alt Hacker NewsI've had apartments, too. Both corpo-owned and owned by some dude who had some apartments.
The corpo ones were the worst.
They invented illegal terms ("Sorry, sir. You may have signed your 1-year lease agreement on the fifth day of the month, but our policy is to close leases only on the last day of the month. You still owe us for the rest of this [13th!] month whether you've moved out or not"), were wildly successful at making all of the security deposit disappear, and were miserable at keeping their word on necessary repairs. They were shit.
The ones that were run by some dude who owned some apartments were very different. I paid my rent on time. If I had a problem, I called the singular responsible person directly and he (being the kind of person who likes to have timely payments in their bank account) would answer the phone himself. There were never any surprises relating to money, and I never had an issue that lasted for more than 24 hours.
And the one person operated apartments are usually undercapitalized and doesn’t have a professional maintenance staff. The ones I have stayed at have on site office personnel.
These were both in the north suburbs of Atlanta - one was mid upper end at the time and the other was in one of the more affluent neighborhoods