Prairie Lakes Apartments — Local services in Noblesville

Welcome to what will, hopefully, be your one stop shop in the reviews!

My hope is to give you all the info I wish was in reviews, haha. My wife and I (and one kiddo) have lived here about a year. Before moving here, we researched 25-30 complexes in the area, narrowed it down to 5, and Prairie Lakes came out on top!

I really would recommend living here to anyone. I've done my best to include both the positives and not as good's. (There's honestly not really any total negatives to living here, in our experience)

I’ve broken the review into three sections: General Info, Outside, Inside.

—————————— General —————————— Overall, Prairie Lakes (PL) is one of the best overall rated in the area. After reading the negative reviews, while not invalidating their experience, I feel like those situations are definitely rare exceptions. The rent is exceptionally reasonable for the quality of living, especially when compared to other complexes. Utilities are not overpriced.

The location is phenomenal. It’s 5-7min to the Noblesville shopping district (Walmart, Meijer, Lowe’s, etc…). It’s 10-15min to Hamilton Town Centre. There’s a Costco that is in the works in the next 1-2 years basically across the street (current Costco is 20min away). There’s lots of restaurants close by. PL is right off 37 and 146th so getting to Fishers, Indy, Noblesville, Carmel, etc. is really easy. Just about anything you need is close.

As for amenities, the valet trash is really nice. Comes 5 days a week. The Package room gets a little messy at times but it does its job. There’s plenty of parking for both you and guests. Pets are allowed. You can take a look at the website for the rest of the amenities, everything is accurately represented.

Maintenance is super responsive, but you do have to hold them accountable, at times, to get the job done right.

—————————— Outside —————————— PL is one of the only, if not the only community in the area that cares as much about keeping the grounds and community nice as it does about the quality of the apartments. Its genuinely a nice place to live, and great to just walk around. The night time lighting is present, but not overbearing.

The Pool and grills are very well maintained and its a great community gathering area.

—————————— Inside —————————— All the floor plans are well designed. You won’t find yourself groaning about oddly located or cramped areas. The color schemes are great. A lot of complexes look pretty bland on the interiors, but PL strikes a good balance between modern and inviting.

The kitchen and other appliances are above average quality for complexes in the area. I do with the pantry was a little bigger, but maybe that's just our apartment. The refrigerators are not the biggest, but it's enough to get by.

The blinds for the sliding doors are the super awful vertical hanging vinyl blinds. Not great, but on the upside, as noted later, you can replace them with curtains if you want. The main room and bedroom windows/sliding doors are large and let in plenty of natural light during the day.

There's actually enough electrical outlets for everything you want to plug in, and they aren't in weird spots. Overall the apartments are very clean and maintained.

There’s great noise isolation between apartments, as far as possible with an apartment building.

There’s also a lot of flexibility allowed for small home improvements and interior decorating such as: hanging drapes, painting, hanging artwork, mounting a TV or satellite dish, installing central...

Honestly, your money is better spent else where. I felt like this complex handles their business in a shady and sneaky manner. My fiancé and I have lived at this complex for almost three years. We had two dogs and one cat. A year ago we had paid our pet fee after adopting our first dog and thought everything was set to go. A year and a month later the office said they had screwed up and they will need another $200 due to an employee putting it towards our rent. I work in a business where if an employee screws up, the customer does not need to pay. We were in the process of buying a home and planning for a wedding, so $200 plus another $200 for our cat, which I paid a year and a half prior to that, went towards another round of pet fees. Again, their screw up and we were getting ready to move out, but needed to pay more money for something that we had thought was already taken care of. The second situation came when our VA underwriter need rent verification from this complex and an employee there sent them (without reading the instructions I was told) that we were late over 30 days on a payment! We got a call that our loan will not process if this was the case. We had to call and make sure the correct verification was sent over, it wasn't sent over in a timely matter, and the loan underwriter said it would take another 1-2 weeks to get this redone. After that, the sellers backed out and we lost our house. We had to no place to live since the complex leased our apartment already and they were at full capacity at the time. After we moved out, management sent us a final bill of $262 for carpet cleaning and cleaning of the apartment. She complained on the phone that they were out $1,000 to replace the carpet. I then told her we were $600 for two pet fees and a security deposit and out $1,200 for an appraisal and inspection on our home. So what they did was illegal. I then called JVM corporate where Peter, nice guy, helped us out and managed to work with us and we now have to pay $75. Management at Prairie Lakes is awful, she doesn't want to hear your complaints and kept telling me that none of this was her fault and it was all on her employees. First of all, if you have the word "manager" in your title, you have to take the heat, not throw your employees under the bus. Put on your big girl panties and take it like a manger would, then take your employees aside and explain what they did was wrong. Don't tell your customer/resident that it's not your fault but someone else's. That is highly unprofessional number 1 and number 2 your customer/resident does not care. All this place wants is your money, and they never give you a deposit back and try to charge you for damage or small cleaning items so they can find a way to keep it. They don't put the money back in the complex, just their offices. Parking is a nightmare and the layouts of the apartments don't make sense at all. One Christmas they said that if we didn't pick up a package in less than five days, they would send it back due to the over flow so we ended up sending everything to our work instead. They give you no grace period for when rent is due, it's due on the first and that's it. If you are passed the first then you pay a late fee. Every complex I have lived in gives you 3-4 in case you are out of town or you have an emergency. I would advise to look else where, the apartments here are not worth the...

My girlfriend and I moved here shortly after we graduated college, and everything was great at first. Unfortunately, things changed about halfway through our time at Prairie Lakes. We signed our lease with a manager named Nina, who was very helpful and willing to address our concerns. A new manager named Veronica took over, and things seemed to get worse. We get daily emails from Prairie Lakes' management team, most of which are uneccessary and hostile towards tenants. Parking has become a MAJOR issue. There are never parking spots near the building we live in. For how much we pay in rent, you would think that something like parking would be convenient and close to the unit you live in. They attempted to implement a parking pass system, but this has not fixed any parking problems, and will probably lead to visitors and guests of tenants having their cars towed.

The biggest issue we have had with Prairie Lakes is moving out. They require a 60 day notice for you to move out, and make you put your new address on the move out notice sheet. They clearly do not understand how difficult it is to produce a new address 60 days in advance. We gave them a 50 day notice, the best we could do, and they stated that our lease would automatically be extended by 10 days. We have been by all accounts, great tenants, yet they were not willing to work with us on this issue. Fortunately our new apartments, The Depot at Nickleplate, let us push back our move in date to accommodate this issue. On top of this, they left us a letter regarding our move out inspection, giving us a three day notice, and six weeks before we were set to move out. Needless to say, they have made moving out a hassle.

Prairie Lakes looks nice, but it is not worth the headache. There are many newer and nicer apartment complexes opening up in the area, and with customer service like this, Prairie Lakes simply...