Cookies place - 733 Tortoise Street, Weltevredenpark, Roodepoort - Landlord/host is Cookie Mbuya

This review is written by 2 current tenants in their 5th and final month of staying at an Airbnb called Cookies place which is located at 733 Tortoise Street, Weltevredenpark, Roodepoort.

https://www.airbnb.co.za/rooms/***?source_impression_id=p***_P31OTDEG7yUGPsjf

Living at Cookies place is absolute the worse experience of our lives!

This property supposedly includes wifi and there is an additional fee for the garden and cleaning services which happens once a week. The owner lives on the same property in very close proximity to the rental house/Airbnb.

• The house doesn't look like the images at all, everything inside is old and worn out.

• The house is located in an extremely busy road as it's close to an office park. This makes it difficult to enter the property via car or Uber in peak times. The busy road also makes it extremely noisy with dogs barking uncontrollably at the constant movement. There is a massive Rottweiler right next door to the house which can be heard loud and clear from any part of the property. This dog is a couple of centimeters away from the gate where we enter the property, which means he barks at you absolutely every time you want to enter or exit the property. Don't even think of bringing your own dog as just a simple thing as going to walk your dog is close to impossible with the dognext door. The neighbors dog will try and attack you or your dog at every opportunity.

On the other side is the owners dog who is just as noisy and not controlled by the landlord. His excuse for his dog is that we live in JHB and that the dog is there for everyones protection. The problem is that since this dog barks for anything and everything we will never know if there's a true threat or not.

The barking dogs is at times so bad that we have to wear earphones in the house to block out the noise. This makes it impossible to work, watch TV, relax or even just have a conversation

• There is also a very suspicious house next to this Airbnb where people consistently stop to collect "packages" even though there is no permanent tenants living at the house.

• The roof in the bathroom leaks and drips on you in the bath after heavy rains. The washbasin also leaked badly for weeks and then suddenly stopped.

• They send an extremely rude gardener that begs for money every week and wants to know how much we contribute towards his services and why we don't pay him directly.

• Since we have given notice the wifi was surprisingly off for 2 days in a row with no proper feedback from the landlord.

• My fiancé is opening a case at the police station for harassment and ************ since the landlord kept trying to enter the property on Saturday demanding money. We were advised to record him for all future communication or should he try to enter the property again via banging on the windows or the front gate. She doesn't feel safe alone in the house as the landlord has a bipolar personality and goes from friendly to angry in seconds. He clearly has money or debt issues and yet he doesn't realize that the tenants are the one's paying him, and it's crucial to keep the tenants happy

• In the 4 months that we stayed here there has been 4 different cleaning ladies, 2 of them said that they are treated badly. That's a new cleaning lady every month, which means our pets have to get fami**** with new people entering their space on a monthly basis.

They also don't stick to a set schedule of when they send the cleaning lady. They will just message you to say that she is coming around and if you don't reply immediately then they get agitated.

• The bedsheets has holes in them and the gardener hasn't been sent in 2 weeks, so the grass looks terrible. We put a piece of paper under each bed when we moved in to check if they clean under beds. Both beds still have the papers underneath which means there was no cleaning done under beds in more than 4 months. The couches we had to put our own pillows under just to sit comfortably.

• The landlord decided to start renovations on his home 8:00 on a SUNDAY morning with no prior communication or arrangement with us. He has absolutely no regard for his tenants. There is consistent banging, movement of workers, and even cranes outside the house moving bricks, like a proper construction site. This is in week 3 now and still going strongly.

• Landlords or Airbnb hosts like Cookie need to learn that their whole business is based on reviews and that they can't do as they please in this industry without consciousness.

He wrote a gloating review about and how wonderful we are so we are clearly not the proplem. We took screenshots of the review should he delete it.

We will do a follow-up review when we move out at the end of February to see if things changed/improved.