The Circle at Hermann Park — Attraction in Houston

WARNING | PLEASE READ | Do not live here | No vives aquí

Summary points: Lease Termination: Expect the Morgan Group and The Circle to try to impose false or additional charges after you move out. Rent/Fees: While base rent is fair, mandatory fees can add up to $300 extra per month. Fire Alarms: Alarms are painfully loud and activate so frequently that the fire department ignores them, and residents can't tell if there is a real fire. Management: Management is unhelpful, deceptive (downplaying emergencies), and takes advantage of residents unfamiliar with their lease. Safety/Security: Security is poor. There are frequent car and apartment break-ins because parking gates are often broken or left open. Packages: The communal package room is a mess, resulting in frequent package theft. Shuttle Service: The non-included shuttle is unreliable, poorly managed, and dangerously overcrowded.

The apartment complex will push additional, false charges after terminating your lease. When you receive the final checkout sheet, do not give the leasing agent your next address or any other personal information, as The Circle and Morgan Group will attempt extortion via debt collection. These charges can include prorated days beyond your lease, duplicated days, and additional administrative fees. Be fully aware of any false charges they may try to push onto you. Tell the agent you will pick up your returned security deposit in person. Know your lease. Know your rights.

While the base rent for the museum district is competitive, mandatory fees can add up to an additional $300 per month that are separate from your personal utility bills. These added fees mean your total payment is comparable to higher-priced apartments in the area,

Every apartment has an ear splitting and painful fire alarm. If you have small children, are elderly, or have pets, you should not live here; you will need ear plugs in every room. The alarms are so frequent that the fire department no longer responds, and residents could not tell when an alarm is an actual emergency.

Safety is not a top priority. The parking garage gates are constantly breaking, and security gates and doors from public walkways are broken. This lack of security leads to multiple car and apartment break-ins and stolen tires across the complex. Courtesy patrol never responded to my calls, so I could never tell if my concerns were looked into.

Management is unhelpful, downplays emergencies, and actively tries to take advantage of residents. The massive waterline break and flooding in the Amalfi side in March 2024 is a primary example. Management repeatedly downplayed the severity, referring to the major flood as merely “a leak” in emails. Three days after the flooding, with no clear timeline for repairs, management sent every resident a Satisfaction Survey. Repairs after the flood took nearly an entire year (March to February).

The shared package delivery room is an atrocious amenity, resulting in frequent package theft. Packages are often not placed in the correct location, and the room’s lock is constantly broken. Management is noncompliant and unhelpful when residents request video proof of stolen items.

The maintenance crew is severely understaffed (roughly 4-5 members for a large complex), leading to long lead times (5-7 days) and half assed, "jerry-rigged" repairs. After-hours service are very unreliable; when I called several times due to AC failure at night, the typical response was, "I’m not there. I can get to it in the morning.” This applied to emergency work orders which mandates immediate action. Additionally, there is little communication between maintenance, management, and residents.

The Majestic Shuttle Service to the medical center is not included in the amenity fee; it costs $40 for a two-week pass. Majestic does not accommodate the influx of students, resulting in riders being dangerously crammed into the 24-seater shuttle, often pressed against the bus doors. The service is unreliable and...

3 entire days and nights of water shutoff and no ETA yet for when it will be restored. What a luxury we are living in!

Pretty sure that all positive reviews are either fake or perhaps provided in exchange for some incentives. Truth is there are frequent car breakins, water shutoffs, and blaring false fire alarms in the middle of the night.

March 2024 update: Expect to have frequent water shutoffs. Right now, we don't have water for over 24 hours and counting on a work day and no estimate of when it will be back. If you live here, forget about going to work in the morning!

Feb 2024 update: There are so many false fire alarms in the middle of the night that if ever there is a real fire, everyone living here would actually be burnt alive because no one goes outside during the fire alarm anymore. Also, the alarm is so insanely loud that it is a potential risk to children, elderly, and people who are not doing well. We fear losing our hearing before our lease is up unless, of course, we burn to death before that.

Update: The only helpful person on the property is Alex, the maintenance supervisor. He goes above and beyond to help residents and tries his best to make up for the inefficient, apathetic, indifferent, and passive aggressive management staff.

Update: Welcome to the Circle at Hermann Park, where you can live with CONTAMINATED WATER SUPPLY for 3 months and counting, where the manager threatens to escort you out when you ask them when the problem will be fixed, where the management does not bother even to fix unreasonable utility bills (because of their efforts to locate the cause of the contamination), and will simply not respond to any e-mail communication. Yes, we have been living with a contaminated water supply for over 3 month now, with the management unable to locate the cause of the issue and no follow-ups or no end in sight for even if the issue will be fixed at all! The management knows everything and is unwilling to respond at all.

Updated Review: Things are worse now and if you move in, be sure to enter an apartment with MAJOR issues covering everything across the board - faulty washer and dryer, broken fans, rusted dishwasher, broken blinds, doors not locking and a multitude of other things that I do not have the patience to write about. Bottom line, no one wants to work here and the excuses keep piling sky high. 5 days gone since checking in and there are still multiple issues that have not been fixed. Not sure why they advertise as luxury when all they provide is a dump. P.S. the AC in the gym has stayed broken for at least 3 weeks now, not to say more than half of the equipment in there is broken at any given time.

I think the apartments are quite overpriced - you are basically paying for the location alone. You will actually enjoy staying here if you love to wake up to blaring fire alarms in the middle of the night every month, all of which are false alarms!

The only lift in the garage has been out of order for weeks and the management flatly refused waiving amenity fees or providing a discount on the rent as a courtesy. This is a particularly annoying problem since about 20% of parking spots on every floor are set aside by management to be reserved for $35 a month and very often we can only find a spot on the 5th floor, which has no elevator right now!

A mysterious new amenity fee appeared a couple of years of ago, probably for the management to make some more money than usual, as if there weren't any amenities before! This goes up too at every lease renewal.

There have been several other problems over time, such as noisy discourteous neighbors and a safety hazard posed by a dangerously cracked granite countertop upon move in. Dishwasher was also malfunctioning upon move-in and stained our new kitchenware. There was also an instance of an outrageous utility bill of $143 a month for a 1bedroom apartment, including sewer charges of $61 in the Houston summer!

Maintenance folks are nice and courteous, and generally fix things...

The Circle at Hermann Park recently announced (with less than a week's notice) that all of the best parking spaces in our garages will now be reserved for those who are willing to pay $35 a month for the privilege. I find this obnoxious for several reasons, but my primary objection is that this is effectively a rent increase--they're taking away about 20 percent of the parking spaces that were available to all of us when we signed our leases, but continuing to charge us the same rent. We're paying the same money, but they're giving us less of what they promised. It seems that for Greystar, manager of The Circle, the bottom line is always the first consideration, even when it means diminishing the daily quality of life of most of the tenants.

The lease is of the standard "The management can do anything we want whenever we want pretty much without consequences" variety, but renting an apartment to us with the tacit understanding that we'll usually be able to find a parking space on the floor where we live, then taking that benefit away from us feels like a form of deception, misrepresentation, or fraud. To add insult to injury, at every lease renewal, The Circle's management expects tenants to swallow rent increases and the addition of more new fees.

The appliances are second-rate and the construction here is shabby. Even though the newer part of this "luxury" facility is only about eight years old, three of the seven windows in our apartment no longer function properly. The kitchen faucet relies on cheap plastic valves that malfunction regularly.

Maintenance is unpredictable at best. Management claims that public amenities that have been broken for almost three years—a water fountain and outdoor shower near a couple of the pools—can't be repaired because they require obsolete parts. (Apparently, home supply stores no longer sell pipes, shower heads, and valves.) I don't know much about property management, but it seems to me that if you can't fix a water fountain, you should probably replace it.

When I add the latest complaints to The Circle's track record of unresponsive management, and I can no longer continue to recommend this place even half-heartedly. I've brought two new tenants to The Circle in the past, but I won't do it again.

Update 1/31/20: Due to the shoddy construction of the complex, it became necessary for the management to schedule a major plumbing repair project that has required shutting our water off for eight hours a day for NINE DAYS so far in January. We’re on day nine of the repairs today, there appears to be ONE plumbing crew working on the property, and the management has just notified us that they'll be shutting the water off on Monday and Tuesday of next week.

In approximately 20 years of living in rental properties, I've never lived in a place that was so poorly managed.

Also, the water fountain in the dog park stopped working a couple of months ago and has not yet been repaired or replaced. And when we received our lease renewal offer, we were informed that besides the usual rent increase, we would now be charged a $15/month “amenity fee.” (Apparently, it costs a lot of money to keep all of these amenities in such poor condition.) Needless to say, we didn’t...