on our patio and in our garage every night. I caught 13 rats in the time I was there. Remember how I said a few extra thousand in rent was a small price to pay, in order to leave? What I mean by that is I had thousands of dollars in rodent damage done to my property in the garage including camping supplies that were chewed through and damage to wiring on my motorcycle and car. This issue was never fully resolved, even after complaining about the potential health hazards of these disease carriers being in the ventilation.
— Their online/​automatic rent payment system is a mess. I initially signed up for automatic rent payments because I like knowing I won’t accidentally forget and have a late payment. It worked reasonably well for the first 6 months or so. (Side note: also included in this automatic payment was your monthly utilities that were distributed across the whole building, like water, trash, etc.) After the first management change, suddenly this utility charge wasn’t automatically taken out. We were not given any warning that anything had changed. I had no idea until I got a notice on the door saying I was delinquent on my rent payment, and that I owed for the previous month’s utilities and a late fee. I didn’t have time or the desire to fight it, so I went to their online portal to pay it, only to find out that they charge a fee for paying online with a credit card. Okay, that’s pretty normal. Do you think it’s a percentage of what you’re paying? No, it’s a flat fee of nearly $ 70 even if, as in my case, you’re only trying to pay a $ 30 bill.
— Our lease ended on the 15^th of the month. Despite this, the system tried to draft out a full month of rent from my account. I caught this the day it happened and called the office. I was told to put a stop payment on the charge and to come pay the correct amount by check in person. Fine. I thought I had finally severed my ties with these people until I received my final move-​out statement in the mail. Hidden in this itemized list was a $ 75 fee for «insufficient funds» which I was told was because of the cancelled charge. I got the runaround for almost 3 months trying to get this charge refunded. I called 4 separate times, and every time, the person I needed to talk to was never in. I was always told that I would receive a call back and never did. Also sent e-​mails and never heard back. The only way I finally got a response was to file a BBB complaint. To top it all off, they sent the check to my old address.
Edit 3÷18÷15: To clarify, there were 2 management *companies* in 15 months, 3 different on-​site managers.

The maintenance guy is the only good thing about this place! I hated how my bedroom window was located where everyone took their dog to shit and bark. The office staff is incredibly rude, hard to work with, lies and disrespectful. Yes those kids – the skateboarding ones… oh my gosh. Yes the thin walls and my bedroom sharing it with my neighbors laundry room or something that was incredibly loud.

Just moved in. The place wasn’t clean. When I requested the maintenance folks come over to fix the smoke alarm that keeps going off I was told that was my responsibility. I took a baseball bat to it. This lack of service was preceded by a disconnected phone number, an answering service that doesn’t speak english and an empty front office. BIG NO TO THIS PLACE!!!

The apartment we live in is nice! We love the floor plan, the big patio and that garage is awesome. We have had some maintenance issues and the guys were on top of it right away!
On the other hand… we live towards the back entrance and it is fine during the day (when they show you around) but at night the smell is SO BAD. If you are considering moving here come by at night and see what I’m talking about.
The garage is awesome but we had to get a second floor to have it. Their pitch was «we use commercial grade building standards so the concrete between each floor is X many inches thicker than code»…granted we have two very large people living above us, but I can hear them walk, fight, and… well, we can hear more than we want to.
Another positive for the property is there are dog stations all over the place to get poop bags; however, we only walk our dog on the asphalt because there are so many land mines!!! 2 times I have seen a pile of dog poo less than 6 feet away from the bags that are provided by the apartment.
There’s some boring silly issues with the office too, but I wont bore you with it. In conclusion, this place as a lot of positive things going for it but for what it’s worth we are moving the second our lease is up.

One of the worse places that I have lived in Austin. Although the area is nice, the rent isn’t too bad, and they allow large dogs. Here are the reasons I will not live here anymore:
— Horrible customer service
— Rent goes up a lot and they never give you notices like they should about anything.
— They do NOT have convenient times to pay rent. I work the hours that they are open.
— People don’t clean up after their dogs
— Since Walmart is next door people walk their shopping carts to the apartments and leave them all over the place like this is some kind of ghetto.
— It seems as though they always have construction going on somewhere or the maintenance guys have to do a walk through for some reason.
— There are never enough parking spots, so sometimes I have to park my car a lot further down the road.
This is just a few things.

You WILL regret moving here. I don’t have enough time nor energy to express how terrible the property & mgmt here is so I will just list a few of the horrible things about this place.
1. The management (which changed 3 times during the year my husband and I lived there) are absolute liars & will tell you whatever you want to hear to get you to move in. The «deposits» are non-​refundable despite the fact that they assure you multiple times that if all is in order and clean upon vacating that you will recieve the deposit back minus a $ 75 cleaning fee yet they do NOT give anything back nor did they ever provide me with a copy of the fine print where they claim this is stated. We paid almost $ 800 in addition to the first month’s rent (we have a dog so we had a regular deposit as well as pet deposit). We were ok with paying that because we were assured multiple times by the office manager and leasing agent that we would get the $ back as long as the apartment was left in the condition we rented it in (minus the $ 75 cleaning fee). We left it in immaculate shape (we took photos to prove this — the carpet was perfect – our dog never had an accident, we never spilled food/​drink etc) we scrubbed every inch of the apartment, i’m talking pulling out the refridgerator and vaccuming and mopping behind it, wiping down all baseboards, scrubbing the patio concrete etc — we were incredibly careful because we wanted to be sure we got our money back obviously. I even called the office manager & asked that someone come take a look to see if there was anything we missed that they might deduct $ for so that we could remedy it. The guy came up & said it looked pristine & he did not see any reason we would not be recieving our deposit back. Guess what? We didn’t get ANY OF OUR DEPOSIT BACK!!! The reason why? Because the painters that Alara had hired to come spray the building and do touch ups on patios and in various apartments a couple months earlier had left painter’s tape on our patio door knob & on our window sill & when they came in after we had moved out & removed the tape it pulled off the original paint. They blamed us for this &used this as the basis to keep our ENTIRE DEPOSIT. And NOT ONLY did they keep our entire deposit, they billed us an exra $ 288.00!!! Literally, the stated reason for the loss of almost $ 800 plus $ 288 on the bill was from «tape», drip pans on the stove (which cost $ 10 each) & the $ 75 cleaning fee. We of course went to bat over this but they had just changed management again so the guy we had been dealing with was
no longer there & the office was fully stocked with clearly uneducated snooty & entitled ladies who were all an absolute joke to deal with. (side note, to add insult to
injury, having to deal with all the painters at the complex was a nightmare, for 3
months we had to move our cars constantly, there was wet paint everywhere, it
ruined several items of our clothing because there were not signs warning residents
& one day i came home & my door was covered in wet paint & i leaned on it to open
it as my hands were full of groceries and my entire outfit was ruined — the mgmt said
the sign must have «blown off» and they weren’t responsible. The paint even got on
several resident’s cars). Obviously we were so upset and distraught over the
absolute thievery & blatent lack of any type of ethical code that we did not pay the
extra $ 288 they tried to charge us & as a result we are having a horrific time getting
into another apartment as now we have PROPERTY DAMAGE ON OUR
RECORD!!! My husband and i both have Master’s degrees, great credit & have lived
in apartments for the last 12 years from Florida, to California & Austin & have
NEVER encountered such a dishonest & awful apt building. I honestly don’t don’t
know what to do now, i’m going to have a very difficult problem paying any more
money to such a despicable company since it’s basically legal extortion & it just
blows my mind that they are allowed to get away with stealing such large amounts of
money & that I have no recourse other than spending more time and money to hire
an attorney.
2. A big initial selling point for me with this apt was the fact that they say they have a 24 hour fitness center. That’s a lie. The gym is CONSTANTLY locked/​closed.
3. They don’t regulate the pool so there’s always tons of kids and families who sneak into the pool to use it as a free spot for children’s bday parties and they leave their trash & kids have accidents in the pool. Expect to see signs that read «pool closed due to fecal contamination» regularly.
4. Ladies: The water is not on the austin city water system. Its VERY hard water that literally wrecked my skin, hair and nails.
5. One of the maintence guys is a super creep & i ended up fixing most problems myself bc i didn’t want him in my apt.
6. They don’t allow grills, but the community grill is out of propane or broken 9 out of 10 times

Overall this is a pretty nice place to live depending on who the current manager is. Awesome pool/​hot tub scene for the singles. The maintenance rocks!