AVA Capitol Hill

Living at AVA Capitol Hill has been a positive experience. This is largely due to the building staff, and especially Johnny Le, whose dedication and consistency noticeably improves daily life for the entire building. Johnny is proactive about issues before they escalate, follows through on any and all requests, and remembers residents’ preferences in a way that makes interactions feel personal and compounding. He is unfailingly kind and professional, whether he is handling maintenance coordination, package and mail access issues, and/or ad hoc questions. His reliability creates a sense of calm and trust that can be hard to find in today's rental market (in Seattle and beyond). Johnny and the broader team’s responsiveness have made my time with AVA Capitol Hill enjoyable and I would confidently recommend it to others.

(PART 2/2) I am Cole's roommate and this is the other part of our review. Everytime we have communicated with the office, they take hours to respond. When they do eventually respond, they tell us that they have identified the issue and will send us a new account setup link to solve it. Every time they have done this, the problem does not go away. It was to the point that I went to the Xfinity store myself and tried get someone in person to help solve this issue. It took 2.5 hours, and while I am immensely grateful for Andrew at the Xfinity store near Capitol Hill, we essentially made very little progress, and only managed to find some information that I forwarded immediately to the office. After this, Liana, the sales supervisor, told me that Xfinity had reset my account setup link and was going to send it again. After that solution failed again, I decided to find a different place to live. I wasn’t angry at the office at this point, but my priority is to have a fully functional apartment, and if a major utility in the apartment is not working and is forcing us to operate outside of it, then the apartment is not up to a renting standard. We toured an amazing place not far from AVA and signed a lease the same day. I then reached out to AVA right after to let them know that we were unhappy with the quality of our apartment, and were expecting a refund for the amount of money that we paid for the prorated rent of November, plus the additional amount of credit they promised for our inconvenience and internet problems. Liana responded saying that we could move out, but that we needed to give them a 30 day notice period, and we would be responsible for paying for the rent during that time. She also told us we would not receive any refund for our rent or any credit that was promised, and informed us that we would had to pay back any concessions we had received. This was after an email was sent out that said that the Xfinity wifi had been down for everyone else too and that the vendor would repair it soon. Not once did they ever mention that the rest of the complex was experiencing internet issues as well, and only after I inquired, told us our issues were seperate. It would’ve simply been a courtesy beforehand to mention the complex issues, while also informing us that our issues were seperate. After we were told that none of our requests were to be met, I asked if I could speak with someone in person at the leasing office. Liana replied immediately saying she would call me. We called and I started with a timeline of our problems, and why I thought it was fair what we were asking for. She explained that our apartment was, “in a functional state”, and implied that the issues we were experiencing were because of my failure to properly set up the account. I countered that not only had I setup the Xfinity account properly, (I was able to modify the network’s name and password), but that with the wifi being a mandatory utility the tenant must pay for, it being unavailable reflected that a major utility was broken and thus the apartment was not in a functional state. She said that wasn’t how things worked and that if the internet was broken, we could have used the community lounge areas with working wifi in order to work around. In my mind, that kind of proves my point. Her tone for the entirety of the phone call was passive aggressive and patronizing. I understood that I probably wasn’t going to get anywhere with her, and apologized for seeming irritated, but said that I would need her to email me the contact information for her higher ups or another resource to see if I could reason with them. She said she would, but that she knew what they would say. I replied with, “That’s fine, I want to tell them anyway”. We ended the call with the understanding that she would send me the link to notify the apartment we would be leaving as well as informing us she will reconsider our requests upon hearing back from Xfinity. That was 11/22.