The Preserve At Ballantyne Commons Apartments, Charlotte, North Carolina

In my humble opinion the Preserve at Ballantyne Commons is an unsafe, run down, overpriced place to live with a management staff that is lacking and unethical.
Lets talk about the apartment buildings themselves. The apartments are old, are not kept up well and have numerous pest problems that are not addressed by management. You can see wood rot on the outside of many of the buildings, there is dog and goose feces in a good portion of the grass and common areas, insulation is poor resulting in higher electric bills and many of the electrical outlets do not work. Also, hot water is hard to come by if you plan on showering during peak morning hours. The maintenance staff is competent but can only do as much as management allows them to so they spend most of their time driving around in golf carts hanging out.
Another issue is crime. Sure, crime can happen anywhere but in the duration of my lease agreement there were 3 car break ins and two attempted apartment break ins. This was in the rough span of 12 months. I didn’t come to know this by the leasing office or management informing me, I learned this from talking to my neighbors, one of whom chased someone off who was attempting to pick the lock on his front door. That one happened in the middle of the afternoon in broad daylight. Not once did I see a police patrol in this apartment complex except once when they showed up to arrest a tenant several buildings down. It seemed to me that management attempted to hide crime-related issues from both prospective and current tenants.
And finally, you’re probably wondering how The Preserve at Ballantyne Commons and CWS management seemed shady and unethical like I started out with right’ One example is the way they FORCE you to pay your rent online. Sounds quick and easy and they say it’s part of their new “green initiative” or whatever lingo they cooked up to sell this nonsense. The way it works is you have to log into a 3rd party website and give them your bank info to have them draft the rent amount each month. The only problem is they include your utilities in with rent so it’s a different amount every month and you have to give them a broad number they can’t draft past. For instance you would log into the 3rd party website they use and set your monthly draft limit to $1000. If that number is too low on any given month they won’t draft anything, will wait until rent is late and charge you a late fee. You will not get a notification. If the draft amount is higher than your monthly bill you run the risk of “accidentally” getting too much drafted and good luck getting that money back. The website you go to makes you agree to terms that say(in legal speak of course)you are basically using the site at your own risk and LITERALLY says in the fine print that your only course of action should you have problems is to no longer use the website. Except that’s not an option because it’s the only way management will accept a rent payment. After much headache the only other option presented to me was to log into the same website and make one time payments each month but to do so would cost me an extra $25 PER MONTH.
Next up is the renters insurance scam. CWS apartments decided they would start selling their own renters insurance, however instead of advertising to garner interest they sent out a letter to all tenants telling them THEY DIDN’T HAVE RENTERS INSURANCE and basically needed to buy theirs in order to avoid violating the lease agreement. If you didn’t go down to the office with proof of your own renters insurance they threatened to enroll you automatically in their own, the rate of which was 3 times that of what an insurance provider would charge and covered liability only. Let that sink in for a minute. It was like they sat around trying to figure out ways to cheat people out of their money.
The other reviews on here regarding the security deposit and how you won’t be getting it back are 100% true so make sure you get whatever that’s worth out of the apartment because management certainly will.
To sum all this up you can seriously do better than The Preserve and after all the shady dealings with management I would not recommend doing business with CWS apartments either.
Sure, there are lots of places that suck worse than this place, but when there are so many nice places to live in the Ballantyne area why choose this one’