Fairfax Square Apartments

Not horrible… room for improvement though. The parking situation sucks as there is no assigned spots unless you rent one of the townhouses which can make it very hard to park when you come home late at night. Maintenance is fairly quick I’ve never had to call more than once and they always fix the problem. The pool is only 3 and a half feet deep so it’s crawling with children and their mothers. The rooms are spacious enough though some of the plumbing stuff is obviously old. I love that they included a washer dryer and dishwasher.

This place is okay but not the best living experience I’ve had. The surrounding neighborhood is pretty safe, and the rent price is decent. The one-​bedroom unit offers plenty of space relative to what you typically get in DC. There is a strip mall within walking distance containing a Dunkin Donuts, various restaurants, a 7 – 11, a Goodwill store, a yoga studio, and a gas station. It is also about a mile away from Old Town Fairfax. Parking is free but not reserved. They have a good size pool that is open during the summer, and this is connected to a small gym. Now to the negatives…
The barrier that connects the second floor to the first floor ceiling doesn’t help with sounds coming from a neighbor that has the speakers on blast to dance music and video games late at night. As for the management staff, I get the impression that they only pay attention to you right before you sign a lease with them (in other words, new customers and not existing renters). I had requested to be added to a lease (no additional revenue coming it for this apartment), and the person who was tasked with handling the paperwork totally forgot about it. We had to followed up with him two weeks later to get my keys. Also, it took their repair guy one week to show up and fix an issue with our toilet; he finally decided to make an appearance right when we were in the middle of moving out of the apartment.

I lived here for 4 years. The fitness center was decent. That’s all I can say.
My apartment, on the ground floor, flooded multiple times due to poor outside drainage. They did ZERO to fix it. I had to duct tape piles of towels around my patio door if it was supposed to rain while I was at work, because I never knew when it would flood.
When they finally decided my carpet needed to be replaced after multiple floods, they gave me no notice. I came home to find the patio door wide open, my cat nowhere to be found, and all of my belongings piled in the bathroom. Clean clothes thrown into the wet shower. Books haphazardly piled in the kitchen. It was… so amazing… I was shrieking at the office employees while people were there to take tours, and they wanted me to calm down. I said FIND MY INDOOR ONLY CAT AND PUT MY APARTMENT BACK TOGETHER. They did neither. The cat was finally discovered behind a pile of books and shelving. I don’t know if he hid there or got trapped there, but he was traumatized.
This was typical of most everything that happened when you needed maintenance. My oven never worked right, but they told me they’d have to raise my rent to replace it with a newer model.
When I gave my written notice not to renew my lease, they «lost» it, made me submit it again, blamed an employee who magically no longer worked there, then charged me extra rent as they dated it from the second submission.
Horrible, horrible, horrible. They can lure you in with a flashy clubhouse and a nice model apartment, but they do absolutely nothing for you after the fact.
I hope the people in my old apartment have fixed the drainage problem; I’m certain that management wouldn’t do it on their own.

I have lived at Fairfax Square for over a year. It is aesthetically charming and has good amenities, but god forbid you ever have an issue. When looking into moving there, the office staff were friendly, welcoming and helpful. Once that lease is signed you are merely an annoyance. The online rent paying system is absolutely horrendous. I have talked to the leasing office about online pay issues and they gave me a number for IT, when I called it it went straight back to the leasing office, where I ended up talking to the same people I talked to in the first place. I notified them of this and the reaction was kid of like «oh…hm…» and nothing has been changed. I’m not sure if the issue is a lack of caring or lack of training, but there is so much room for improvement.

I visited this apartment and spoke to couple of leasing agents and each one gave me different rent, deposit and moving specials. I got suspicious and after speaking to the Manager Asma Mahmud and Asst. Property Manager Sheila Ehsan I realized that I was dealing with unprofessional and misleading management. I will report them to local agencies.

I have lived in Fairfax Square apartments for over three years now, and I am glad to be out of there for good. I have lived in apartments and army barracks for over 12 years and I can easily say that Fairfax Square is the least professional, most incompetent, and least customer service oriented place I have ever lived in. The owner (or at least senior guy there with Van Metre in his name) is obviously a cheap bastard. He has established a system of mis-​management that systematically overcharges and underachieves in order to maximize profit potential. One of the only reasons one might want to stay in an apartment in the first place is because it is usually cheaper than buying and you don’t have to worry about maintenance, but at Van Metre properties neither of those points are valid. During my three years there, I had multiple problems with the shoddy plumbing and the air conditioner. Every time I had a problem (in three and a half years I had about a dozen incidents) it took over 5 phone calls and three weeks to fix. Every summer my AC went out and they took weeks every time to fix it. I had a shower that I couldn’t use for over a year because I got sick of calling in (I called about seven times) and asking them to come and fix it — luckily I had a second shower. And on top of that, they are easily one of the highest priced apartments to live at in all of D.C. So I bought a house for $ 400,000 dollars and now my monthly mortgage is actually less than what my rent was. I tend to think that $ 2200 a month for a 50 year old 1400sq ft. townhouse with no garage, leaky pipes, and intermittent heat/​AC with only self-​maintenance to rely on is a bit steep, but hey, maybe that’s what someone is looking for.
Some specific problems I had while living there that were not handled professionally or in a timely manner were;
–Leaky bathtub which leaked though the ceiling and onto my computer — took three weeks and five calls to get someone from maintenance over to fix it
— Fairfax Sq. has an agreement with a local towing company which allows the towing company to come tow anybody at its discretion if not in compliance with either local ordinance or Fairfax Sq rules. That resulted in the accidental towing of my vehicle while I was on vacation where I ended up paying $ 700 to get my car back. Fairfax Sq. (specifically Mr. Tom Van Metre) refused to refund me the money saying that I would have to take it up with the towing company — even though it was their agreement that allowed them to do it in the first place
— Twice they were too incompetent to be able to rewrite my lease in time and they then tried to place the blame on me (and charge me the fees of course) even though I had called and spoke to the office a full month in advance to renew the lease
— There are also not enough parking spaces and they have tried to make up for that by creating compact size parking spaces which has resulted in my doors being banged up and dented.
The list of problems I had are way too many to list here as there’s only a 4000 character max and not a single one of which was handled properly. Bottom line is that the Fairfax Sq. apartments are so old, run down, over priced and the management is so incompetent that it borders on criminal (in any state besides communist commonwealth Virginia it probably would be criminal). I would go out of my way to discourage anyone I knew and didn’t loathe from moving in any Van Metre run establishment. There is just really no good reason to go there at all.