My husband and I viewed a Timberglen 1 bedroom/den apartment in the last week of November because we needed to find a nice unit, with a great deal in a relatively short period of time. The tour of the apartment was conducted during the day and my husband noticed that there was still dirt in the kitchen. He asked if it would be cleaned by move-in and the leasing consultant assured us that it would be. The selling point for us was all of the upgrades, i. E new appliances, carpets and closet shelving units. Even better was the $199.00 moves-you-in special.
We signed the lease in the early evening of November 30 and went to look around the apartment. Once inside the unit, we noticed a few live roaches on the kitchen counter near the sink and began to look around for more roaches. They were in the cabinets and one even had somehow gotten in the freezer and was frozen. These were not the huge cockroaches that one thinks of, but the small German kind. We immediately returned to the leasing office and insisted that they do something about it since we obviously weren't going to be sleeping there with roaches. To their credit, they sent in a maintenance person who bombed the apartment and apologized to us because we weren't going to be able to spend the night in the unit and told us that it had been worse prior to then re-doing the unit.
The next day we went and there were still roaches in the apartment, so we told the leasing staff that we would need another downstairs unit, a unit at a sister property or even another unit that was more expensive, but that we could not stay in that apartment. The next day we went back to check on the progress of the bombing and laid down bay leaves. At this point we saw roaches coming out of the woodwork and again let it be known that something had to be done.
On the following Monday, I was telephoned by the manager and solutions were offered such as sending out a pest control person and having someone come into the unit and manually suck out the live roaches. As my husband and I felt this should have been done anyway, we neither agreed or disagreed with this course of action. I did request another unit again at the same site or another sister location. I called the corporate office and have not heard from them again. The manager offered us an upstairs unit equal to the that of the 1BR/Den and were told that we would be allowed to live there until our unit was under control and that we could not be given preferential treatment over the other tenants. This was not acceptable to us as we needed a downstairs unit due to the fact that two of us are physically handicapped and the alternative of literally moving into a roach infested apartment seemed unreal, unclean and unhealthy. Less than 72 hours later on that Monday afternoon, I told the manager that we wanted out of the lease, but she told us that we could not get out of the lease.
With the help of a housing crisis center pro bono attorney, we wrote of letter of repair request and sent it to the manager because we felt we couldn't win in court trying to fight the fact that the lease hadn't even been signed or that we wanted out less than 72 hours later or that we hadn't even spent a single night there. The letter indicated again that we wanted another downstairs unit at either Timberglen or a sister property and that we would give them 7 - 10 days to repair the problem. The manager phoned me and spoke of how my husband and I were calling her integrity into question and that she had done all she could do by sending out the exterminator and that basically she had fulfilled her legal obligation, but still no consideration was given to tearing up the lease. Her rebuttal to our letter said that she was on top of the situation and that she had acted reasonably by sending out the exterminatory, by offering us a larger downstairs unit and by offering an upstairs unit like the one we wanted. A larger unit was never offered. Had it been, my husband I would have gladly taken it. We understand that Timberglen is trying to operate a business.
When we went to visit the attorney a second time we were told that Texas law favors the landlord and that we would have hard time proving our case. We decided to find another apartment because we still had no place of our own and was living with family. Since we were being held to the lease and had paid December's rent, we decided to put it out of our minds and attempted to enjoy the holidays before continuing the fight.
On January 5, I phoned Timberglen and let them know that we needed to make an appointment to return the keys and to broker a deal to get out of the lease since clearly we have never lived in the space. The manager phoned the following Monday and told us that they had begun the process of evicting us and that if the keys weren't returned and a letter breaking the lease wasn't submitted, that our credit would be affected. I was told that the deal would be what was in the lease, which is about 3 months rent. We wrote the letter and handed in the keys and we were told that we would be billed, but they would not accept payments lower than $100 a month.
Today, January 9, I heard from the realtor who referred me that Timberglen would not be paying the referral fee because we were breaking the lease. The manager also revealed to the realtor that she should attempt to collect from our new apartment complex since we had signed a lease elsewhere.in addition to revealing this information, my realtor informed me that manager has concluded that my husband and I are running some kind of scam.
We have had our "integrity" called into question, we've suffered financially from this experience and now we are being defamed simply because we felt that moving people into a roach infested apartment and refusing to let them out of the lease was unethical. This all could have been avoided if Timberglen and the corporate office practiced a bit of ethics and had a little more integrity.
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