The Ludlow Apartments — Local services in Philadelphia

The Ludlow was an exceptional place to live and easily my favorite. This was the best rental experience.

For what I got with the price, I think it is well worth it and it's hard to beat. I considered 10 other Center City/Fairmount/Rittenhouse luxury apartments when I looked a couple years back; the Ludlow in my opinion had the best combination of location, amenities, management, building, community, and price. I was fortunate to not be in a rush to close on a rental property, so I could wait for off-peak pricing. Even at a relatively low price, my rent only went up ~5% year over year.

The location is very convenient. I relied on SEPTA to commute, so being so close to Jefferson Station, BSL, MFL, 11th St bus stop, and the trolley was instrumental. City Hall is right there, and there are tons of nice restaurants and entertainment activities within a 5 min walk. Penn's Landing and South Philly are only about a 20 min walk. The Philly Art Museum is only about 30 min walk. It's worth noting that if you elect to keep a car in Center City, parking is very expensive and there is a lot of traffic to even get out to either I-76 or I-95. I didn't have this situation so I didn't experience the downside. The other consideration is that the surrounding East Market has been pretty empty for a few years now with un-leased out commercial spaces.

My 1 bedroom unit was very modern. Nice appliances, walk-in shower, backsplash tiles in the kitchen, soft-closing cabinets, a kitchen island, floor-to-ceiling windows with great light exposure, and tall ceilings. I really liked the color scheme of grey and white throughout the apartment, including the hardwood flooring. In terms of downsides, the closet space is a bit limited, and the HVAC is loud and takes some getting used to.

The amenities are top notch and well-maintained. The outdoor terrace is shielded from the noisy Market St so it's peaceful. The terrace has nice trees, a gardening area, grills, patio chairs, fireplaces, a ping pong table. The only downside is the terrace doesn't have a great view anywhere, but the fact it is shielded by the surrounding buildings makes it less windy. There's a pool table which had new pool cues last year, shuffleboard, 2 TVs with pretty much every streaming and cable, a nice gourmet kitchen. There used to be a coffee machine; I'm not sure if that will come back. The fitness center is small but has very nice equipment; the building added 2 Peloton bikes and 1 Peloton Row machine during my time there. If you are a student or someone who WFH, there are modern private conference rooms, a printer, and some desktops. The lobby is gorgeous. Packages are secure and only accessible through concierge in a locked room or in the Amazon hubs through a code. I see maintenance and a cleaning crew tidy up all the common spaces and the amenities floor diligently every day. The only minor improvement is sometimes concierge is unavailable for more than 15 minutes; I don't mind waiting, but an alert system to let them know someone is waiting would be nice.

Management is incredible, reasonable, responsive, and easily accessible given they are in the building itself. I have never seen a building that does so much for their residents in terms of organizing building events. Some events are wine tasting, cooking, art + fashion shows, Thanksgiving dinner, hosting nearby businesses like Rumble Boxing and Joseph Anthony Spa, and even encouraging residents to organize events. I met over a dozen wonderful acquaintances and friends in the building thanks to these activities. Maintenance is exceptional in terms of timeliness in responding to my unit's issues and how friendly they are. Within management, Tim is awesome, very thorough, and creative with these community events. Amanda is great to work with.

My only complaint for the Ludlow is that it's rental only and none of the units were for sale! If I were to continue renting, I wouldn't...

I honestly don't know where to begin. Living at this building really forces you to understand the meaning of "death by a thousand cuts." In the middle of winter my heat stopped working. I called the front desk and they told me to "turn on the oven and stove for heat" and that someone would get in touch with me the next day. I had to bundle myself and my cat up under several blankets as it got colder and colder until the on-call maintenance tech who didn't want to come out at night showed up the next day.

For the entire first month that I lived here, the main light fixture in my apartment didn't work. It took several maintenance requests and multiple emails to have someone come and repair it. Then, they marked it as repaired but it wasn't fixed. It took another email, another maintenance request, and several more days until they actually fixed it.

In my first week here, my key stopped working twice. Over the next several months, it stopped working no less than five times. One day, after coming home from work, it wasn't working again and I went to the leasing office to have it fixed. The leasing agent gave me an attitude and asked, "Do you /really/ need it fixed right now?" What was I supposed to do? Sit on the floor outside my apartment until the next day?

The fire alarm goes off here constantly - and the alarm will go on and on for quite some time. The fire alarm frequency is due in part to the fact that we share an alarm system with the entire block so, if there's a problem at a nearby store or restaurant, you're going to woken up for it. They're testing the fire alarms on each floor on Monday and they'll be sounding non-stop until someone enters each unit on the floor and "verifies the volume." First, we were told that no one would enter our units. 24 hours later, TWO people are going to be entering our units in the middle of a pandemic while we're all working from home and forced to listen to a blaring fire alarm for who knows how long.

Management decided to lock down the package room and force everyone to go to the front desk, sign out a key, get your package, sign out your package, and then return the key and sign it back in.

They're now demanding that any guests we have stop at the front desk and sign in/out with their full name and phone number. This isn't a college dorm and no one here should have to have all of their visitors and visit lengths monitored.

The coffee machine in the lobby is broken more frequently than it is operational. The rubber/plastic that runs along the bottom of the shower door doesn't run the entire length of it - it exists in two small segments, leaving a large gap that ensures your bathroom floor will be wet every time you shower. Two different outlets in my apartment just don't work.

Since March, we've been prohibited from accessing any of the amenities in the building. Now that things have started to open up again, we're forced to use a third party app to "sign in" to the different amenities and we're prohibited from bringing any of our guests into any of the amenity spaces.

Frankly, I'm sure that I'm forgetting all sorts of things. This place is poorly managed and the people running it will do everything in their power to inconvenience you as frequently as possible. For what you're charged to live here, the state of things is absolutely inexplicable. Even if the rent prices here were dropped substantially, I still wouldn't recommend it. The building is nice, the front desk staff is friendly, and nothing here is "horrible" per se... but believe me when I tell you that the problems here will pile up and wear you down over the length of your lease....

The apartments per se are not bad, the appliances are nice and the apartments are quite new. However, they are tiny and over priced, especially during covid times, when all the rents have decreased. The deck is nice, but management doesn't care about maintenance and thus, umbrellas are broken, chairs are dirty, fire is left on over night, etc. Management is just a complete disaster, arrogant and unable to fix any problem. Money hungry. For example, we exchanged some emails with them regarding our moving time and day. They assured us that the deck was booked for us. The day before our moving, we called to confirm this and they recognized that they booked the deck to someone else. Our movers had to wait for two hours, they were mad at us. Another example. The A/C vac for a few apartments was located on a little wardrobe in our bedroom. That produced a lot of noise and vibration, it made impossible to rest. we communicates this to management, ...and communicate, ...and communicate again....and again....for two months. After a big fight, we got them to move us to another apartment. Exactly same apartment than ours, 7 floors lower, they asked us the same price. We accepted because we needed to sleep. Moving day arrived, and...the new apartment was all dirty, no one had cleaned it. They started freaking out and had to find us another apartment on a rush, everything is very unprofessional. There is one guy from the East Market management who lives in the building who has nothing but bad ideas. He will go up and down in the elevators without the mask on, even if you ask him to please wait for the next elevator (elevators are clearly marked with papers asking for masks and no more than two persons per elevator). He will put the music so loud in the East Market square (which is just downstairs if you are facing south or east), that you will have nightmares with the Xmas songs until mid May. He will ask for super loud music for no reason, in the nights, in the cold, in the lock down, when no one is around. Not to talk another amazing idea: outdoor fitness in that East Market square at 8 in the morning during the whole summer....if you work later on nights and are still sleepy at 8AM, be ready to be awaken by loud music and fitness classes. Really, stay away. The place is plenty of hidden fees (every month, you will have to pay a fee to pay your utilities just because), management is incompetent (I am sure now they will offer us to call them if we need anything....try to call them....good luck with getting anything solved), the printer and the coffee machine in the lobby are more time broken that working, etc. Also, if you are thinking to move to this building, I would suggest you to read carefully the 5...