Hidden Lake Apartments — Attraction in San Antonio

Management: Hours are kind of inconvenient. 8:30 AM-5:30 PM. If you work all day, you will not be able to get anything done during the week. Plus they're closed on Sundays. So Saturday will be your only day to get stuff done with them if you need to. Guess what, so does everyone else, so most of the time you're there, you're waiting to be helped. There is not package retrieval areas. So if your delivery is sent to the office, you're SOL if you can't go during their hours. They'll tell you, you have a package... at 5:28 PM. They always seem to be busy, all the time. The other day, it almost took 10 minutes just to get a delivery package from literally on the other side of a wall. They will close sometime for lunch for 2 hours with no warning. So if you go home for lunch to get something done, they're just going to say sorry they're not there.

Maintenance: Hit or miss. I've had a few maintenance items that get resolved quickly and correctly. But, more often than not, the maintenance request will be "completed" incompletely. I needed to get a new aerator for my kitchen sink. They marked the maintenance request complete in the late morning. When I got home, the aerator was still in the bag, OUTSIDE my front door. I proceeded to put it on myself and realized it was the wrong type and wrong size of aerator. I called and told them they didn't do anything and gave me the wrong piece. They didn't believe me and never came to actually complete the request for a whole month after. The chain on the flush lever snapped and my toilet couldn't flush. I found this out after I did my business. I call it in on a Sunday at 1:30 PM. I told them, my toilet won't flush that it currently has feces in it. They said they'll get to it in the morning.... they said to me at 1:45 PM, that they will get to it.... in the morning. I was going to have to have a toilet filled with human excrement for hours. One morning, it was about 30-35 degrees outside. I woke up with my heater not working. I called it in as an emergency since it qualified as an emergency at around 6:50 AM. it took them almost 2 hours to complete the task. 90 minutes of those 120 minutes was me waiting for them to show up.

Amenities: Basic amenities, pool, 24 hour fitness, mail kiosk for mail only, not packages. The one thing that separates this apartment from others is the lake that is there. It's barely accessible though. There aren't many paths to it that are free from branches and very high grass. If it doesn't rain every week, the lake will recede and the shores will just be a huge mud area. It makes it very hard to actually get to the water. But hey, it's nice to look at though. Half of the landscaping is dirt. probably 20% of the grounds have grass, so if it rains, you will have to stay on the asphalt if you're walking your dog or walking to your vehicle. just dirt everywhere, no grass There is a mini trail that cuts through the middle of the buildings which is heavily shaded with all the trees. Shade = no grass. The entire area in between buildings is either dirt or leaves that no one has or every will rake up. it's clutch in the summer though. there is however no dog park or children's playground. So the apartments doesn't really off "basic" amenities.

Parking: Parking is okay, don't really have many problems. Hope you drive a truck because there's speed bumps, EVERYWHERE. There are two entry gates, the front, which is riddle with speed bumps, and the back, which is only open from 6 AM to 9 PM. so like the office, the hours suck.

Actual living areas: Pretty fair for sizing and pricing. Kitchen is MINISCULE. Balconies are huge. Closets are small. Master bathtubs are very large, which is nice. you need your own washer/dryer. automated locks and thermostat you can schedule and control with an app on your phone which is nice.

Conclusion: This apartment can be worse. for the price and what you get, its okay. Then again, this place can be A LOT better. There is so much more room for improvement in like almost any aspect. But instead, they add more...

Has potential to be a 4 or 5-star place, really. Place looks good and clean. Washer dryer already installed, water heater is better than at my parent's. Great stuff. Our immediate neighbors are nice, and while likely unique to my experience, the rest of our neighbors park and drive like animals. Parking so crooked they're on both lines, people all over the complex parking in front our our building. People park with their mirrors few inches from my door. Dents on my car appearing overnight. Commerical vehicles. Giant trucks and trailers. Cars in obvious disrepair taking up space. Getting in and out of the place is dangerous and always congested. The lake is gross, attracts tons of roaches, pest control is useless even after fogging the unit. The lake doesn't even have somewhere to kick a boat off of or a decent shore to fish from. The amenities drive up rent by another $200, and they suck. Valet trash has gone whole weekends without picking up the trash, then will leave a note with the veggie tales on it (do they have the copyrights?) saying the bin's too full like they haven't taken it out for 3 days (i know they dont come on Saturdays, but they won't pickup on the friday before, or the sunday after often). Management is often unhelpful and pushy if not curt instead of courteous. Maintenance doesn't do the job right most of the time, but I'm sure they're swamped and they're pretty decent folk. But wait, there's more as I haven't even gotten to our actual apartment yet! Simply put our unit wasn't ready for move in. None of the baseboards were sealed in the entire unit, letting in all sorts of bugs. Tons of cracks and openings in every nook and cranny thats supposed to have caulk or SOME sort of seal, even in the door. Speaking of the door, it didn't open right when we moved in. Had to tackle it to get out. It got eventually fixed. The door handle broke and gave me a nasty gash. Long screws poking out the master bathroom cabinet next to the toilet and TP holder, like 5 inches long. They replaced it with a big thick block to hold up the cabinet door and it blocks the TP holder so we just have a roll on the counter instead of the holder! Window screens had holes. Vent handle stuck. Fan in second bathroom doesn't work. Tons of mold in master bathroom. "But Javier, why didn't you inspect the place then give management the inventory and condition form?" Oh, I did. We moved in on a Saturday. Gave us 24hrs to check it out. 24 seemed a little short, but whatever. Next day, i go to the office with the filled out form. Closed. Day after, closed. The following day. Closed. The DAY AFTER THAT, finally open. Madison didn't accept the paper, "because its past 24 hours" like they weren't closed for 96. Straight up looked at me in the eye, telling me they weren't. That's a pro liar at work.

Roaches. So many roaches. We don't leave food out or have our unit warm or otherwise attractive to them. We have seen hundredes of roaches. There's a 75% on any day we'll see 3-5 roaches. Can't even watch tv without one or two trying to crawl on my leg.

The cell service sucks, its hard to make a phone call in the middle of my home! I have to go somewhere else if i need to make an important phone call if the other party wont email or text.

Fire sprinklers were painted over with the landlord special, that's a huge fire hazard as they were unreadable up until they were fixed.

To be fair, outside is nice and pretty if you don't step on poop. Its everywhere.

All that being said, I wouldn't recommend Hidden Lake to someone unless I disliked them. If the price matches the quality, I wouldn't exactly be happy, but my expectations would be satisfied. I could spend no more than $700 monthly before I would be dissatisfied. Lucky for me, im paying more than twice that.

Hope this helps. I don't need much to be happy. But this place is a downgrade from the ghetto place i was in prior. I'd...

As much as I want to say I loved living here the last 10 months, it’s been less than satisfactory. I moved here because I thought it was incredibly pretty and quiet, but the apartment has had a few issues. Upon moving in there was huge pile of dirt, rubbish, and leaves on the balcony and inside the outside closet that needed to be cleaned up. Like someone put it together and didn’t bother disposing of it. The towel rack in the bathroom was not on the wall but instead sitting in the corner as though it had fallen off. The key FOB to get into the apartment didn’t work for me to open the gate so I had to get a new one...which was seemingly impossible because of the office being closed for covid-19 and them never answering the phone. My only choice was to keep calling and waiting for a staff member to return my call to come outside and give me a new one so I could get inside the gate. We had put in 2 work orders for our fridge to get fixed because water is somehow leaking inside over all of our food. At this point it’s easier to just put a bowl and dump the water leaking out ourselves. Only after the 3rd work order was it fixed. One weekend it rained and the water leaked through to damage our living room ceiling line. While we have no issues with things beyond human control, the maintenance people took a whole week to fix the ceiling. Including 2 days where they said they’d come but never showed. However, a week later they fixed the foundation of our building and the ceiling line cracked again making all that work pointless. So...it’s back to being unsightly. I’d rather not wait a whole week of them coming in and out again to get that fixed. But they said there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t come out of our security deposit....like it was our fault it rained and leaked through and then they fixed the foundation and it cracked. There’s trash all behind our apartment in the woods from random people walking to the lake which completely ruins the point of having a balcony facing the trees. In addition, there’s like a million raccoons that go into peoples trash and make a nightmare of having to put the trash in the valet trash container. We literally have to use rocks on top our trash to keep them out. It would be easier to not use the valet trash but it’s not really an “option”. Parking at night is a nuisance because sometimes I have to park 2 buildings away due to all the random people coming into my neighbors apartments. Upon moving out, the apartment complex was closed for Memorial Day. Thus, I wasn’t able to turn in my keys the weekend I left. No one called to instruct me on what to do for move out, so I called prior to moving to confirm I could just drop the keys off at any time the following day. I got a call the next morning that if I didn’t drop it off within the first hour of opening that I would be charged rent for the day. No one informed me of this until 9 minutes of when it was due. I would have turned them in earlier if they communicated correctly. I just didn’t want to be threatened to be charged when it was their fault for not informing me beforehand. When I tried to speak to them about how outrageous it was they interrupted me over the phone several times. Thankfully after much talk they opted not to charge me. As people who work full-time and go to school full-time, we wanted to live someplace that cared for it’s residents and I will say this place is generally peaceful. There are pros to living here. I’m just not sure if they outweigh the cons for the price we’re paying each month. I simply don’t have time to hound their office but it feels like that’s what it takes to get them to care for...