I am not impressed by the owner of this complex. He doesn't value his tenants or the money they spend just trying to live in a decent apartment while going to school. The new renovations are purely cosmetic. He's putting in laminate flooring in place of the carpeting in the living room and kitchen in the Latah apartments. That in itself is an improvement as far as cleaning and duribility goes but my problem is with him calling it hard wood flooring when advertising it to potential tenants like he did with us before we had signed our lease. We signed and after all was said and done he refused to remodel our apartment because we had signed with a lower unremodelled rental rate before he'd decided he was going to up the price to cover the remodel cost. In effect, he didn't want to spend the money remodeling our unit if we weren't paying more in rent even though we signed with the verbal agreement that our unit (and all the others) would have new hard wood flooring. Laminate flooring is NOT hard wood. In fact, laminate is described on wikipedia as ""a multi-layer synthetic flooring product fused together with a lamination process. Laminate flooring simulates wood..."" It is a misrepresentation to call something hard wood to try to entice new residents when in actuality it is not anything close to genuine hard wood floors. And it is even more dispicible to tell someone they would get all the updates at a lease signing then refuse to do it because you want more rent money to justify doing the work you promised. With this in mind, the $130 increase in rent from the unremodeled unit rate to the remodeled rate is unjustified. That would net the owner $1560 more in rent per year per remodeled unit and the flooring wouldn't need to be replaced as frequently as carpet. Laminate is anywhere from $1.50-3 per sq ft according to about(dot)com. The kitchen and living room at Latah are about half the apartment (total of ~730 sq ft) which at most would mean the cost would be $1100 not including labor to install laminate in each unit, likely a lot less when you buy in bulk for multiple units and less for labor when you use your own maintenance crew. It is recommended that carpets be replaced every 3-5 years, compared to the average 10-year warranty on laminate (about(dot)com) and recarpeting can be done for less than $500. The owner tried to tell me that the rent increase was just barely covering the cost of the remodel and he's not really making a profit. Maybe in the first year that's true but I can do the math and in the long run this guy is making off with bags of money. Even including labor (he has his own maintenance crew which undoubtedly gets paid regardless if they're installing floors or working on something else) I don't buy that he's being generous by keeping rent rates 'low'. Have you ever heard of someone decreasing their rent rate after remodel work has been paid for? Of course not, which means that after 10 years tenants are still ""paying for"" a remodel job that's a decade old. It's a rip off. The location is good (just behind Sella's) and office staff does do a quality job both maintaining the units and communicating with the tenants. It's not their fault that the owner dictates policy that rips off students with already extremely low incomes.
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