Shadowood Apartments

As far as apartment complexes in Chapel Hill go, this one is great for five reasons:
1. Cheap rent (My roommate and I pay 950 total, one-​bedrooms go for around 750 – 800)
2. Pets allowed
3. Great amenities (nice pool, awesome gym, tennis courts, volleyball, clubhouse, dog park in the works)
4. Great front-​desk staff and maintenance for the most part. Always willing to help and very efficient in response time.
5. Online system for rent payments.
There are a few negative aspects to Shadowood, however. First of all, I have a two-​bedroom apartment with no windows in the living room. It is always dark and I do not like spending time in this area of my apartment. However, I think that we just got unlucky. I think you can try to get an apartment that has more windows if you make this a known requirement. Also, once a fire started in my oven and the maintenance man was sort of rude to me. He told me to call 911 and essentially to leave him alone. It turns out that if a fire is sequestered in a closed oven, it will eventually go out on its own. Otherwise, though, I have had great experiences with maintenance visits.
In conclusion, pretty quiet (good for grad students) and safe place to live with cheap rent.

Personally, I haven’t had a horrible experience at Shadowood. The community is pretty quiet at times considering you have less undergraduates living at the complex. I’ve lived at Shadowood for about 2 years and I can’t say that the management is bad, but I do feel they can be pretty neglectful.
There has been instances where my roommate or I called maintenance and they didn’t respond or they lost our request. For instance, this summer our AC broke and we put in the request the day it broke. The following day, we called to double check about when they were going to fix it and we found out they never got our request. My roommate went into that office to day before and talked to someone that worked there and they somehow didn’t get our request.
Also this summer, we had a hornet’s nest forming in front of our front door. My roommate and I were pretty freaked out considering we don’t want to get stung trying to enter or leave our apartment. When we called the front office that day, they told us they would come the following day or the day after because it wasn’t an «emergency.»
Although maybe not a ‘direct’ office issue, there was a personal instance this summer when I walked to the bus stop in the morning to find out that the bus stop was closed. Since the bus stop was closed, I had to walk from the bus stop across from Shadowood to another bus stop down the street pass Estes. It would have been very convenient if the front office would have let residents know that the only bus stop to campus was closed that morning.
Other than those experiences with the front office, I’ve had an alright overall experience. It seems that the rent is currently going to go up, so it isn’t as affordable as I would like considering how far the apartment is from campus. In terms of amenities and the apartments overall, some are up to date and refurbished while other aren’t. I’ve seen some of the newly refurbished apartments and the cabinets seem to have bad paint jobs.

I was excited to be moving across the country and starting grad school. I eventually stumbled upon Shadowood when I started my apartment search. Based on the website, I was impressed and was fairly set on this place early on. But I wasn’t going to jump blindly into this and sought out more info…
That’s when the trouble started.
I called a couple times in late April about the availabilities of the unit I was looking for, but was given vague answers or told someone will call me back. They never called or email me back even after 5 attempts in the span of a couple weeks.
I never really had an apartment management team give less of a f*ck about a potential renter. This isn’t San Francisco…
After a month, I was able get enough info (I actually got some of the info from my grad program) for me to go ahead with this place. Some guy I talked to said there were a couple units left and I’ll be fine if I turn in my check by the end of the following week.
Well, the following Monday I was literally at the post office to drop my check when I decided to call to make sure there’s units left. And of course, the guy wasn’t sure and told me he’ll call me back. He didn’t and so I followed up with email with no response.
When i called the next day he told me there’s nothing left and pretty much that I’m shit out of luck. Great!
If they were more on this and acted like a real business, this wouldn’t have happened.