While renters have it tough, managing an apartment isn’t a walk in the park either, and one local manager has truly seen it all. On the condition of anonymity, the industry professional of nearly two decades agreed to dish the details.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I could likely fill a large novel with good material on this topic.”
His “go-to” story starts about 10 years ago at an undisclosed three-story apartment in Charlottesville’s urban ring. A maintenance worker was befuddled when he opened the door to a ground-level bathroom and discovered a caved-in ceiling and “three inches of some type of mysterious fatty substance across the entire floor.”
He then tried the unit above it, where he found the same thing. Upon entering the third and final floor, “It looked like a scene out of a movie,” the apartment manager says. Streamers hung from the ceiling from a party the night before, but “it wasn’t a raging kegger, it was their child’s first birthday party—and they butchered a goat in the bathroom.”
That’s also where they cooked the four-legged mammal and poured its fat down the drain. (Much to their dismay, the pipes burst.) A neighbor recalled seeing someone enter the apartment with a live goat across his shoulders, and the animal’s carcass would later be found in a nearby dumpster.
The apartment manager says he also learned real quick that the best way to enter a home is to swing the door open and pause before proceeding through it. Why? Because if the place is particularly unkempt, cockroaches could rain down from the doorway.
In one instance, he recalls the shower of insects lasted for at least 10 seconds.
“There were so many roaches that the carpet was flowing like water.”
And last but not least, he remembers two young roommates, likely renting an apartment for the first time. They caused quite a scene on their move-out day, when inspectors found tens of thousands of BBs lodged into the drywall.
“Every piece had to be ripped out and replaced,” which came with a price tag just south of $10,000, he says. Pay up.