Actually, it’s kind of an interesting story about a seedy Chicago real estate agency. So the apartments I live in had a pretty bad reputation- not that there was crime or anything, but I’m right by a bunch of hospitals and a lot of my neighbors are southeast Asians (mostly Indian) who are here for medical school. That’s not the problem. The problem is that Management Company A was having problems with housekeeping and maintenance in some of the units (which were built in the 80s and hadn’t been renovated in quite some time) and blaming it on them- I was once told by someone in the management office that “they don’t even let their women learn to read,” and he said that in all seriousness, like he thought I’d commiserate with him instead of saying “why would you say that, you know my neighbors are female medical students, that’s pretty racist.” They’d always been super nice to me, but, y’know. I’m white. I didn’t know how dang racist they were when I moved in, otherwise I wouldn’t have signed the lease. Anyways, Company A for some mysterious reason gets a lot of bad reviews on the apartments, they’re losing money and tenants, and so they sell out to Company B. And Company B was shady as hell. Company A informed us of the transition, and when Company B moved in, they went over everyone’s lease and found new and interesting ways to charge them. They tried to charge my elderly across-the-hall neighbor extra maintenance fees for her wheelchair- she had a power chair, and they were going to charge her extra fees for wear and tear, which is illegal. My animals are in my lease, and despite Company A telling me that there wouldn’t be any problems and that I’d be grandfathered in, Company B said they had a new pet policy: one dog under 25 pounds or one cat per unit, nothing else, and pet rent went up from a flat payment of 100 per year to 100 per month. And no pets would be grandfathered in- so if you had a big dog, you had to move. Suffice it to say, people were freaking out, me included. They also closed our swimming pool, took one of the elevators out of commission (that had JUST BEEN FIXED), turned off the air conditioning in the laundry room, and just generally made everyone miserable...
Until three weeks later, when Company B disappeared. They just up and left, didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t tell maintenance, didn’t tell the concierge- they just fucking left. There was no one in the front office for like a week, and then Company C moved in- and that’s who we’ve got now. They’ve done a lot of work to rebrand the apartments, including a new name, renovating all the units, and renovating the infrastructure and amenities buildings, and they went back to the original pet policy (no rodents and no aquariums over 60 gallons, which has more to do with the potential damage that 60 gallons of water dumped on the floor can cause than anything else).
Company C is a pretty good management company. Company C’s agents, however, are all under a non-disclosure agreement re: what happened with Company B. I can find no mentions of Company B online, their website is gone, and the one e-mail I had during the less-than-a-month tenure of Company B gives me no clues as to what happened to them.