Waterfront Place Apartments — Attraction in Everett

I moved out in March after living here just shy of two years, so here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly (let’s be honest, there is no ugly…it’s too beautiful!). Long story short - No place is perfect, but I would 100% still live here if I didn’t have to move across the country. I lived in the south building (The Carling), so some things may be different from the north. The biggest difference is that most of the amenities and resident events are in the north building. While I enjoyed the quiet of the south building, some people might feel out of the loop or neglected and prefer the north.

The Good: Obviously the views! This place has the market cornered right now if you want to be ON the Waterfront. The rooftop views are unbeatable, and the views from the second floor lounge are beautiful if you don’t want to sit outside when the weather’s bad. Even my South facing unit faced the Grand Ave bridge, south piers, and a little peek of the Cascades in the back when skies were clear. The Waterfront Place area just keeps getting better. Still love my OGs Seas the Day and Lombardi’s, but I was happy to also get The Muse and South Fork in my list of walkable spots. Being able to walk out the front door and take a waterfront stroll…such an amazing thing (especially when it’s lit up for winter). The Waterfront area is very quiet and safe. There are a fair number of resident events, like Cookie Fridays, monthly birthday celebrations, and seasonal parties. The pride that goes into the upkeep of the building is phenomenal. From the daily grind of dealing with the dumpsters and trash room to frequently touching up the paint, the maintenance guys are the true heroes of this place. This is also a great group of residents overall, definitely the best out of the last three buildings I lived in. People are generally courteous about the fact that dozens of people are living in close proximity to each other.

The Bad: They went cheap on the finishings, which is especially annoying given how much you pay in rent and all the little extra charges. The first floor has nice fabric top-down shades, but every other floor has the cheapest, thinnest aluminum blinds I have ever seen. The carpet wasn’t installed right and kind of waves across the floor. While I found the noise from other units to be minimal, the entry door does next to nothing to block noise from the hallway (thankfully most people are fairly quiet as mentioned before, but the one-offs can sound quite loud). Communication is very inconsistent; I would get reminder emails that I never got the original email for. No email for one problem or outage, but five reminders for another. They also charge (or used to) a $200 “Admin Fee” to process your paperwork when you move in. That’s literally the function of a management company, and I didn’t see that fee listed at any other place I looked at in the downtown Everett area.

I don’t think I ever submitted a maintenance ticket, so I can’t speak to that. A lot of the problems in previous reviews are from when the building first opened (at least in my experience). I was like the fourth person to move in when the south building opened and the hot water did take FOREVER when there were no other people living there, but that is no longer the case now that the building is full. You couldn’t enter through the water side doors for like the first year, but that has been fixed for a long time now. And yes the original package service and transition to Amazon lockers was abysmal, but that is also over a year in the past.

In the end, location was the most important thing to me and I was very happy with my choice to live here. Being able to ride my bike or walk to the Navy base past the traffic of eight ships in port was worth the trade off of any negatives. I also loved my home and the time I spent in it. Listing the attributes I perceived as “bad” isn’t meant to dissuade anyone from moving here…just trying to give a balanced assessment. Thank you for coming to...

In short, apartments are made very cheaply, there is poor communication at move out, and even if someone in one of their apartments threatens you and a manager hears it, they will say there is nothing they can do.

The apartment: Drawers barely open and are barely usable. If you cook a lot or bake, this will be a tough place for you. For what you pay, you should expect a better quality kitchen.

Poor communication during move out: They send you these checklists saying what move out will look like, including a walkthrough of the unit where they tell you what might be wrong with it and what you might be charged for, and when I asked for that, I was told it was something they don't do. When we moved out we got charged for a few minor things and we paid the amount due. After that, they changed the amount and said the carpet needed to be replaced. I asked them if they could show me how bad it was and prove it to me but they said they already did it. I told them I would have liked to have been shown, and that this creates poor communication and a lack of trust. My partner wanted to ask them questions about it before we paid. We called and called. They said someone would get back to us multiple times. Every time we got a "you need to pay a bill" message, she tried calling to ask questions. Eventually we thought we were just waiting for a response but they had just sent it to collections. We just wanted some questions answered.

The Threats: There's a guy who has a big dog off leash all the time and says he is "training" it, but he just yells at it and it doesn't listen, no actual training involved. Not all other dogs or humans like it when big dogs run up to them, so I confronted the guy. It ended up with the guy saying something along the lines of, "If you see me and my off leash dog, you better stay away from us because my dog will take yours down." The main property manager we dealt with lived above this guy and heard the whole interaction. We told him this made us uncomfortable every time we took our dog out, but he just said there's nothing he could do. So I guess the upside is, if you are kind of a trash person, feel free to act the way you want because you won't get evicted!

Update 3/30/2025 - We received more contact from Waterfront trying to "explain" all of the mistakes they made and say essentially, "sorry, but we did it anyway," and all of the familiar "we tried to contact you," but any of our attempts to reach out to them have still...

Beautiful property but the staff is lacking - I lived at Waterfront for a year. They care less about current residents and more about filling homes with new residents. Any time I had an issue the staff would act like they were too busy, or it was a personal problem of mine. Their attitude always seemed to be "well no one else is experiencing that"... Which gave off a sense of me not being worth their time. For example, door access not working repeatedly, the mail delivery service that they outsourced constantly being late, and construction problems with my unit.

Also, as another reviewer mentioned, package delivery is poor. I have lived at many apartment complexes, none of which had staff that were “too busy” to accept packages. I suppose I always considered that the job of onsite apartment staff. About halfway through my time there, they outsourced packages to an extremely poor service called Fetch. With Fetch you must pay about $20 a month to have your packages delivered to Kirkland, whereupon you have to request using their website that your packages be delivered. All of this can add 2 or more days to your shipments – go ahead and cancel your prime membership and don’t pay for expedited shipping. You won’t get your monies worth.

I reported a sprinkler missing a cover during one of the first inspections while I lived there. It did not get fixed until the week I moved out.

I lived in a brand-new unit and kept it meticulously clean. When I moved out the staff were too busy to do a walk through with me (again, talking to potential residents), so I just handed them my keys and left. Let me tell you, do the walk through. Don’t let them rip you off. During my move in inspection, I noted damage to the carpet in the bedroom, likely caused by the construction crew - they charged my $200+ for carpet cleaning after moving out. Only one small room in the entire unit is carpeted... Updating this review because I found out they charged me because the carpet was installed incorrectly so it bunched up in places, they pegged the repair costs on me. Conveniently for them I didn't report it during my time there because I was jaded about the other items I brought to their attention and didn't receive help with.

My caution would be, go ahead and rent a unit for the location and amenities if you want, but do not expect the luxury experience that the...