Penrose Square Apartments — Attraction in Arlington

Written at 4am on a Saturday.

If you have a baby, or a dog or you generally expect any kind of peace in your life, I strongly recommend you avoid Penrose apartments. When we moved in here almost two years ago we heard about all the issues with the main one being fire alarms and we ignored all of them. Now, we are regretting not just moving in here but also being dumb enough to sign a second lease at Penrose Square.

First m, we had a dog for the first year of living here and the number of times we had to jump out of our beds to a blasting sound of a fire alarm just to go outside and see the firefighters walk around for 30 minutes to an hour just to disable the alarms once again. I’m not even going to talk about the stress that this does to animals and people, as these alarms happen EXCLUSIVELY in the middle of the night.

But now, we have a newborn baby and I was wandering how long it’s going to take before she gets to experience the fake middle of the night fire alarms at Penrose Square. The answer is 17 days. That is how long it took for another hour long 3am fire alarm. Mind you, the residents don’t even go out of the building anymore, we just hide in our bathrooms with ear plugs and ear muffs, so one time when we end up having an actual emergency, we will all just burn to the ground I guess.

They have also done everything they can to shift the blame to others - Giant store downstairs, other residents… I honestly don’t even care anymore whether they can control this or not - bottom line is this is not a good place to live. I can’t go to bed anymore without being scared of the possibility that we will be woken up by a fire alarm at 3 or 4 in the morning. I repeat, if you have babies, pets or generally expect any kind of peace at night, you should not rent here.

The leasing office people have generally been nice to us, so there’s that. But none of that matters if we have to deal with this insanity every month. Also, it’s a bare minimum for the rent we pay.

There’s other things too: elevators break often, so you are forced to use the ones that are far away. Appliances break all the time. At least the maintenance is fairly good at responding quickly. They also love to make unnecessary changes line installing fobs on our doors like it matters whether we unlock the doors with keys or fobs? They made a big deal out of the renovations they did on the club house, but they also charge their long term residents $150 an hour to book these rooms, for what is free at many other apartment buildings.

Also, don’t forget that they added a charge on our rent when we resigned the lease and made us report our rent payments to the 3rd party to “improve our credit score”. We never asked for that. We had to cancel it ourselves.

They also bumped up the parking charge even though the garage has more than enough empty spaces and also you can pretty much park for free as they don’t tow or regulate the parking anyway.

Do not rent here.

Edit: Had a meeting with Ryane, the community manager. I greatly appreciated her initiative to sit down and talk to me personally and for that she has a lot of respect from me. This does not unfortunately change my opinion on the building itself as at the end of the day, dealing with 4 fake fire alarms this year alone is not acceptable in any way. And while I do understand that certain things are out of control, my bottom line still is that an issue like this is a deal breaker for me and my family. I bumped up my review by one star, solely because of her initiative and the fact that she obviously cares about the people...

I was a resident in Penrose Square from Dec 2019 - Feb 2024.

The Good: Location is great and not too far away from DC. One of the leasing agents (Tomma) and a few of the receptionists were pretty pleasant to deal with. Maintenance quickly addressed any concerns

The Bad: I had more than a few unpleasant conversations with the leasing staff (Ryane the Community Manager and Mike). They often generally seemed annoyed and uninterested when interacting with them. I had an ongoing noise issue for which the staff claimed they could not figure out where the noise was coming from. It went on for months before they finally offered to just move me into another unit, which was a good solution, but still extremely inconvenient to deal with the noise for that long and to have to pack up everything in my unit and move to another one. After I got into my new apartment, they decided to install a new parking system in the garage. My apartment happened to be directly above the garage entrance. Noise issues arose again when the parking system apparently malfunctioned and let out a very loud beeping noise/alarm all throughout the night for several nights. It eventually got resolved but still a very inconvenient situation to have to deal with. Fire alarms randomly go off, mostly really late/early (2-4am) The last issue is reason I’m writing this review a year later. I am in the process of moving again and I have to apply for the unit that I want. Shortly after I moved from Penrose, I started to get collection notices from Penrose when I had already paid everything that was owed. After some back and forth with the Community Manager Ryane, she confirmed that my balance was zero and that the collection notice was an error. To my surprise, after my application was ran last week for the new apartment I wanted, there was a $60 collection on my profile from Penrose and my application was denied. I have called and left 2 messages with the receptionist for Ryane to call me back. She has responded to emails but not once has she called me back nor apologized for the issue that was either caused by her or someone/something on their end. I am now stuck in a back and forth between Ryane and the collection agency who refuses to clear my record until they receive notice from Penrose that it was an error. I am unable to rent anywhere decent with this false record in my history. It takes 30 days to clear something from your credit history so whenever this issue officially gets resolved, I then have to wait 30 days before I can...

UPDATE: Management reached out to me, and actually came and inspected my apartment. They cut the wall and checked the insulation. Unfortunately, I don't believe they could do much more. But they did go the extra mile to try to make my stay enjoyable. So I have to give them credits for that.

OLD POST: Do not move here if you value your sleep or privacy. I have been living here for a few months now, and it saddens me that I have to write this review about this complex. The management and the staff are really pleasant to work with, but the issues facing this building are systemic, and I don't think that they can be solved or fixed.

Let us talk about noise transfer, and the thin walls. The walls in this complex are paper thin. I can hear my neighbors having casual conversations from their own apartment. My neighbors are not particularly loud or anything, the walls are just super thin. I can hear them laughing, talking watching TV, getting freaky, having regular conversations and so on. I can even hear my neighbor's cell phone ring and their alarm clocks. And it is from all directions. I can also hear the people walking the halls as they talk extra loudly. It feels like they are in my apartment living with me. And if I can hear them that well, I bet they can also hear all the conversations I have all the time. It is just a constant stream of muffled sound in my apartment. This can't be the norm! I have never experienced anything so bad, even at bad cheap hotels. I would understand if there was some noise coming from my neighbors, but it is absolutely ridiculous that I can hear every conversation they have.

My upstairs neighbors are those who I can hear the best. Every step they make transfers to my apartment. I can hear them opening doors, turning on the sink water, flushing their toilets and so on.

The rainwater pipes outside my apartment are also for some reason an issue. Whenever it rains, it feels like someone is beating on a steel plank over and over. Good luck falling asleep with that noise.

And I am sure you guys already read about the fire alarms. There was a false one yesterday due to some technical issue.

It is a shame really. This place would have been perfect had they invested a bit more in soundproofing as they were building...