The President, 809 12 Avenue SW, Calgary

My review wouldnt have been much higher earlier, but in recently weeks, the landlord’s and company that own the building really ticked me off on top of the horrible neighbors who live here. So rent will cost you about 975 without paying for unsecured parking, with unsecure parking it’ll bump you up a bit more for a homeless guy to piss on your car, I’ve seen it happen twice now, but the suites are also only about 400-500sqft bachelor. with horrible, rude, RACIST, drunk neighbours. Seems people in the building can be incredibly inconsiderate, as the guy above my apartment stomps around like he wants to come through my ceiling and screams at people over the phone for literally hours, and same can go for the couple across the hall who frequently seem to get arrested, and to the man who decided my wet laundry would look much better on the FLOOR of the dirty basement where the laundry room is kept because he refused to wait 10 minutes after my cycle was done for me to come grab my clothes and pop them in the dryer….TWICE… but now the landlord’s can’t get their act together enough to tell us proper dates on construction happening right outside our windows in the parking lot. 9:30 AM and it shakes the building entirely. I thought we were having an earthquake. People are blocked in cause their cars can’t go around the construction happening right in the middle of the lot. About a week, maybe 2, earlier we received notice that construction was going to take place and then we’re met with a notice a few days ago saying it not longer was going to happen, as they had mixed up the dates, and the construction would be taking place March 2021. I woke up this morning to the building literally quaking, my bed was shaking so much. ???where is the notice about that??? On-top of such, my bathrooms tub has clogged many times, it clogged the most when we first moved in and I pulled up massive clumps of someone’s blonde hair from the drain, it seriously hadn’t been cleaned out by either the previous tentant or the maintenance workers of the building. The doors are squeaky beyond belief, the fridge had ruined my food many times, it freezes all my fruit no matter what temperature setting it’s on, the oven was not properly cleaned by the time we moved in, and I found that out when the apartment filled with the horrible smelled of something old being burned, the renovations are so sloppily done it’s a travesty to look at, the colours of the apartments are bland and there’s no counter space in either the bathroom or kitchen. The one thing I can give it is that the closet space is plentiful and it has a unique look.

I lived at The President after returning to Calgary from Vancouver and had nothing short of an amazing experience! Finding a place can be very stressful but Holly made the process so simple and enjoyable! I can say she is hands down one of the best landlords I’ve had in all my rental experiences. My place was very cozy and extremely spacious for a bachelor apartment. No troubles at all with appliances, etc. FREE laundry which is rare! Quiet building, I never had any bad experiences with other tenants being loud or disrespectful towards me. There are homeless folks that can be loud in the alleyway at night but living downtown that should always be expected, no matter the building, so that was not a problem for me. Overall a great experience and would recommend The President to anyone looking to rent in the Beltline area!

The manager threatened to report me to head office for complaining about other tenants. Claiming I was trying to make her perform illegal actions but asking her to serve a 24 hour eviction on tenants who threaten the physical bodies of others with death! Sorry but are you kidding? This building feels like a mental hospital and evicted tenants are allowed to stay. So good news! If you’re a partying inconsiderate loser with mental and addiction issues and no income you can move right into this building and act however you want. I’m no longer worried about if I’m too loud or not. Because I have faith my neighbours will be louder. They get away with is for months. While good renters are forced to leave. There are always homeless people in the parking lot camping on mattresses left behind by tenants. The lady below me is an aggressive addict who will intimidate abd corner you in the hallway and laundry room. The entire building is filthy. People smoke cigarettes inside too. Don’t waste your money trapping yourself in an unsafe building without any onsite manager. Especially if female.

I have had great experiences with the staff management and maintenance in The President. The management has always been extremely responsive to my requests and messages, Holly is probably the best landlord I have had in the last 15 years. The communications with tenants is fine and always felt like I could reach out if I had any questions or concerns.

Holly walked us through the rental process with ease and you can tell she has a lot of experience doing this.

The building is funky and interesting which is what drew us to it. The rooms are smaller, but we were looking for a short term furnished rental so it was fine. Everything worked in the unit including the kitchen appliances and hot water in the shower. Plenty of heat in the wintertime and big windows to let the light in.

Parking is in the gravel lot beside the building which is not secured. We had our car broken into during the summer unfortunately, but there is not much you can do about this without underground parking.

The laundry in the building is free which is great and there are usually machines open. There is no other storage than what is in the unit, and in our unit there was one decent size closet that we used for clothes and storage,

To start off of course there was the problem with bed bugs. It’s illegal to even rent out apartments knowing there are bugs. That was remedied mostly by bed-bug-proofing the furniture and wearing pajamas. Being a new tenant I didn’t want to make a big fuss so I just dealt with it my own way. Not too big of a deal and haven’t been bit in months. The biggest issue with this place is the management and maintenance staff. They are incompetent. They will leave letters under your door addressed to one tenant, in the opening line they are referring to a seconds tenant. You, the third tenant are wondering if they even care about their jobs. Not only that, the apartment address written on the header is wrong. The hot water sucks. You can’t have a peaceful shower without someone else in the building making it too hot or too cold by turning a tap on or off. The hot water goes out every couple of weeks without a notice or explanation. The heating sucks. There are nights that you will wake up frozen. To warm up, other tenants will turn on their natural gas oven, but there is not proper ventilation in the apartments. So the carbon monoxide alarms start going off. I don’t know how they got approved with gas stoves and no ventilation. They must have paid someone off. The fire trucks come here every month or two because the boiler or hot water tank will start leaking natural gas or carbon monoxide to the point that the main alarm goes off. There are nights you wake up sweating because they’ve decided to pump the boiler up 500%. A day or two of that and it’s broken again (no wonder). Call the building manager about any of this and you get yelled at and called stupid. The laundry is free, but doesn’t work properly. When you wash your clothes they come out smelly. The dryers take 3 or 4 rounds before the clothes are dry. Again this is all due to incompetence. The way the dryer exhausted is put in makes no sense. Hot air rises. Sections of the exhaust go downwards! Yeah that’s not going to work. So the hot, moist air pools in the laundry room and on the first floor. The doors are crap as well! I swear these people are so incompetent they don’t even understand how doors are supposed to work! Normally a door spring pulls it shut, then at some point a shock absorber kicks in so the door slows down to shut slowly, but with firm pressure from the spring. These doors are all springs with no resistance. So anytime anyone goes anywhere BAM the whole side of the apartment shakes. You get used to it after a while, but you may lose sleep during the first couple of weeks. The door slamming shut like that all day long bends the aluminum frame after a while, and the door doesn’t latch, but appears closed. So of course crackheads are coming in and making themselves little beds! Then they have the audacity to blame the tenants for it! So they put up little sign the printed off of MS Word “Don’t let anyone in the building that doesn’t have a key.” YEAH no kidding. I think everyone knows that scabby-faced people don’t live here. It’s their pure and simple incompetence that lets these people in. I swear these two crazy people will be the end of this building. Renoir should just fire them. Don’t rent here. Seriously.

I also experienced bed bugs from Oct 2017 until I moved out in April 2018. I requested they heat treat my unit before I moved but they didn’t so I had to pay to do it myself as to not bring any with me. I can’t believe they let bed bugs go on for so long in the entire be. Sad that companies won’t pay the money needed to fix a horrendous problem that effected so many tenants