Naked Apartments

I’ve lived with Naked Apartments (Dean St) since 2011. I fell in love with my renovated attic more or less sight unseen. I saw the beautiful, updated finishings in the apartment below and the framework of my apartment and was ready to go. Their natural wood, contemporary design and special additions like heated bathroom floors, full sized washer/​dryer and river rock showers have made my attic apartment so lush. After 4 years I finally decided to move mainly because I was outgrowing the space and Wicker Park is becoming to expensive to live.
Terry and Kate are very quick to respond to issues within the apartment and his team of repairmen are great.
What really amazes me is how great they’ve been to me once I decided to move out. They were courteous to my living schedule with showings (although it maybe took 2 showings to rent the place) and have been prompt to respond and very helpful, providing detailed lists of items to do to help me get my security deposit back.
Go with Naked Apartments!

I’ve been a tenant in the Feather Loft building that Naked Apartments owns and rents out studio spaces to artists, artisans, designers, writers, etc. since 2006. I’ve been consistently happy with the way the place is run. Compared to similar artist studio buildings in the city that I or other friends have rented space in, this building is so much more secure and the spaces in it are completely private. Terry and crew do a great job of maintaining the building. If anything breaks or there is any kind of problem, the crew takes care of it in a timely fashion. They’ve also done a good job of updating the floors, ceiling fixtures, etc. in the building over the years.

Terry is an awesome landlord and his assistant Kate handle things with brutal efficiency considering their vast rental empire. It’s kind of awesome that even with many buildings to manage, the owner is still reachable and personally handles some things. With most rental companies, you get third rate flunky subcontractors to take care of maintenance issues.
Terry has his own crew who does maintenance and ** upgrades ** on a regular basis. Upgrades like new granite counter tops, heated marble floors and stainless appliances. This alone makes him a unicorn in the land of rental companies.
In one instance, my air conditioning went out several summers ago during July when it was 95+ for a week in a row. I wasn’t looking forward to toughing it out while waiting for a repair guy to come. Trying to get any A/​C repair guy to come out would take near forever considering the A/​C repair guys were booked for weeks. Terry had it repaired within 12 hours. Quite amazing.
He is also a gangster when it comes to removing bad neighbors. Five upstarts in a cookie monster metal band moved in next door to me. Being large spaces with 13′ ceilings, they turned their apartment into a rehearsal space for their band with a singer who sounded like cookie monster with his genitals trapped in a vice. Terry got rid of them immediately and has since been much more discerning of his potential tenants.
In another review, I saw someone mention the ‘alley is a mess’. Newsflash if you just moved here from Iowa: every alley in the city of Chicago is a dive bar with latrine for homeless dudes. Among alleys, the alley on my end of the block is by far the nicest. In fact, it might win the Least Ghetto Ass Alley Award in all of the city considering we have excess trash collection capacity thanks of the buildings own dumpster, in addition to the city provided trash cans.

I’ve been a resident of naked apartments for over a year and have nothing but the nicest compliments. Always assessable and accommodating with easy to pay rent. Very happy and renewing my lease!

I have been living in my current apartment for almost three years. This apartment feels like home. Since I have lived in this building, it has gotten a new roof, I have had my bathroom renovated with the addition of a washer and dryer that I didn’t have before, and they added a balcony to the front of the building.
Apartment living is never perfect because you are renting from someone else and there are a lot of things that are out of your control. Your apartment will only be as clean as you keep it. Terry is admittedly spacey sometimes, but as long as you follow up with him he gets stuff done.

Only reason this isn’t a 5-​star review, is because that’s just impractical (show me a 5-​star review for any apartment rental company!) I’m guessing it would feel implausible to potential tenants anyway :)
I’ve lived at one Naked Apartments property for two years, and just signed a lease to move to another one, this upcoming summer! To an earlier reviewer’s point: issues happen, and the important thing is how it’s dealt with.
The negative reviews appear to be divided into three separate buckets, so I’ll speak to those specifically:
1. Fees/​administrative issues
That’s just par the course. I don’t know any property management that doesn’t have application fees, and the neighborhoods where Naked specialize (Bucktown/​Wicker Park/​Ukrainian Village) are incredibly competitive markets. For what it’s worth: when I decided to move from my current place to another one of theirs: there were no fees, and they transferred the security deposit (only making me pay the difference) – couldn’t be smoother!
2. Cleanliness
I, too, had issues, upon move-​in, where the previous tenant did not leave the apartment spotless upon his move-​out. Unfortunately, with leases that end at the close of the month/​start on the 1^st – it’s sometimes impractical to get into every crevice for the next person (I know I’m struggling with how to do this for my upcoming move). Terry IMMEDIATELY arranged to have a cleaner come in, and paid to have the entire place – inside AND out – scrubbed. All while my belongings were still in boxes, so it all evened out for me.
3. Repairs
I couldn’t disagree more with the experiences shown below. When I had an issue with my outside drain clogging, creating a small flood outside my front door, it was fixed before I came home from work that day. When a problem arose with my dryer, it was again gone to be repaired by the time I got home from work that day. It was returned, working, within 2 – 3 days. Just a few weeks ago, I woke up to realize my heat wasn’t working, and the sentence wasn’t even out of my mouth before Terry was on the phone to his heating guy (s). They were there, and it was fixed, within 2 hours!
No apartment (especially in climate-​diverse Chicago) is perfect, but I’ve been perfectly happy with Naked! When faced with the decision of where to go for a slightly bigger and brighter place, I actively chose to stay with them, due to the respect and priority they’ve given me, as an existing tenant.

So far, Terry has been a great landlord! We have been living with him for almost a year.
Our unit is great! It hasn’t been without its issues (because that just doesn’t happen), but Terry has been quick to fix anything we have had trouble with. Our dryer was ripping small holes in our clothes and Terry had it fixed the NEXT DAY.
Barring a total shift in the dynamic, we will likely renew our lease an additional year.

I honestly think one star is too much for this experience — I was a tenant at another building run by the same landlord Terry Zeman and his wife. I didn’t have heating system as there was something wrong with it in the midst of the Chicago winter. Although I followed up many times, it took them a good 2 months to get it fixed. The wires are all hanging out of plugs in the space so there is a extreme fire hazard in these spaces. They are rude, unprofessional and the only thing they are good as it to take your money. Do yourselves a favor and do not rent any space that is run by them.

Do yourself a favor and DO NOT by any circumstance live in any of Terry’s apartments. They look fantastic at first glance, but you will run into issue after issue after issue. When my husband and I first moved in, we had to spend literally 24 hours trying to clean every single inch of the apartment, because none of them are move in ready. Terry doesn’t require any of his previous tenants to clean after they leave, meaning the next set of tenants can walk into a disaster of a unit. There was mold in the fridge, in the toilets, in the showers, it was filthy. Our unit had absolutely no insulation. We could hear a pin drop from our upstairs neighbors, our next door neighbors and the people living below us. I didn’t realize what quiet sounded like until we moved into our new apartment in May. We also had several issues with leaks. Terry rarely cleaned the gutters and three times, our apartment leaked, even when it wasn’t raining that badly. The brick was falling apart everywhere in our unit and we’d have to clean up molding and decaying brick at least once a week. Terry on more than one occasion would just magically show up to our unit, one time, when my husband was in his underwear trying to get ready for work. The windows would never shut correctly and any sort of vibration from above or below would cause the windows to open in the middle of the night. When Terry installed these windows in our unit, he didn’t even let us know they were coming. The entire crew was there when we got home. Not to mention, the crew didn’t even clean up after themselves and there was saw dust, paint fumes lingering in our apartment for days. God I could literally go on and on. Every time there was a problem in the unit, he’d say «put it in the portal» which is supposed to be where maintenance requests go to be assigned to his «crew», but at this point I’m pretty sure its just a spam folder, because it would take months to fix a door handle. When they would fix units, a dude named Pancho, would come to the unit and mostly just apply duct tape or gum and a paperclip to fix anything — I don’t think he actually knew what he was doing. Oh and the most dangerous thing of all. Our dryer vent was venting out into another pipe in out unit and not directly outside — which was not up to code and actually could have killed us (toxic fumes) and could have blown up the apartment, actually. A People’s Gas tech came in to check on our gas line and noticed it, so I’m not making this up, this was a legit concern. Also, this guy has failed MULTIPLE building inspections, that its almost a joke. Type in any of his residents from his website into this portal and you can actually see how many violations each building has received in the past. Literally this entire organization is a joke. Do not live here. My husband and I had a countdown of when we could leave this god awful place and we even paid people extra to move in to our new unit earlier so that we could get the eff out of Terry’s hell hole.

If I could give Terry Zeman 0 stars I would. It was very stressful year living in our unit and my husband and I could not wait to get out. His places are huge, and cheap — and you get what you pay for. The entire building itself was just never maintained very well. The mail and package room locks never worked. You just had to push hard on the door and it would open and people could get into your mail and your packages. Our door to our unit was probably broken for a good 2 – 3 weeks, after putting in a request through the maintenance system every day for two weeks from the 3 units on our side of the building. Literally anyone could have just walked into our foyer area because the door would not lock. The walls are also very thin, so unless you had about 3 fans in your room to try to sleep while the people upstairs are throwing a party, you’re out of luck. My closet door never got fixed and the trash in the alley would get unbearable at times Because there were so few trash bins. We had ant problems as well, probably related to the amount of garbage that was all over the place in the alley. Terry was just very unreliable and unresponsive and it’s not worth it to be constantly worried about where you live all the time. We were thrilled when we left the apartment.
I can pretty much guarantee he was the worst landlord I’ve ever had to deal with in chicago.

Awful communication, ridiculously unprofessional. Not interested at all in keep appointment times and has no interest in actually showing you his apartments. Terry Zeman is possibly the rudest landlord/​whatever I’ve ever dealt with. No-​showed to two apartment appointments with no communication at all. As potential renters willing to shell out a fair bit in rent, we were totally treated as a disposable inconvenience. Stay away.

Horrible communication — renters beware!
The apartments that this company manage look great according to their website. Unfortunately I never got to see one of the units.
Despite having an appointment, I showed up and waited at a unit. It wasn’t until 2 HOURS LATER and I was long gone that I finally received an e-​mail that the showing was cancelled. Well, obviously it was cancelled, but good try trying to make it seem like you notified me.
We rescheduled for the next day and I was very clear that I was mad about their earlier no-​show and I expected better. Well, of course, the next day as I’m pulling up to see the unit, I get a phone call that they can’t show it that day. What, you couldn’t have called me an hour ago?
They offered to show a different unit in a completely different building, but I said no. First of all, why would I want to see a different building? Second of all, you already managed to mess up twice. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I’ve had crappy landlords before, I don’t need another.