Alden at Cedar Park — Attraction in Cedar Park

The apartment is very nice and I had no problems living there in the year and a half I lived there. Reasons I didnt give it a 5 were a few things, most of which is out of the Alden's control.

Location: the Alden is in Cedar Park, about 20-25 minutes from downtown Austin depending on traffic. What's nice is that it is next to 183 but 183 is a toll road in that area. I tried avoiding the toll road the first few months I was there but it became too time consuming as I was driving more and more into Austin( avoiding tolls added an extra 10 minute drive time). I am a single guy in my 20s. Most of what I do was in north Austin or downtown austin. Even though for me the drive wasnt too bad, doing it everday became annoying. The place is close to alot of restaurants and shops which is nice and convenient but Cedar Park is a suburb and if you are young and single and looking to experience more of austin, I would just recommend living closer to austin and coughing up the extra hundred dollars a month for a less luxurious place. Youd save much more in gas, tolls and time. Also most of the community are either retired folks, young families or couples looking to start a family. Cedar Park has a few nice places for young people to hangout but I found myself going more to North Austin and Downtown Austin.

Parking: this was somewhat a problem for me. I had a few close calls driving inside the garage. You really have to slow down before turning and make sure no one is coming as the turns are huge blind spots and some people just drive a little too fast for a garage. Also the garage is a free for all unless you paid extra for a reserved spot. If I got home after 8 pm, then 70% of the time I had to park in a different floor than my apartment. Before Srping of 2023, the alden didnt require cars to have permits to park in the garage. They started requiring it, Im not sure why but my theory was for the freeze in winter of 2022-23 I think many residents let their friends park in the garage which screwed over other residents. I had never seen the garage that packed and I parked all the way in the back of the 4th floor. The 4th floor garage is the only floor without a ceiling and my car froze. The worst part of parking was guest parking. They required guests to give license plate details for guest passes. Even if it was for a short time. There was no street parking near the alden, and the garage was on one corner of the building so if you had a guest park and you lived on the other side of the building you either had to drive to pick them up (which I did a few times) or walk to them because inside the building is a maze. I stopped hosting people because many of my friends thought it was too much of a hassle to visit me.

Keys: the building is very secure, and safe which is nice. But it is too dependent on the key fob. If you lose that thing outside of office open hours then good luck getting in. One time I lost my key fob and didnt realize until I got to the apartment at 10 pm. I basically had to wait 30 minutes for another car to drive in and follow that car in. Even once you are inside the garage you still need to scan your key fob to get through the door. Someone left one of the doors ajar that night so I got lucky.

Room space: I lived in a 1 bedroom apartment so I cant speak for every apartment but my own. My apartment was spacious (like 720 sq ft). But the way the rooms were setup was weird and caused the apartment to look much smaller than it was. My aparment had an island, but the island took too much space and made it harder to setup the living room. The kitchen also took alot of space. The bathroom only connected with the bedroom so if one of my guets had to use the bathroom they had to walk through my room and had access to my closet. The closet only connected to the bathroom. It did not feel like I could host more than 3 people at once. My new place is only 20 sq ft more than this apartment and it feels much more bigger.

THese were the bigget things for me: other than this the Alden was great. It was...

PLEASE READ BEFORE SIGNING

Disclaimer summary: if you are looking for a clean, peaceful residence, this is not the place for you. The complex itself is very poorly built. No exaggeration, you can hear every little footstep your neighbors make. The walls and flooring are too thin, and with no carpeting except for the bedrooms and closet, every footstep reverberates through the room and floor. Go check out the videos of the Alden to see what I mean. The management cannot and will not do anything to remedy the situation. We cannot break the lease or move apartments without paying a substantial amount out of pocket.

Background: My partner and I moved into The Alden early December of 2021. On the surface, The Alden was appealing: spacious layouts, laminate flooring, generous amenities, and a signing discount for a 15 month lease. It seemed like an oasis within the hellscape that the greater Austin housing market has become. That’s about where the pros stop.

The day we moved in, I noticed the inordinate amount of noise coming from upstairs neighbors, so much so that my grandmother even commented to me about it- and she’s deaf in one ear! Of course, living in an apartment setting, you should expect to hear neighbors from time to time. But this was no ordinary amount of noise. Footsteps that sounded like boots stomping above us day and night, keeping us awake even over the sound of our fan, noise machine and air purifier going full blast. Because of their odd schedule, the stomping could often be heard late into the night and early before sunrise, sometimes waking us up between 1-2 am. Nothing but earplugs tightly jammed in our ears could remedy the situation.

So we reached out to management, multiple times. We also wrote a cordial note to the upstairs neighbors explaining the situation, giving them the benefit of the doubt that they don’t know how thin the floors are given that they live on the top floor. No matter. We even tried speaking to the neighbors about it in person and were met with hostility. Nothing we did helped the situation in any permanent way, and management met us with cold indifference.

They simply said because the neighbors weren’t partying or being vindictive, they had no authority to handle the situation. We get it. People need to be able to walk freely in their apartment. But we also deserve to sleep.

Finally, after a couple nights of interrupted sleep, we went to the office again, requesting any other options- to either move us to a 4th floor apartment or let us break our lease without incurring the penalty. The options they presented to us simply weren’t viable, given that we would need to cough up at least $1,100 in fees to terminate or sign a brand new lease at an increase of 7% of what we originally signed for. Given some unexpected expenses that came up recently, both options simply weren’t viable.

Furthermore, under the new management in recent months, the cleanliness of the property has been in steep decline. The communal areas and offices are kept tidy, but the hallways and floors are often disgusting. They are not cleaned on a regular basis, and dog piss and dark stains can regularly be found on the floor. Management will bombard your inbox with emails nearly every day, but will rarely respond to your email complaints unless you follow up in person.

If you like taking a bath, you are SOL here. The bathrooms only have showers, and you must have a squeegee on hand lest you develop shower mold.

All this to say, I am deeply disappointed with The Alden and management. I would not sign here again even if they gave us a discount. Please understand that every response from management under the poor reviews in the last few months have been poor attempts to save face publicly. No real change has occurred here. Let it be known, The Alden and Avenue5 Management do not care about customer service, only their...

We were so unhappy with this community that we actually packed up our two-bedroom apartment with a toddler and two dogs in tow, to move to another apartment 9 minutes down the road.

Why? Unbelievable amounts of dog feces surrounding the property. Multiple break-ins to the mailroom Failure to fix security locks in a timely manner on exterior doors so anyone can get into the building Neighbors that let their dog roam the halls to go to the bathroom INSIDE or try to run inside your apartment No actual courtesy officer to answer the phone when your neighbors and their dogs are keeping you up at 1AM. When we went to the office the next day to complain, they told us we should've called the office...which is what we did. It goes straight to VM when it's called after hours. Apartments being rented out through AirBnB with travelers who could care less about the quiet hours No set timeframes for drop-ins from maintenance/techs. They just tell you a date that they are coming...and half the time never show When you speak up about the stairwells and carpets being filthy, they'll appease you by saying it's being worked on. The stairs were cleaned a month later. The carpets were never vacuumed or professionally cleaned on my floor, even though they sent a notice to residents with a date that it was going to happen. Trash rooms filled with so much garbage you can't open the door. Residents that repeatedly leave their full garbage cans on the carpeted halls for days over the weekend when the valet trash service doesn't come. A clubhouse that you can't even access when people are typically home after work and on the weekends. Random blackouts to sections of the building, and when you go to notify the office, they already know and haven't bothered to send an email to tell residents they are working on it. A parking garage that you can't park in because it's slowly becoming all "paid"/"reserved parking". A pool that will be surrounded by cans and garbage from the residents the day before.

Before someone from the office tries to comment and say they are "disappointed to hear about my experience"...just don't.

They didn't really care when I was living there and sharing concerns, and now that I've moved out there's nothing they can do to change it. However, I can make a point to help out someone else from making the same mistake as us.

I've rented from 7 different places over the years. This was the most expensive, and my least favorite. I also moved in before the housing market went crazy, so the price I paid wasn't even indicative of that. The finishes of the apartment are fantastic...but the poorly run and maintained community made it completely not worth it.

Update: Adding proof of The Alden acknowledging on their Social Media the power loss that occurred not during the Winter Storm which was in...