The Village At South Campus — Local services in Provo

I lived here for 2 years. The apartments are fine. They keep raising rent and fees. My biggest issue is with their cleaning checks over the summer and poor communication.

I kept my contract over the summer, however I have not been living there this summer. Ideally, I would have been able to sell the contract but I was not able to. This was in part due to the high fees charged by the village to transfer a contract with the transfer fee and nonrefundable deposit.

One of my roommates was able to sell their contract, however the other two have been gone this summer as well. The apartment was clean the last time that I was there. I received the message last Thursday about cleaning checks. I assumed the apartment would be clean since that is how I left it. I was unable to contact the new roommate since I did not know him.

Cleaning checks were tuesday 7/15 for building B. I got back to Utah on Tuesday night and was unable to find out if we passed. I called first thing Wednesday morning while out work and was informed that we failed and would be charged $50 per person. I was informed that rechecks were that day and that if we failed that, we would be charged another $25 per person. Rechecks were to be finished at 3pm.

I informed them that I was at work, and could not make it down to Provo until that night to clean the apartment. I asked if they could do our recheck on thursday since I was at work and was not able to find out if we passed or failed until that day. I was told no, I would still be charged $25 and that I could send pictures of the clean apartment that night to avoid a cleaning crew being sent in.

I requested that my apartment be the last apartment to get the recheck done (around 3pm) to see if I could somehow leave work to go clean it, and this request was denied. I was told " we cannot control when they drop by." I'm not sure who this is referring to as I assumed the village staff was the ones doing the cleaning check. I asked why it could not be controlled and was told they would check with the property manager to see if they could make an exception. Eventually I was told they would come by around 2:45 but I was unable to leave work early. I was also told that they were closing at 3 for a "company lunch."

I'm really not sure what I was supposed to do in this situation. I was told some different things that I "could have done." The first is to have someone else go in and clean it. I could not do this due to them not having a key to my apartment as well as not having the app to get into the building.

I was also told that I could have done a cleaning check at the beginning of the summer to avoid dealing with any of these checks. However to do this, I was told I would have had to move all my stuff out and be completely moved out.... and keep paying full rent. I wanted to store stuff in my room since I was paying this full rent all summer.

I'm really not sure what I am supposed to do in this situation to avoid these fees, especially the second $25 fee when I really had no opportunity to go and clean the apartment. We were only informed of the failed check by the paper on our counter, and no one was even there. No email, or message about us failing.

I was told that I could not get any sort of extension due to "equal housing laws"' and that the extension would have to be given to everyone. I find it very disingenuous to use a law that was written to prevent discrimination, as an excuse not to help residents who have extenuating circumstances during the summer. I was given no notice other than a piece of paper. I had to call to be informed about the failure, and the rechecks were the next day.

I am really disappointed about the lack of help on this. I was told many times that "there is nothing we can do." I have been a resident for two years, and am very disappointed.

I would appreciate it if this is made right, and I receive back...

If you want to spend way too much money to live someone that just looks a bit nicer than most places around here, this is exactly the place for you. I will certainly say that all the students I have interacted with working here are super nice (girls at the front desk, employees at sodalicious). But any interactions I had with management here were quite negative. For instance, I once filled out a request to have my hot water fixed and a few hours later I got a response saying that somebody came by to fix it and that everything was okay. I had been sitting in my room all morning and nobody had come by, and upon checking on the water, there was still no hot water. If you fill out any complaint about management, guess where it goes! Management. I don’t know if it ever gets to Peak Living or what, but they can pretty much just act however they want and it doesn’t matter. As far as the living experience, while many of the people I knew here were very kind people, there are a lot of people that make the whole experience very negative. For instance, there is a loft above the office for people to have get-together’s or family home evening or whatever you reserve it for, but it was constantly being closed to everybody because people would have huge parties and totally trash the place. Same story with the pool. Some of the emails I got during the year from the village were asking students to stop having parties in their rooms, stop breaking the exit signs in the hallways, and stop THROWING TRASH BAGS OUT THE WINDOW AIMING FOR THE BIG TRASH CAN IN THE PARKING LOT. That’s who you live with here. Speaking of trash, it’s everywhere. The parking garage is constantly full of trash, especially the area around the elevator (which anyone living here will tell you is the slowest elevator they have ever been in) and every floor except the first floor smells like trash all the time. The trash pickup service and cleaning services do not do a good job keeping the place clean, except like I said the first floor. I think the purpose behind that is so you don’t know the whole place is gonna stink when you walk in. But I was constantly dodging PUDDLES OF TRASH WATER when I was walking down the hall. I don’t think a single trash puddle ever got cleaned up. Picture that when you think about moving here. Those trash puddles always made me so happy whenever I saw the fee for trash collection in my monthly utilities payment! Speaking of that, my rent every month ended up being about $600, when you add in utilities and parking garage fees. So don’t hope for this to be any kind of reasonably priced. Apartment closer to campus that are just fine to live in are around $400 a month, utilities and such included. About half way through the year, I filled out a form with an intent to move, with the promise from management that they would offer my housing contract to the first person that asked to buy such a contract. Not only did they not try to give my contract to anybody, but when I called towards the end of the semester they told me they didn’t have a form on file for me. They will do anything to keep taking your money from you. They care about money here, and the residents are the last concern on their minds. I wish I hadn’t spent so much money on living here.

Edit: I am not going to change anything about my review to respond to the response the Village gave me, but I want to add another thing that happened today just to give another reference of what it’s like here. Last night my air conditioner went out and I filled out a work order to have it fixed. Meanwhile, I turned it off to avoid paying for AC that wasn’t working. This morning somebody came in to fill the order, and all they did was TURN THE AC ON WITH THE THERMOSTAT, and then they left. Needless to say, it is not fixed. That is a perfect example of the...

I've lived here for about a year, and it's awful. Management is the worst I've ever had to deal with. They're impossible to reach, and there have been a crazy amount of times I've been calling them with no answer, only to walk to the office to find them all sitting there by the phones. One time I called them from right outside the door, heard the phone ring, and watched them ignore the call. The rooms are nice, but aren't clean when you move in, I've lived in multiple rooms and they're always dirty upon move in but theyll charge you a cleaning fee anyways. And the walls are paper thin, I can literally hear my roomate breathe.

When I first moved in I renewed my contract for the fall, only for them to email me saying I needed to move out because my contract had been sold. When I told them they had sold a contract I had already bought, they told me first that I hadn't renewed my contract. And then when I fought against that, they told me they weren't liable because there had been a recent change in management? I was homeless for two weeks before I was able to secure a new lease with them from a girl who told me she was seeling because of how awful management was. And then I wasn't able to move into her room for another two weeks because they said they had a cleaning crew coming for all the rooms, but they obviously never came because the room was dirty when I did move in. And then they charged me for the cleaning fee.

They tack on ridiculous fees like two trash fees, one for the big trash can (which is ridiculous, there's no way each tenant in the building needs to pay 12$ for the large trash can to get emptied once a week) and one for a trash removal service. But there are times when our trash doesn't get removed for over 2 weeks, so why are we paying for trash removal?

Multiple employees have given me completely different answers to important questions that ended up screwing me monetarily. It just seems like the employees are all kids who don't know what they're doing. They tried to charge me for a second security deposit upon buying a new lease (even though they told me my deposit would carry over and didnt return it to me), and it took forever to get them to remove the charge from my payment portal. They also tried to charge me utilities for the month I didn't live there, and the girl I spoke to about it didn't even know how to show me a statement of my last few payments and seemed really flustered like she didn't know what she was doing.

Long story short, the management is impossible to contact by phone, and is mostly run by young kids who don't know what they're doing and give unreliable and inconsistent information. The only upside to living here is that they keep the grounds clean, and cleaning checks are...