Barlow Park Nightmare living

Where do I even start? Well for one, I haven’t even fully moved in, yet I’m already looking for other places. Barlow Park was advertised to me as a new, modern apartment complex where “Loadshedding is a thing of the past” with great promises of backup power, water, and easy living. The very few weeks of been here have been anything by but easy. Firstly the promises of backup power are misleading. The only backup power is in the common areas. Apparently the apartments will only have backup power in “April”. I don’t mind unexpected delays, but I would have appreciated if this was communicated to me before I moved in. Additionally, before moving, I asked one of the agents about the noise levels since there is construction still happening on site, and he assured me that all the major construction was complete and there would be no excessive construction noise, so I’d be fine working from home. This was an absolute lie, I’ve had to brave construction from the early morning to late evening from Monday to Saturday. I can understand that they need to complete the building fully, but I would have appreciated honesty from the agent promoting the building. In addition to the construction noise, the agent also failed to mention that the apartment I wanted was right next to the Curro Barlow Park playground. Once again I would have appreciated if I was made aware of this beforehand. Having since started moving in, I’ve discovered many issues which are shared by many of the tenants here. One of the first issues is that the building management makes decisions without informing tenants - they decided to close the ba*****t entrance to pedestrian tenants without informing us, which resulted in a lot of confusion for me when I needed to head to work in the morning. You’d then think why don’t the tenants just communicate with the building management team - but this has been like milking a rock. The allocated building managers do not respond to any messages, and when they do, they usually don’t have answers directing us to the property management email address. This email is either not attended to, or they purposely ignore the emails because all you get is an automated response asking you to provide your number and apartment number, beyond this, the email is never responded to. I recently received my rental invoice with the amount owed being different from what I understood as my rent amount because of unexplained extra fees I was unaware of. I tried to contact management to get an explanation of these fees but of course no response. So if you enjoy being misled, never knowing what is happening in your building, constantly chasing answers you never get, paying random fees then Barlow Park really is the place for you.