Finders Keepers

So unprofessional and inconsiderate. They texted me (not even the courtesy of a phone call) to cancel a property showing an hour before we were scheduled to visit. This appointment was made days before, but they cancelled because they waited until the day of to notify the current resident of the viewing, to which the resident disapproved. They didn’t even respond to me about rescheduling a date. Never again

So I rarely review anything but this realtor is so so horrible that I can’t continue to say nothing. The thought that more students and families are signing leases with them year after year just angers me.
I rent a small 2-​bedroom apartment in a 8-​plex with them. My lease ends this summer and I’m counting the days that I get to leave. During the viewing of the apartments they try their very best to hide everything that is wrong with the apartment and dodge your questions. I was told that what I now know was a whole bunch of lies from the start.
My first major problem was parking. I was told that our building had 2 parking lot on each side of the building. After a week or so of moving in I was threatened to be towed for parking on one of the two lots. I went into the office to ask and it turns out they don’t own the property of one of the lots and we can’t park there.
The state of the apartment itself is worse than it seems. Birds or squirrels had made nests in the roofs and they won’t do anything about it. I keep the place cleaner than a hospital and never leave open food or liquid out and the place has a continuous cockroach problem. They hired an exterminator who came and told me how bad of a problem this building in but I don’t think Finders Keepers paid them for more appointments or further action. Now every 2 months I go to Home Depot myself and get roach baits and gels and try and keep the problem under control myself.
Everything in the apartment is on the verge of falling apart which is understandable on how old this place is. Over the year I’ve lived here though maintenance keeps getting worse and worse. Any request has to be submitted 3+ times for them to notice. If you call to remind them they half hazardly say they will pass a message to maintenance when you know they probably won’t as I told them a lot of information and they didn’t write anything down. Moreover, in the last few months they’ve been charging me for all my maintenance. Last months my ceiling light in the living room broke and they came and fixed it and billed me $ 40. Since it was the third time something similar has happened I put in a dispute of charges. After 2 weeks of that, I still had to pay it. So for the last few months in my lease I guess I’ll be fixing my own things. I called their emergency maintenance number over their lunch period about my water. The call went to voice mail 4 times. This number is for 24 hour emergencies! How can it go to voicemail?! On top of that when they called me back 1.5 hours later they sounded super annoyed that I called them 4 times. It’s like somehow I’m at fault for all of this.
I am also pretty sure they enter my apartment without notifying me or leaving a note. Once I came home from school and I noticed on all my neighbor’s door knob some restaurant has placed a flyer except for mine. After walking into my apartment the flyer was placed in the center of my coffee table. Nobody else but them has a key to my apartment. When it was time for a lease renewal, I submitted the form very early saying no thank you I will be moving out. I then found a new apartment and when the new placed called them about my application, Finders Keepers told the new place that there must been a mistake as they think I am staying. This caused lots of confusion with my new apartment. I give them a check for rent every month and this month they deposited for $ 200 more than the check says. I had to put in a dispute with my bank. Although that’s not a big deal, it’s just annoying.
These are just the tip of the ice berg of everything wrong with this company. Any of the above thing might not be a big issue by itself, but having weekly problems with the place you call home takes a toll on you after awhile.
Lastly, for those of you that think renting with them is cheap and to save a bit of money each month you’ll just deal with it, they are not cheap at all. If you look at the bare rent yes it looks like a good deal. However, please note that that does not include ANYTHING. You’ll have to pay for electricity, water, trash, and sewage. Since the place is so old everything is not efficient so your utility bills will be super high.

CAN I GIVE ZERO STARS?
I would literally rather live under a bridge than lease through Finders keepers again. From the get-​go, nothing on our move-​in list was ever addressed, even after filling out additional work orders for them. Ever wonder why they aren’t registered with Better Business Bureaus? Too many reasons.
Communication is NON-​EXISTENT. I would call, email, submit work orders through their website, and even SHOW UP IN PERSON and get no acknowledgement or response whatsoever.
The city of College Station left warnings and citations on our door twice a week for a few MONTHS about how the grass was over the acceptable limit (which by the way is TWELVE INCHES TALL… like I couldn’t find my dog in the back yard it was so outrageously overgrown), and no matter how many times we attempted to have it mowed (which is clearly labeled as Finders Keepers responsibility in the lease), they refused to do so. I even went so far as having the city call them directly and they still would not comply.
The doors stuck, were an inch above the ground (there goes the AC), and made pest control quite useless since any and all rodents basically had a free ticket inside.
Our dryer stopped working, and Finders Keepers maintenance said that it was the dryer itself that went out, so we sold them and bought brand new ones, which also didn’t work. Turns out it was part of the house and not our dryer afterall, and they refused to fix it anyway, or cover any of the associated expenses. So basically we had to pay to upgrade a perfectly fine dryer and then fix the house too.
Only two of the four oven burners every worked, and no one would address it or even offer suggestions for self-​repairing.
Black mold was constantly building up on the toilet and around the shower, and no one seemed to care about that either, nor the health risks associated with it.
To top things off, the manager had the AUDACITY to email me after failing to respond to any and all work orders, inquiries, or contact altogether, and told me that she would be showing the house that afternoon. I responded telling her that unless she plans on having the lawn taken care of (or at least trimmed below knee-​height before then) and can find a way to acknowledge communication on either part, that she would NOT be allowed inside the house, and also warned her that bringing prospective tenants to the house of an extremely disgruntled one was probably not the best idea. She showed up anyway, and played dumb to everything, saying she got my email (but didn’t respond) and thought it would still be okay to come by. I politely declined and said that communication does not work one way, and told the prospective tenant to reconsider using Finders Keepers altogether. The next day, my front door was almost beaten down by the manager’s husband, who apparently is in charge of mowing lawns (hmmm, things seem to be adding up here), and he put his hands in my face and screamed at me for a good 10 – 15 minutes. It’s not my fault that you can’t do your job or communicate with your wife, sir. Get your shit together and act like the 70 year old man that you are before you go spitting in a 22 year old’s face for not taking care of your own business.
Also, after moving out, they charged us $ 150 for «filling holes in the backyard» which is funny because my dogs don’t dig. and I’m not quite sure how they would have dug holes through the 18 inch grass pasture that was growing out there.

So I have been looking into different options for rentals as my lease is up within 2 months and I am trying to plan ahead. I found several properties that looked great. I called up Finders Keepers and spoke to a man named Rick. Upon speaking to him, I was told the property owner had no intention of doing anything further than a 2 week move in. 2 weeks? You want people irresponsible enough to only start looking for a new place 2 weeks prior to move out? So anyway, when I asked him about the fact that the house for rent I’d been looking at had been available for the past 3 months, he explained that they were looking for the right people. Later, I found another property and called again. Again, I spoke to Rick. He explained that THOSE property owners also wanted nothing to do with people 2 months out. Okay, I’m seeing a pattern here. He explained it hurts their revenue if they do it that way. Upon explaining that that behavior makes it really difficult for people to be able to lease through Finders Keepers, I was astonished (and this is the reason I got on Unilocal!) to hear him say, «There are plenty of properties. You just won’t find any through us.» I cannot tell you anything further as I couldn’t do anything but hang up the phone.

Is there a zero star rating?! Seriously DO NOT rent from this company unless you are prepared to manage your own property, lose your entire security deposit, and hire an attorney when you move out. And if you absolutely must rent from them, take a lot of pictures — even video– and document every single conversation you have with them. The worst part is that they control many of the less-​expensive properties in this area so they know the people that are renting from them won’t be able to afford to take them to court.
We rented from this company for two years (we had intended to be there for four). When we signed our lease we were promised that the house would be cleaned prior to moving in as well as many repairs (garage doors were non-​functional, ceiling fans either didn’t work or squeaked very badly, one bathroom sink leaked, some other minor problems) but shortly after the lease was signed we realized our mistake. We moved in a month after we started renting (we were finishing our vacation elsewhere) and the house still had not been cleaned! Apparently they forgot. We had to leave our stuff in boxes to wait for the cleaning crew to come, and after they left we saw these huge bleached spots all over the living room where they had damaged the floors. We submitted pictures to the company, which they supposedly lost when it came up years later when we were moving out. Luckily I still had those copies on my camera so they weren’t able to charge us for that but they were going to try. Unfortunately, we didn’t take other photos of the house which cost us a lot of money when we moved out. It took almost 4 months of complaining to get them to fix the garage doors so that we could pull our cars in, and even then one of the locking mechanisms didn’t work right. After many calls and letters they finally replaced the ceiling fans… with cheap ones that started squeaking again several weeks later. I had to call to have the faucet fixed 3 times… and it still leaked– I finally just gave up. And one of the times the repair guy came while we were not home and didn’t leave any kind of notice or anything that he had even been there! That is illegal! When I noticed that there were different parts in the bathroom and called the leasing company about it their response was something like «oh yeah we’ve been having that problem with those guys». This company makes you resign a new lease almost SIX MONTHS before the expiration of your current lease because if you don’t resign they want to put it on the market during the «hot season» when all the students are looking for housing, which means that if you don’t sign a new lease they will be showing your house to people for almost half of your lease term. Oh, and they will not call or set up appointments with you– they just come whenever. After we moved out we waited almost 3 months for our reimbursement check and when it finally came, boy were we shocked! They refunded less than $ 300 of over $ 1300 in deposits! They charged us for cleaning, even though we cleaned according to their move-​out instructions. They charged us for «trash removal» to discard items in the shed that were there when we moved in. We didn’t realize that we were supposed to write down things like shovels and rakes on our inventory sheet when we moved in. They charged us $ 250 for wall repair and paint even though our inventory sheet clearly states that every single wall in the house was scuffed, scratched, and dirty when we moved in. They claim that because one of our dry erase boards «damaged» the wall that we were reponsible even though the walls were already damaged when we moved in. They charged us for a missing bathtub stopper that was never present, removal of vines on the outdoor windows that were there when we moved in, and a whole host of other things that were not our fault. After having an attorney contact them and sending them the little proof that we did have, they reimbursed us a very small additional amount (like $ 25). Our lawyer says we could go to court and fight a few of the items if we wanted– like the paint and maybe the vines– but when it was all said and done the time it would take probably wouldn’t be worth it.
These people prey on low-​income families and students and have absolutely no motivation to treat people fairly because they know every year they will get a new batch of students moving into town so reputation doesn’t matter. They will be very helpful right up until the point when you sign your lease. DO NOT TRUST THEM!