The Edison Lofts Apartments — Local services in Raleigh

Just moved out after 2 years of living at the Edison. Walkable to everything downtown, the current leasing staff are friendly and great people, the assistant facilities/maintenance guy, Chris, is the best employee there. As a prospective renter, it’s a great price for the big units and the location. But the price is only good for your first year, then prepared to given a BS renewal letter that screws you over no matter what the current market price is. If your current unit is available for $300 less per month then you’re paying, prepare for minimum $200 a month if not more increases every year, it’s a complete rip off, so your choice is move out or get screwed. The location as great as it is for being near everything is also terrible and the worst part about this building. The dollar general store below the building is the worst corner in downtown Raleigh. Stabbings, drunks, drugs, stealing, are a daily occurrence right here just look up the news from the end of the July. You can’t go for a walk without being asked for money for drugs by a cracked homeless person. They make noise in the street till 2am, yelling drunk and racing cars around. The parking garage for Edison is horrific. There has not been a week where a car wasn’t stolen or broken into. It’s a regular occurrence and nothing is being done about it. Whatever they say they’re doing which they did the bare minimum and added cameras and some old security guard walks around like once an hour, it hasn’t changed a single thing. If you own a Kia or Hyundai run away from this place now. Homeless people doing drugs in the parking garage stairwells regularly as well. The amenities are decent, although both courtyards at night in the summer don’t even bother going near the grills because there are hundreds of cockroaches running on the stone walls. Then the most unnecessary renovation. The list is so long of the things that went wrong with this project, they should have given every resident a month free of rent, but instead you only get that as a new resident to rope you into this trap. This project had their budget cut in half almost instantly, and it was supposed to be completed by end of March/early April, well it took them till the middle of August…. the amount of issues it caused was absurd between paint fumes, closures to entrances and hallways and the dog park, the noise and drilling, the workers not giving a fu**, A slightly updated lobby with a new arcade machine? It’s a joke. If the head maintenance guy ever comes to fix something that broke, youll be told it’s your fault and given a solution that solves nothing and blames the tenant. Our washer drum was completely shot, it was shaking the washer into the wall and putting a hole in the drywall with like 10 pieces of clothes in it and we were told “your overloading the washer” and he left. The washer then proceeded to ruin our clothes and a very expensive comforter when it ripped all the fabric. The head guy spends more time smoking in the parking garage than doing anything around the building and when he actually does he just blames tenants instead of doing his job. When the assistant is gone on vacation nothing gets done except the other one watches the cameras all day long creepily. If it wasn’t for my friends and being able to walk to some really good restaurants and bars I would have paid the termination fee to end my lease months ago. The value of the location compared to neighboring places seems like a steal but with everything you have to deal with between the street racing in the parking garage at night or the crack heads in the street yelling and throwing stuff, or your car possibly getting stolen, it is not worth it. Especially when CR realty couldnt care less about current residents and any sort of incentives to stay, they care about raising rent and screwing people over while not actually solving any of the major problems with this building with actual solutions. Go look at CR...

My husband and I lived at The Edison Lofts for 3.5 years and had an overall positive experience. We moved out of state recently and we were actually pretty sad to leave.

Pros: -Great location downtown and I overall felt safe. They started using an overnight security team last year, and that made me feel better because random people would sometimes make their way into the building overnight. The security has prevented these incidents from occurring.

-It is overall very clean here. There was about 2-3 months while they were doing renovations where there was a roach problem. While this was unsettling, it was the only time in our 3.5 years living here that there was this big of a problem. We did not have any issues during our last six months living here and we always noted how impressed we were with the cleanliness.

-The maintenance people are AMAZING and Chris especially deserves a raise. He was always very timely and communicative whenever we put in a request.

Cons: -We never had an issue with the leasing staff, but there were some times where it felt like we were bothering them just by asking a question. There is also high turnover amongst the staff. Overall not a huge deal for us, but it’s something I’ve seen noted in other reviews. There was a leasing agent who used to work for The Edison Lofts named Karan, who was always so friendly, helpful, and accommodating.

-The biggest con is that, by the end of our time at The Edison Lofts, our rent was raised so high that we were paying about $800-$900 more for our one bedroom apartment than we would have if we were new residents. At that price, we could have been living in one of the penthouses. Even if we hadn’t moved out of state, we would have had to move to another apartment because the rent price was getting way too out of hand.

Overall, we really did enjoy living at The Edison Lofts. It’s probably the best apartment complex I’ve ever lived in. I think this is a great place to lease at if you’re not planning to stay for more...

I lived here for 15 months and had a great experience! The location is unbeatable - there are always events happening at Moore Square and you're a 25' walk to Glenwood. It's also right above a DGX, which is so insanely convenient. So nice to be able to just run down and grab anything if I had forgotten something in my groceries. It's also above a very cute coffee shop/bar, gelato place, and Domino's. Sosta across the street and Element a few blocks down are both excellent. Lots of really good stuff in close walking distance: restaurants, an express library, pharmacies, etc. You'll probably want to drive to groceries, but you could arguably walk or bus to the Publix nearby. You could feasibly get by without a car if you work downtown.

The apartments themselves were pretty nice - I lived in a 1 bedroom that was small, but the space was intelligently used. The finishes are pretty cute and we liked the appliances. The building is relatively quiet - you can hear the typical apartment noises (steps above you if they're heavy, conversations in the hallways if they're loud) but nothing crazy.

Amenities were great - valet trash, pool, nice common spaces, package lockers. Sometimes you have to pick up packages in the office when the lockers fill up, but that's pretty easy and they'll usually notify you. They also only let you put your trash bin out from around 6pm-9am, which helps keep the hallways neat and generally keeps people from just leaving their trash outside. Maintenance is also very fast; I've had maintenance requests filled within a few hours of submitting them.

The folks in the office are nice and there's always some sort of resident event going on. The pool is fun in the summer - busy enough to meet people but not so busy that you can't find a chair to lay out. My renewal offer was also EXTREMELY reasonable given the current market. Would've happily renewed my lease if I wasn't...