theVUE — Local services in Norman

I lived at The Vue for three years, unfortunately, and after my experience here, I wish I had left sooner.

The primary issue here is the management. The first manager, Jen, was amazing. She left after dealing with the poor treatment from the owners, though, and after that, they were unable to keep a manager from quitting for longer than a month. Now they have to manage the building themselves, because no one else will work for them.

The owners will completely disregard both your lease and the law when it is convenient for them. They repeatedly entered my apartment for completely non-emergency, or maintenance reasons, multiple times without any notice. They simply opened the front door and let themselves in. Even after informing them that it was illegal, and asking them to not do so, because it felt like such an invasion of privacy of my home, they began to give me only 15 minutes of notice instead, instead of the 24 hours the lease and the law promised.

They will make up "standard" fees to charge you, which they will not inform you of in advance, especially when it comes to your security deposit. Do not expect to get your security deposit back. I had video proof of both my move in, and move out, including pre-existing damages, and how clean I had left the place, and I did not receive any portion of my deposit back. If you question the fees, you can expect them to speak to you condescendingly, acting like they are doing you a favor for not charging you more money than what they are.

The lease states that the owners will get to decide the standards to get your deposit back upon your move out. The standards will be impossible to meet.

The security here is terrible. The bedroom door locks are battery powered, and I would suggest taking the batteries out and exclusively using the physical key if you value any of your safety or privacy. I repeatedly came home to my locked door suddenly being opened, with things in my room being adjusted, and was told there was nothing they could do. I was also informed by one worker at one point that all of the door locks worked with two maintenance codes, which wouldn't be difficult to guess, and weren't treated with much secrecy. Do not expect privacy while living here.

They also replaced my front door lock with a Bluetooth one, without providing any of us with a physical key for the lock for almost a year. I couldn't lock my front door for a year, because the power going out would break the lock.

At one point, the management implied that they may terminate my lease because they claimed I was smoking on the property, which I did not do, nor did they have any reason to believe that I did. This was in spite of the fact that there were many residents there who did smoke, and often left the ground outside covered in their cigarette butts. Expect to get blamed for things you have no involvement in while living here, no matter whether or not you have proof of your innocence.

For the first two years of living here, the internet hardly worked, despite the fact it was included in the rent. The only reason it was fixed was because the residents left terrible reviews, and they promised to fix it in exchange for the reviews being taken down.

I asked them to fix my window in my first year living here, as it leaked water during the cold months, and I was worried that my room would develop mold problems. That problem was never fixed.

The elevator breaks at least once about every two weeks. Often with someone inside. I would avoid using it, if possible.

The rent is far too much for the size of the rooms. If you live in a B or C unit, expect to feel like you are living in a shoebox for the entire lease.

In all, living here was terrible. I honestly only stayed for the convenience, and I deeply regret the time and money I wasted here, and the stress living here put me through. The only good thing left here is the fact that the maintenance guy is nice.

I would not recommend living here to anyone who values their money, privacy, security, happiness, or...

I have lived at The VUE for two years. Below are my thoughts.

BEDROOM I love that the mattresses are Full XL, though the frame is larger than the mattress size, so it will slide away from the wall unless you put something on the opposite side. Some rooms lack a good spot for a TV with cabinets directly across from the bed. There is plenty of space along the three rods for clothes (two small ones behind the lower doors and one large pull-down one behind the upper doors). The windows in the bedrooms do not open. The carpet in the bedrooms is very thin and not soft or comfortable.

BATHROOM You get your own bathroom with a large mirror! Some of the toilet paper holders are in very awkward positions and seem to have been an afterthought in designing the bathrooms. The cabinets above the toilet are low enough that you might hit your head on them if you sit up very straight on the toilet. The bathroom sinks do not have much water pressure. The shower is pretty nice, though mine sometimes drains quite slowly. All sources of water (bathroom sink and shower and kitchen sink) get very hot, so be careful not to burn yourself.

KITCHEN There are numerous kitchen cabinets, but many of the shelves are difficult to reach without a step ladder. There also aren’t many good places to keep large cookware. Our microwave has always been a bit finicky. Sometimes the plate starts spinning if the door isn’t closed just right. I don't love the concrete floor in the common space (and the bathrooms).

INTERNET Unfortunately, Internet access has been one of the worst parts of living at The VUE, especially over the past year. There are frequent issues with both TheVue Wi-Fi and the Ethernet ports in the bedrooms. The Internet has been extremely unreliable over the past few weeks. There was discussion of possibly switching to Fiber, but that was over a year ago, and nothing has changed. They need to fix this.

HEATING/COOLING The HVAC system can easily reach your desired temperature in short order, but it doesn’t kick in until the temp gets 2 degrees away from the set temp, so there is a constant oscillation of about 2°. When it is hot outside, it still doesn’t run enough to keep the humidity down to an ideal level. We once noticed a leak on the floor when the AC was on, and maintenance fixed the issue.

AMENITIES I don’t use the amenities often, but the pool and hot tub are nice, and there are spaces on each of the four floors (lobby, study space, exercise room, and a movie room). The complex has several trash cans and a nicely hidden dumpster.

STORM SHELTERS I love that there are storm shelters on each floor, something you won’t find in most other off-campus student apartments.

PARKING I have never had an issue finding a place to park, but the walk-in gates to enter the complex are often broken.

SECURITY There are key cards that grant entrance into the complex, the elevator, and the front door of your unit. They say the front door locks after hours, but it often does not. The individual unit front door locks had an issue that required replacing the batteries every few weeks, but that seems to have been resolved. The bedroom doors can be unlocked with a physical key or a four-digit passcode via the capacitive number pad. Mine has not been very reliable.

MAINTENANCE The outside usually looks nice, but the stairways are hardly ever cleaned. Until recently, each of my service requests (lightbulbs out, HVAC leak, etc.) were resolved within a week. However, I have had two service requests pending for over a month now. I have already visited the front office to inquire about them on two occasions, and there does not seem to have been action taken.

CONCLUSION Overall, my experience at The VUE would have been much better had there not been such significant Internet connectivity problems, and now service requests pending for over a month. While the apartments are far from perfect, they would be fine for most students if they fixed the...

Notice how all of the 5 star reviews are from 6+ years ago. TheVue has far worse issues than just the consistently down internet you read in other reviews. I so badly wish I had looked for more in depth reviews before I had moved in. The charged rent is not only absurdly high for the low quality of the apartment itself. You also have to pay all utilities except water and they will add charges to your account for whatever they feel like. Competing apartments like 2900, Montara, The Flats, and most other students facing apartments do not charge you for electricity. Upon moving out, even after leaving my room sparkling and spotless, even after Susan W. (the owner) did a walkthrough with me and told me the room looks so good that I should only be getting a $50 fee for repainting (Painting they had to do because water is dripping down the interior of the walls, all of the walls, which is not my issue) then sneak charged me $400 after move out. Susan W. is a slimy money grubbing liar, and she owns the apartment, not just manages it. In my 1 and a half years of living at the apartment I have seen 5 different apartment managers come and go, until Susan had to step in the role because I assume no one wants to work with them. Susan would casually gossip about other tenants to me. Complaining about how disgusting they were and the pay problems she was having with specific tenants that she would name. Police have been called to the apartment multiple times while I lived there. We had a non-tenant hop the fence and roam about the complex stealing items, and nothing was done about it. The elevator and internet was constantly down, making it impossible to do schoolwork. Whenever it would rain, water would flood into our living room unless we stuffed bath towels below the door. Our washer and dryer consistently had problems. There's so many little nuisances that would get swept under the rug. Ants were also a constant issue, I pity those that lived on the first floor lol. People will blast their music as they party outside, the guy above you will be screaming for hours at video games, nothing will be done about it.

Do yourself a favor and try other apartments first. 2900 is significantly cheaper, is the same quality as TheVue, but at least won't try to squeeze every last dollar they can out of vulnerable and naive students. Montara, The Flats, Alight, are all cheaper. TheVue looks pretty, but that's because it has nothing else going for it and they want to...