Student Apartment Building in College Park, Maryland Accused of Years-Long Mice Infestation and Predatory Business Practices
The University Club apartments, located at 4800 Berwyn House Road in College Park, Maryland, is a privately owned housing complex, primarily populated with students from the nearby University of Maryland (UMD).
University Club (UC) also has a history of chronic mice infestation, failed code inspections, and dubious business practices that go back at least nine years.
Former tenants going back at least to 2012 allege that UC improperly withheld their security deposits, charged them frivolous cleaning fees, frequently shut off the water with little notice, and did not adequately address a widespread mice infestation.
The pattern of unsanitary conditions and predatory practices go back to when UC was under different ownership, demonstrating the impunity with which different owners can mistreat college aged tenants in College Park and across the country.
UC has changed ownership twice in the last 7 years. The first was when a joint venture of University Communities LLC, a housing firm with offices in Colorado, and the California State Teacher’s Retirement System (CalSTRS), purchased the property in 2014 from a subsidiary of McKinney Properties, a housing firm based in Pennsylvania.
The second change in ownership was when a subsidiary of Global Student Accommodations (GSA), purchased it in May 2021 for $24.5M. GSA is based in the UK, and operates student housing in nine countries, and are the current owners of UC.
Though ownership has changed, management practices and personnel have changed little. When McKinney sold the property in 2014, the then new owners kept many of the same exploitative and extractive business practices.
When GSA took over, they also purchased UComm LLC, UC’s management company under the previous owners, and kept much of the same upper management: its president, Lee Ryder; it’s Chief Operating Officer, Dennis Hardie; and General Counsel, Christine Garrison.
But it remains to be seen if GSA will pursue the same practices as past owners, despite retaining the same upper management.
It isn’t a good sign though that they declined my request to take a tour of the property so I could see the rooms for myself and to interview current tenants, or to see a sample lease given to tenants to see what their terms were (more recent tenants signed their leases online and no longer have access to them).
GSA did not offer substantive comment on this article.
Tenant Complaints
A quick look at the reviews for UC on Google Maps, Apartments.com, and apartmentratings.com turns up years of strikingly similar complaints. The chronic presence of mice, predatory towing, unjust cleaning fees, and improperly withheld deposits.
When these former tenants were contacted, they expounded on the same themes and in the same terms: mice, water shut-offs, misleading tours, unresponsive management, unjust bills sent to collection agencies and damaged credit scores.
Precise dollar amounts were stated by multiple tenants. The standard cleaning fee assessed is $150 if the carpet is not professionally cleaned by an approved service, regardless of the actual condition of the carpet upon move-out, or what the condition was upon move-in.
They would recall these details with astonishing consistency without being prompted by me, over and over.
Laura Acsadi, the mother of one former tenant who moved into UC in August of 2012 (then owned by McKinney) kept many emails and other contemporary documents.
She said when she took possession of the room, it was not cleaned, and some amenities were broken. She also noted that common areas were filthy, and that it could take days for vomit to be cleaned from frequently walked areas.
As an isolated event, this would be minor. But Laura would note events that took place in 2012 and 2013 that would be repeated in subsequent years, despite the change in ownership that would take place in the summer of 2014.
For example, she noted that they charged $150 from their security deposit to clean the carpet after her daughter moved out even though the room had not been cleaned when she moved in, and she left it in better condition than she found it.
Other tenants reported the same: the room was dirty upon entering, they would tidy up before leaving, and be charged $150 regardless.
A move-out checklist I obtained, dated in May of 2019, shows that the cleaning fee for a single room is $150. Tenants are required to have the carpets professionally cleaned by an approved service and produce a receipt upon leaving, or else UC will clean them and charge $150 for it, without regard for the actual condition of the carpet.
The same move out packet also itemizes the cost to clean and repair certain items. It isn’t clear if this level of detail is specified in the lease (since GSA, the current owners, declined to provide me one), or what level of cleaning is required to trigger a charge.
Under Maryland law, property owners cannot charge tenants’ security deposit for what amounts to “ordinary wear and tear”. The move-out packet makes no reference to this fact.
Another move-out packet I obtained, dated from July 2017 is essentially the same document, suggesting that this policy is an official one that is carried out across the years with little to no change.
There is some inconsistency as to whether this requirement is spelled out in the lease, or just the move-out packets. Two tenants, Sarah Bullard and Kara Stevens do not recall that requirement being in the lease, though another tenant, Sara Samadani, told me it was. They moved into UC in separate years (2017, 2019, and 2016 respectively) so it is possible this requirement changed over the years.
Laura Acsadi provided me the section of the 2012 lease that dealt with move-out procedures, and it makes no mention of a requirement to have the carpets professionally cleaned.
Laura says her daughter paid a $300 deposit and the whole deposit was seized, $150 to clean the room and $150 to clean the carpet. She contested both, and got the $150 for the room back, but not the carpet on the grounds that she did not produce a receipt for the cleaning, even though this was not required in the lease at the time. She says she let this charge go since it wasn’t worth the effort.
Laura also shared an email with me from June 6, 2013 in which she informs the then owners that they can only enforce the language in the lease, and that the professional carpet cleaning is mentioned only in the move-out packet and not the lease itself:
The requirement to have the carpets professionally cleaned was certainly in the move-out packet in 2017 and 2019 (and likely other years too). But it doesn’t seem to have been required in the 2012 lease when UC had different ownership (but the same business practices).
I cannot verify if this specific requirement has been in more recent leases or not without GSA providing me one, which they declined to do.
However, the practice of charging fees for the purposes of cleaning the carpet itself is inconsistent with the condition tenants say they found their room in, whether or not it is described in the lease. Former tenants would frequently insist that the room they would move into was already dirty, and they left it cleaner upon move out.
Charging $150 to clean rooms is a dubious practice if rooms are not actually cleaned.
Cleaning fees and deposits
Besides Ms. Acsadi, other former tenants confirmed the practice of frivolous fees and withheld deposits.
Carla Mardesich, who lived at UC from August 2014 to August 2016, was sent to collections for a $15 fee for a mailbox key.
Except Carla was never issued any such key. A representative of UC told her by email in October 2016 that they never gave her one. Come January of 2018, over a year later, she was still emailing UC asking them to remove the charge, and it was still affecting her credit score. Carla says she paid this fee just to get the charge off her credit score, even though UC confirmed she did not actually owe it.
As young people who often have a lot of debt, college students are uniquely vulnerable to this sort of coercion, and many tenants I interviewed told me they simply paid fees they felt were unfair, and did not contest their deposits because it wasn’t worth the trouble.
UC will also deduct security deposits under vague pretenses. One former tenant named Sarah Bullard, who lived at UC from August 2017 to July 2019, had two $50 charges taken from her deposit for “damage charges”, with no specific damages described in the notice.
Sarah also told she didn’t understand the electric charges. She told me she suspects the charges were “utter bull crap”.
She was present during the move-out inspection, and she says the inspector noted no damages. Like many former tenants, she decided that contesting the withheld deposit was not worth the trouble. Out of a $200 deposit, UC took $121.03 leaving $78.97.
She told me she didn’t bother to contest these fees because of the stressful experience of her lawsuit against UC, which she brought because of the presence of mice in her apartment. She explained:
“that entire court case was so demoralizing and discouraging that I just wanted to get away from that godforsaken company. I knew they were gonna screw me over and I just wanted away from them”.
Sarah’s claim that she simply did not have the morale to begin another lawsuit is one that was parroted by other former tenants. Her remarks here illustrate the limited options tenants have, and the effort they have to exert to protect themselves from property owners.
In other years, UC could be very specific with what they were deducting for. One such security deposit notice emailed to Sara Samadani, who lived at UC from August 2016 to July 2017, (she moved out just before Sarah Bullard moved in) shows what sorts of things UC might actually deduct for:
Her story is a tired one by now: she cleaned the place before leaving, was told during the walkthrough that the place as clean, and then was billed for new paint and cleaning. Sara told me she was also billed for broken window blinds, even though they were broken when she arrived and sent multiple maintenance requests to have them fixed while she was there.
Sara says she later returned to the property to see if they had actually painted the walls they had charged her $125 for, and saw that they had not.
Though this is the only explicit confirmation that UC charges students for repairs that they never make, it is consistent with the most natural interpretation of the testimony of other former tenants who claimed they inherited a dirty room and were charged to clean it when they moved out.
A former employee of UC who is knowledgeable on UC’s fees, but who asked to remain anonymous, explained to me that “they want to charge” and “they will nickel and dime every single resident”. They also said that these fees are unfair, and confirmed that rooms are often dirty when residents move in.
Jacob Hogan, who lived there from the Fall of 2014 to the summer of 2017, was also billed $150, and was likewise sent to collections without being contacted. He told me he also inherited his room dirty, and cleaned it himself. His security deposit was also seized, and he claims that he was never given an explanation why.
Jacob also noted another common practice of UC: misleading tours.
Misleading Tours
Not a single former tenant I interviewed said they saw the room they would end up renting, and I interviewed eleven, plus one mother. Two of them said that the model room they were shown was misleading.
Jacob explained that the model room was clean, and his was not. Sadia said the same, and explicitly said the model room was misleading.
A property owner showing a model room, when the actual room is occupied, to someone who hasn’t committed to a tenancy yet isn’t necessarily suspect. However, in this case it is suspect because tenants alleged they were charged for conditions present when they moved in, conditions they were unaware of because the model room was clean.
Some tenants also had rooms overrun with mice, and recall being told by building maintenance and code inspectors that the mice issue was an old one, and was widespread in the building.
If prospective tenants had been allowed to see more than a mere model, they may have been reluctant to move into UC.
Mice Infestation and Lawsuits
Some former tenants did file lawsuits against UC besides Sarah Bullard. No less than four tenants brought escrow lawsuits against UC from November of 2017 to November of 2018.
An escrow lawsuit is one option a tenant has when there are conditions that are unsafe or unhealthy in their residence. It allows them to pay rent into an account established by a court instead of the property owner, depriving the owner of rent until they prove they have adequately fixed the problem. Once the property owner has corrected the issue to the court’s satisfaction, the money paid to the court is then given to the landlord.
In three of the four cases, an inspection was ordered by the District Court for Prince George’s County and conducted by the city of College Park. Two of the three were obtained through public records requests: the inspections of the rooms of Paul Ghanem and Mychele Lynn.
The inspection of Sarah Bullard’s room, who also filed an escrow suit, is unavailable for unknown reasons. The document is presumed lost.
One of the plaintiffs, Paul Ghanem, lived in UC in 2017 until the end of 2018. He began to see mice in June of 2018 in his apartment, room 521 on the 5th floor. He told me they were getting in through the central air system. College Park’s code enforcement inspected his room on October 3, and UC failed the inspection for the presence of rodents.
Ghanem filed his escrow suit on October 30. A re-inspection was set for November 5, which UC likewise failed, again for rodents.
The College Park inspector, Charles Reading, testified on his behalf at a hearing on December 4, and the Court set up an escrow account and ordered another inspection, which took place on December 13. UC failed this also, and again for the presence of rodents.
Charles Reading could not be contacted for comment.
UC failed three inspections in the same unit in three consecutive months. In the final inspection, the inspector noted that UC had provided documentation that the problem was being addressed, but UC wouldn’t go on to pass an inspection. Instead, Paul would go on to move out. This suggests that whatever was done was inadequate.
Paul confirmed to me that UC did send out an exterminator, but it didn’t fix the problem. Paul says he killed about four mice with traps he bought himself.
Paul told me that when College Park’s inspector, Charles Reading, appeared to inspect his room, Reading told him that he had other rooms in the property to inspect. Paul did not remember which inspection this was, but this memory is consistent with the widespread rodent problem at UC at this time.
There was a follow-up court hearing on the 18th of December, but no additional inspections were ordered. At this hearing, UC’s lawyer offered to terminate Paul’s lease if he would drop the suit, and Paul agreed. He says he moved out by the end of the month.
No follow-up hearing was ordered, and I do not know who moved into room 521 after Paul.
Paul says he was later billed the customary $150 and UC took his deposit too. By then he was too fatigued from the system to contest it, not unlike Sarah.
Paul’s experience demonstrates the problem with an escrow system that does not refund the tenant the rent until problems are fixed, but instead merely withholds it from the owner. This disincentivizes the tenant from taking justified legal action, since they are not compensated for their legal fees, time, or for having to live in conditions that a court deems unsafe and/or unsanitary.
Before I concluded my interview with Paul I asked him if there was anything else I should I know. He answered “they are terrible people”.
Mychele Lynn, who lived at UC in 2018 and 2019, says she started seeing mice in the July of 2018. She also kept detailed records and memoranda.
She told me UC maintenance laid glue traps. She says the maintenance man who placed them said that the problem was due to the structure of the building and that the mice problem used to be much worse. Mychele was not told this nugget prior to moving in, and as you might guess, she was not shown the room she would actually rent prior to renting it.
Mychele would later discover that the wall in her bedroom did not go all the way down to the floor, providing mice an opportunity to get into her room.
She told me the building manager at the time, Brittney Lewis, told her that they would just lay down traps until the problem went away.
When she filed an escrow suit on November 19, 2018, and the court ordered an inspection, the inspector, Charles Reading again, told her that they had had many complaints there. UC would fail the first inspection in her 3rd floor room on January 2, 2019 for the presence of rodents. Reading again noted evidence that UC was working on the problem.
On February 11, 2019, Mychele’s room was inspected again. The inspector noted a possible rodent infestation, and again evidence of treatment. A re-inspection date was set for March 11, but it never took place.
Like Paul Ghanem, Mychele spoke with a lawyer for UC, and he offered to terminate her lease in April of 2019 instead of August. If Mychele paid the rent for March and April, her lease would be cancelled without penalty. Mychele accepted this offer.
The Court recorded this agreement taking place on February 15, 2019.
Despite this agreement being on the record, she received a delinquent payment notice for the remaining months (May through July) which damaged her credit score. She had to go back to the court to get records of the agreement and then forward them to UC to get the charges removed, and they were eventually dropped.
After Mychele did all that work just to get UC to do what they agreed to do, they naturally kept her security deposit, and Mychele was too fatigued to fight for it.
Once is an anecdote, twice is a pattern. And we’re not done yet either.
Sarah Bullard told me she started seeing some mice early in her tenancy, which began August of 2017, but she described the problem as minor. The problem got worse, and she sent in a work order about mice as early as February 16, 2018.
Sarah also kept detailed memoranda of when she saw mice beginning in July 2018 in which she documented seeing mice repeatedly in her bedroom and hallway outside her room.
The mice infestation went uncorrected for months. She described to me how she had to throw away food because mice were chewing through containers. She and her roommates put out moth balls and snap traps that they bought with her own money.
The problem was so persistent that she describes having seen smaller mice she believed were babies, which means the mice were not just entering but reproducing in the property. Sarah sent me many pictures of mice feces all over her apartment.
Sarah told me that UC’s maintenance staff put expanding foam in the cracks the mice were using to enter. The foam was quickly chewed through and the problem resumed. She said “the only effective treatment was done by us”. Like many former tenants, she had strong memories and strong feelings, telling me “I hate that place”. Like everyone else, she was shown a model room, but not the room she would actually occupy.
Sarah sent another email complaining about mice on July 30, 2018. The building manager at the time, Brittney Lewis, offered to allow Sarah to cancel her lease renewal and vacate the next day. Sarah responded that she would have nowhere to go the next day, but said she could leave by the end of August. Brittney told her that wouldn’t be possible since her lease expired the next day.
Sarah had no way of knowing that the only way to get UC to cancel a lease early is to have multiple court hearings and failed inspections.
She told me the “whole apartment building was infested”, and this is confirmed in an email sent from manager Brittney Lewis to an apartment-mate of hers (Sarah is cc’d in the email), when they told her that they had to add her to a “list of exterminations” in an email dated August 21, 2018. Sarah and her apartment-mates lived on the 4th floor.
Sarah filed an escrow suit August 2, 2018. Without access to inspection records, I cannot say with certainty how the inspection(s) of her room went.
However, court records show that the Prince George’s County District Court received an inspection report on September 24, 2018, and Sarah made her first escrow payment three days later, which suggests that UC failed this inspection.
The escrow suit was closed on October 16, 2018, which is consistent with UC ending the infestation in Sarah’s room, but Sarah told me that the problem continued until she until graduated in December.
More mice
Though she did not file an escrow suit, Sadia Alao lived on the 4th floor from July 2018 to July 2019, at the same time the escrow suits were taking place, and told me about a significant mice infestation. She told me that the first night she was there, a loaf of bread was torn to pieces in the bag by mice.
Kara Stevens says she lived at UC from December 2019 to July 2020 on the 6th floor. Prior to moving out, she began to notice mice.
She told me that her emotional support animal (a dog) woke her up one night. The dog was in bathroom playing with what looked like a toy. Kara is near-sighted and reached down and picked it up. It was a dead mouse.
She explained that she had read online reviews about UC talking about mice, but did not believe them (always believe consumer reviews). Unlike most others, she says she got her deposit back and was not charged a cleaning fee. She credits this to her emotional support animal and her threats to sue them for discrimination.
Kara had to contact maintenance many times before they responded, and they put out a few traps. She told me UC never brought exterminators to her unit, and the mice were there until the day she moved out in July of 2020, nearly two years after the first escrow lawsuits on record.
The same former employee of UC who agreed to speak with me on condition of anonymity, confirmed that “there is a major mice problem at University Club”. They explained that there were weekly exterminations every Friday, and if a resident complained about mice they would be added to an extermination list.
They explained that the mice are living in the walls of the building, and that the mice issue continued into 2021.
The former employee told me that when prospective tenants who have read the reviews ask about mice, they do not deny that there are mice, but they “sugar coat it”. In practice, this means that they blame the residents for not being clean and taking precautions to prevent mice.
They told me that they left UC because of their unethical business practices, and that the mice problem was still present when the source left their position earlier this year. I cannot say precisely when or how they lost their position without compromising their anonymity.
I was able to obtain four extermination records from October of 2018, dated October 5, 12, 19, and 26 of 2018 (all Fridays). These were the only such records that College Park had, and should not be read as a comprehensive list of all exterminations at UC in relation to mice. Remember, the earliest email confirming these weekly exterminations is dated from August of 2018 (shown above).
UC at the time had 132 rooms available. On October 5, 2018, 21 rooms had a mice infestation, or approximately 15.9%. This means if you lived at UC that day, there was about a one in six chance that you one, had mice, and two, reported it, since only those who reported the problem were added to the list, per the anonymous source.
On the 12th and 19th, 7 out of 132 rooms had mice. And on the 26th, 18 rooms had mice, or about 13.6% of rooms
The documentary record in the possession of College Park for these exterminations ends on the 26th, but keep in mind that UC would continue to fail court ordered inspections until February of 2019 when they let Mychele Lynn move out, and the former employee of UC confirmed that it continued into 2021.
Online reviews alleging the presence of mice continue past then, with the most recent being posted on Google Maps in June of 2021. The current tenants would have moved in sometime in August of 2021.
The extermination record dated on October 26th does note that 5 out of the 18 rooms had very poor housekeeping, and implies that this exacerbated the mouse problem. I am willing to take their word for it, but since three of the five rooms were on the 3rd floor, and another one on the 5th, one wonders how these mice were able to exploit the poor housekeeping.
For the zoologically uninformed, mice cannot fly. That there would be mice on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th floors of a six floor apartment suggests a deep and long-lasting mice infestation, and is consistent with tenant assertions that the problem was not addressed appropriately, and was left untreated long enough for mice to reproduce in large numbers, as Sarah Bullard (4th floor) suggested. It is also more consistent with the assertion that the mice are living in the walls, than that the tenants are simply dirty mouse-mongers.
UC never passed a rodent inspection when a court was involved, going 0 for 5. In the case of Paul Ghanem and Mychele Lynn, they agreed to just let the tenant go instead of fixing the problem.
Water Shut-offs
UC also has a history of frequent water shut-offs in the entire building, sometimes on short notice. Jacob Hogan told me there would sometimes be water shut-offs at UC “several times a month”.
Jacob was able to share 12 examples of total water shut offs in the entire building with me, one isolated shut off, and one water reduction. There was only one month during Jacob’s stay that rose to the level of “several times a month”, and that was April of 2017, in which there were three total shut offs and one reduction. These shutoffs appear to have been on and off from April 17 to April 20 of 2017.
Previously in Jacob’s tenancy, UC acknowledged in an email dated November 6, 2015 that they had received complaints about water shut-offs from the year before (Jacob documented four shut-offs between April and August of 2015.)
In the same email, UC said they would isolate sections of the building so that they did not have to shut off the water for the whole building just to make repairs in a single room.
Water shut-offs can be a necessary part of building maintenance, and it looks like this problem was addressed.
However, after this email was sent, UC would still shut off the water for the whole building when they needed to make a repair in a room that did not have an “individual shut off valve”. Jacob documented an additional six complete water shut offs from November of 2015, when this email was sent, to June of 2017, a month before he moved out.
UC would usually give at least 24 hours’ notice of these shut offs, but gave imminent notice (effectively none at all) at least three times (June 2015 and April 2017 twice) and gave five hours’ notice once (August 2015) during Jacob’s tenancy, according to his communications with them.
Luke Matanin would pick up the record in November 2017 when he filed an escrow lawsuit against UC, not for mice, but for water shut-offs.
Luke lived at UC from August 2016 to July 2018, and also had a problem with mice that he described as “minor” explaining that he only had to kill a few. Luke also told me that his room was dirty when they moved in. He says they also tried to take his deposit, but they relented after several months of pestering.
Though many others have complained about water shut-offs, Luke is the only former tenant who appears to have taken legal action on that basis. He told me his case was dismissed on procedural grounds December 22, 2017, but court records do not specify the reason.
The same day Luke filed his lawsuit, November 2, 2017, College Park code enforcement conducted an inspection of UC (I cannot confirm if the two events are directly related, but it seems likely). UC failed this inspection on the grounds that water was not running in multiple kitchens. This gives credibility to Luke’s assertion that his case was dismissed on technical grounds, and not because he was lying about water shut-offs.
I was unable to obtain a record of the re-inspection that was scheduled for December 2, 2017, and it is unclear if it ever took place. Luke’s lawsuit was dismissed December 22, 2017.
Luke shared with me his communications with UC in the weeks leading up to his unsuccessful lawsuit. The emails document some of the most flagrant water shut-offs and arrogance from management.
On October 6, 2017, Luke was informed that he would be losing water in his sink and dishwasher for a repair. He was given a few hours’ notice that his water would be off for three days.
On October 18, he and the occupants of six other apartments (not the entire building) were informed by UC that their water would be off from the 23rd to 30th, and the email suggests that his water had actually been off the entire time since the 6th by speaking in the past tense (“this has been an inconvenience”). Luke confirmed this interpretation to me, and it would be confirmed by subsequent emails. Luke was in room 507.
The email also says that Luke and the other residents would be refunded $100 in their rent. Luke was paying $549 in rent a month at the time.
The combination of emails and inspection records show that Luke and the other affected residents were without water in their kitchens from at least the 6th of October to the 2nd of November.
Another email, sent by then building manager Heather Plater-Carlock to a regional manager, Melissa Cholak, shows that all of this was done to fix a leak in a single room, apartment 106. UC’s efforts to prevent building-wide shut-offs were technically successful since this was not a building-wide shut-off, but they failed to quickly restore full operation to the seven effected rooms.
Luke complained vociferously to management. In a typo-laden and confusing email, Melissa Cholak explained the reasoning behind the $100 rent rebate in an email from October 23, 2017:
It isn’t clear what “the 21st day” in the email refers to. My best guess is that she is saying the water will be back on 21 days after October 6, when it was first shut off, meaning the 27th of October (it would end up taking longer than that).
In the email, Cholak solemnly explained the market price of tap water as well as her Christ-like generosity in calculating the $100 rent rebate. But Luke wasn’t asking to be compensated for water he never consumed. He wanted to be compensated for the reduction in living standards from the loss of running kitchen water he thought he would have when he paid rent for that month.
After Luke told Cholak that he intended to file a lawsuit, she responded that $100 was fair because Luke still had “over 90% usage of his home”.
If this email seems arrogant to you, that’s because it is. It’s the arrogance of impunity.
Sarah Bullard continues this narrative beginning in April of 2018, and ending in June 2019. In that time period, she documents nine water shut-offs in the entire building, suggesting again that UC’s effort to prevent total shut-offs were still incomplete at best.
Four of the nine came without warning, and were estimated to last between 30 minutes and three hours. I cannot know how long they actually took.
The frequency and lack of notice is what is important here, not that UC was making repairs, which on its own would be a good thing.
UC also did not live up to their commitment to upgrade the water system so that total shut-offs would be no longer be necessary to fix one just a single sink.
In one extraordinary case, UC actually shut off the water in the whole building for an estimated three hours to upgrade a single vanity sink in the conference room in February 2019. Tenants were given about 16 hours notice.
Dubious positive reviews
Positive online reviews for UC do exist.
Positive reviews for an apartment building aren’t exactly newsworthy since that it how commercial residences are supposed to function, but there is reason to doubt the veracity and sincerity of these reviews.
Some reviews allege that the positive reviews are fake. More specifically, former tenants allege that tenants are bribed with gift cards to leave positive reviews. Some tenants I spoke to suggest that this could be the case, but weren’t certain.
The way it was described to me by tenants made it sound like a rumor, and no tenant was that confident that it was actually true.
I was able to find a positive review for UC left by the aforementioned Brittney Lewis, a former manager of UC. According to her LinkedIn, she started working at UC in January 2018. The review was left on UC’s Facebook page on April 16, 2018.
She did this without indicating that she was an employee of UC, and thereby implied that she was a former or current tenant who enjoyed her time there.
I spoke with Brittney Lewis, and she told me:
“I did the best I could for the residents with what authority and power I had. Only regret I have is for the review I left which I totally forgot I left and have since deleted”.
I noticed the review had been taken down on September 27, 2021.
This anecdote establishes that UC is sensitive to its atrocious reviews, and isn’t above inserting misleading positive reviews to try to offset them.
The former employee I spoke to was able to confirm that tenants are paid in the form of $10 gift cards to leave positive reviews, and added some context to the practice.
The former employee explained to me that tenants are targeted for gift cards. If management suspected that a tenant had a positive stay, they would be approached and encouraged to leave a review and promised a gift card if they did.
Theoretically, even if a tenant left a bad review, they would still be given the gift card if they were promised one. However, this was unlikely since the offer was not mentioned to tenants likely to leave a negative review.
This practice of limited targeting is consistent with how former tenants described the practice. Few had heard of it at all. The ones who had heard of it, reported it in a mythological tone, as if they had only heard of it through unverified gossip.
This was not an offer made publicly to all residents, nor one made privately to any of my tenant sources.
The combination of tenant testimony, the misleading positive review from a former manager, and the testimony of the former employee should be enough to cast doubt on many of the positive reviews available on the internet, especially the vaguer ones.
They could be former tenants who thought mentioning their negative experiences along with the positive and giving a mixed review could compromise their gift card.
Or they could even be employees of UC.
Conclusion
At this point you might ask why students keep moving in, or why some stay for multiple years.
Kara’s explanation was the simplest: housing is expensive in College Park, and she could afford to live at UC. The rent at UC is cheaper than some other college housing in the area.
Sadia attributes it to naïve college students who don’t know any better, and the high cost of housing in the area that forces them to accept lower quality housing.
The central planning in many American cities that deliberately keeps housing stock low, and therefore housing prices high, makes it easier for landlords and management companies to abuse their tenants, since many cannot afford to leave.
College students are also more transient than other tenants, and so if they hated an apartment and swore never to return, nothing changes. They would have left soon anyway. Just bring the new class of students in.
College students are young, and often don’t know their rights and what to look for in prospective landlords. Many come from other states and so don’t know local laws. Others, like Paul Ghanem, come from other countries and so have less familiarity with the American legal system. Not that it would have helped much anyway; Paul was helped far more by his resourcefulness and stamina than Maryland landlord-tenant law. (Paul told me this was his first experience with renting in America).
According to Laura Acsadi, the nearby University of Maryland (UMD) encouraged students to live there, at least at the time her daughter moved in during the summer of 2012.
Carol Ott, one of the directors of the Fair Housing Center of Maryland told me that “UMD has allowed outside management companies to treat their students badly”.
When reached for comment, UMD said:
“UMD students have a wide range of housing options in the Greater College Park area including on-campus housing owned by the University and privately-owned housing off campus. The University of Maryland does not own or manage the University Club apartments.
The University’s Off-Campus Housing Services Office provides a range of resources and information for students looking for housing in the Greater College Park area, including housing locator services via the UMD Off-Campus Housing database and educational events such as Off-Campus Living Fairs where private landlords and apartment property managers can provide information and list their properties’ availability to UMD students, faculty, and staff. Private, off-campus properties such as University Club may choose to participate or provide sponsorship for these events, however, the UMD Off-Campus Housing Services Office does not endorse, inspect, or recommend any specific homes or apartment communities.
If concerns arise for a student who has signed a lease with a local off-campus apartment community, the student tenant should contact the property management office and escalate any unresolved concerns to the property manager, if needed. UMD students are also welcome to engage the university’s Student Legal Aid Office if they have questions about the terms of their lease. Renters who have concerns with their landlord can also contact the City of College Park Code Enforcement Office regarding any alleged city or county code violations.”
This article should not be construed as an exoneration of any other apartment complex. Rather, it is a deep dive into a single apartment building to demonstrate what can be gotten away with.
Why couldn’t other buildings and property owners do precisely what UC has done, if not more? There is no reason at all.
The “bad apple” objection doesn’t get you very far. This objection asserts, effectively, that tenant rights and dignity should be left at the mercy of apartment management and the hope for “good apples”, rather than scrupulously enforced by law and market competition. There is evidently little of either in College Park (and surely many other cities).
To re-cap: from February 2018 to February of 2019 UC more nearly resembled a petting zoo than an apartment building. They likely had more resident mice than humans, and systemically failed to address the problem sufficiently and instead opted to let two tenants simply leave the property.
There is more evidence that this problem continues to the present day than that it suddenly stopped.
When I asked for UC’s assistance in interviewing current tenants, they declined. (I specifically asked if I could tour the property and distribute my contact information to current tenants).
UC, with no exception known to me and my sources, failed to allow prospective tenants to look at the room they would actually occupy, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the model room resembled the actual room, which it typically did not.
For the entire time period of my research, starting in July 2012 to the present day, tenants have alleged that they were charged frivolous fees and had their deposits seized in whole or in part on dubious grounds.
Tenants spent weeks in court battles just to get UC to adequately address their mouse problem. UC never did address it adequately, but tenants exhausted themselves without any monetary compensation. Not just that, but they lost money, not just from time and travel, but from fees and seized deposits.
As my reporting shows, the fact that only four tenants brought escrow suits (three for mice, and one for water shut offs, with inspection records existing for two) shouldn’t be read as a minor mouse problem. It should be read as an indictment on Maryland’s tenant rights law and court system, which makes lawsuits of this kind prohibitively costly to tenants, and therefore uncommon.
The earliest former customer of UC that I spoke to was Laura Acsadi, whose daughter moved into UC in 2012. She described the property to the then ownership, “I am of the opinion that this property is very poorly managed and resembles a slum property”.
That was 2012. The other 7000 something words of this article describe events that happened between then and now.
Something is wrong at UC, and it is deep, and cuts across ownership. The current state of Maryland landlord-tenant law has profoundly failed these people.
If you are tempted to console yourself by thinking that this is just a Maryland problem, then I’d like to spoil that too. University Communities, the former partial owner of UC (2014 to May 2021), has an F rating with the Better Business Bureau. This rating comes from a failure to respond to four customer complaints. One was from Minnesota, another from Illinois, and the other two did not specify a location.
University Club in College Park is not alone.
If you are tempted to believe that new ownership will fix these problems, don’t. At least not until it actually happens. They refused to allow me to conduct basic reporting steps that could have served their reputation well, and they maintain the same upper management as the previous owners.
The unreported subjects of this article, the current tenants of UC, moved in sometime in August of this year.
