Bay Village Townhomes — Local services in Whitefish Bay

FIRST, I AM NOT RECEIVING ANY COMPENSATION FOR SHARING OUR EXPERIENCE LIVING AT BAY VILLAGE APARTMENTS. I DID NOT KNOW THE LANDLORDS OR EVEN KARADEMAS UNTIL WE MOVED IN AND DID NOT REVIEW ANY COMMENTS BEFORE WE SIGNED OUR LEASE. THIS WOMAN, MARY ANN IS NO LONGER THE LANDLORD, SHERRI M. IS THE LANDLORD AND FROM THE COMMENTS I READ THESE 2 WOMAN ARE AS DIFFERENT AS NIGHT IS FROM DAY. I HAVE A LOT TO SAY AND I HOPE YOU READ EVERYTHING BECAUSE SINCE WE MOVED HERE IN 2014 IT HAS BEEN THE BEST EXPERIENCE OF OUR LIFE PERIOD. Are you looking for a place you can really call home? Want nice neighbors, family friendly if that is what you like or if you wish to live in an area with older residents the management can accommodate this as well. My husband and I have lived in various apartments on the East side of Milwaukee for over 20 years and I have to say that living here at Bay Village Apartments has been the best decision we have ever made. I cant say enough about Sherri and her team of maintenance workers at Bay Village. I have never lived in an apartment where the landlord actually answers the phone and has one of the maintenance workers at our home on those rare occasions when we needed their help with minor problems in our home. Sherri is always accessible for any need Roger or I may have regarding our home and in general she is just a very honest, nice person wanting to make everyone's experience living here a good one. For what we are getting in our town home the price is very fair and it is our hope to live here indefinitely. We have just celebrated our one year anniversary and are starting our second. Now, with the advent of being able to pay our rent on line it will make rent paying a very quick and smooth transaction something I really appreciate as I am disabled and getting around can be difficult. Not only to we receive the amenities listed below we also have FREE CABLE!! Who gets free cable? While we have upgraded our cable package, when we moved in while waiting for our cable to be upgraded all we had to do was plug in the TV and attach a cable to our TV and the wall and wa-la something to pass the time until the upgrade was made. Our town home is more than just a "box" it is a beautiful SPACIOUS three level home. Our livingroom has a beautiful picture window looking out on a well taken care of courtyard, our kitchen is big enough to hold our diningroom table and a few extra tables where we put various knick nacks. We have cupboards to spare, a full size refrigerator/freezer, dishwasher, garbage disposer and windows that look out to our garage and small back yard area where we can grill out in the summer. Our fully finished basement in perfect for watching television and working on various family crafts as well as having a washer/dryer and space to put boxes as well as summer/winter clothes and other things we don't use on a regular bases, all this is included in the rent. In the basement we also have a bathroom with a walk in shower. Our second floor has the biggest master bedroom I have ever had, if we wanted to we could put a California king bed in this room with space to spare for dressers and other things as well as two full size closets and another huge picture window also looking out on the courtyard. Our second floor has a full bathroom with a tub large enough to take a proper soak after a long day at work or a nice long hot shower, our hot water heater holds enough water for 2 people to take at least 20 to 30 minute showers one after the other. The second bedroom is just right for company and it also has a closet. We have a hall closet for all our sheets, towels and other things we need to stock upstairs. In short, you need to come and take a look at Bay Village Apartments, the sample unit is the same setup as our unit right down to the carpet. You will not be disappointed in choosing to live here and maybe you could live in a unit close to ours and come to one of our backyard cookouts. You really have nothing to loose and...

DO NOT RENT FROM BAY VILLAGE! So as it turns out, I rented a townhome at Bay Village for 1 year with my girlfriend and good friend / roommate. We are very responsible, well kept people and have been renting around the East Side now for 10 years. Even though I'm 27 (roommates approx. same age) we were treated condescendingly as children by Mary Ann, the rental manager for the properties.

Upon move in, we were greeted with an uncleaned unit (I hope they didn't charge the previous tenants for cleaning, because they surely didn't do it themselves!), which we spent approximately 5-6 hours working on upon move in. And the worst of it was the cabinets in the kitchen which had shavings on the inside of them that closely resembled an animal problem. A few weeks later, and over the span of a month, we end up catching 8 mice. Even though this rodent infestation was obviously there upon our move in, which we informed management about, it was not handled at all. We were told to buy traps and deal with it, even though they had pest control services (which did end up coming over, but only to place more traps which did nothing).

Issues such as neighbors who sounded like they were beating their kids, parking issues left and right, and unresponsiveness to maintenance requests really left us with a bad taste in our mouthes. To top it all off though, was that everytime we had an issue with something, Mary Ann tried to say that it was our fault and would argue with us about it needing to be fixed; in addition to the fact that we had to go through a "preliminary" walkthrough and a final walkthrough, by which she tried to come up with ways to charge us for every little thing (wait, even though we spent 5-6 hours cleaning the place after moving in???? does that make sense?!?!).

Overall, terrible management (never met anyone that unprofessional), and terrible experience x2. Would never rent there again, would never recommend renting to a friend. Save your money and the headaches that come along with loosing it to such a terrible property and rent somewhere else.

Note to Karademas (Management company that owns the property): Find some new management and there may be better reviews. Additionally, inform your managers that it is highly unprofessional to take written complaints to the neighbors and call them out (we were approached by our neighbors asking if we complained about them because Mary Ann told them we did - I've never heard of any property manager using actual names of the complainers to those being complained against - that is a confidential issue that could result in domestic cases... save yourself the...

The good: the new management is responsive, and I've never had an issue with the few times I've needed to call maintenance for something. The units are nice, and most of them are fairly updated.

The bad: It seems like there's constant construction going on, and I question a lot of the decision-making that went into the projects. I live in the main building. They were building back decks when we moved in . But then, they took the nicely landscaped courtyard with trees and shrubs, and spent several noisy weeks re-landscaping the courtyard.

They promised that the next building over would get the same decks, which I know from speaking with those neighbors, they were looking forward to, however that project was delayed due to, ostensibly, lumber shortages and issues related to COVID.

However, they've recently started on front decks in our same building, which doesn't really make sense to the couple of people I've spoken to who live here. Why do we need two decks? And what about the people they've been promising their decks to in the other building?

So for months, I've been trying to work from home whilst having to deal with pounding hammers, masonry saws, and hammer drills; often directly into my wall where I was trying to work. It was so much so that I had to move my home office to the other side of our unit so as to not have to deal with the noise during the weekday. And, should I have to sleep in after a late night, I have to wear ear plugs which may or may not work depending what caliber of tools they're using on that given day.

This particular project has been going since fall of last year, and so far as I can tell is going to continue through the end of my lease. There's even been times when I've had to leave during the day so I could find somewhere to work in peace. For the amount of rent we have to pay for this place, I just think it's unreasonable to have to deal with this for as long as we have without any say in this, for a feature we probably won't even be...