Amanda Smith
This company is terribly managed, as are their properties. I was enticed by the affordable rent and promises of supporting a local, minority company. I am a long term renter and was relocating to Atlanta. I thought I found a gem! However, the Promise Homes Company uses third-party rental companies and contractors for everything. They are not local. They don't have an office and almost never answer the phone. Zana Creary can be very helpful but anyone else in the office is impossible to get ahold of. Their maintenance line is a call center based out of Texas. Someone just batches the calls to "local" contractors. Every maintenance call requires someone home for the initial visit so the contractor can assess the issue, place a bid and then another visit at a later date will occur to actually (maybe) fix the issue if promise homes accepts their bid. This process can take weeks for a single issue to be fixed. And minimally, you need to be at the property two days. For someone with a full time job, that means minimally two days off of work for every maintenance call. I rented one property for 3.5 years and had 3 different management companies oversee my lease. When moving to Atlanta, we were promised the home would be painted, cleaned and ready for keys at walk thru. We arrived from out of state to a property that was in disrepair. We had two pages of issues noted at walk through. It took months for those issues to be resolved. The floors in the kitchen and bathroom were so sunken in from subfloor damage, we weren't able to use the spaces. Months without a second bathroom or being able to step in half of the kitchen. Another issue was a leaky roof everytime it rained. It rained through the attic and into the bathroom. Every. Single. Time. It rained. And we reported it. Every. Single. Time. 9 months of this issue and my bathroom ceiling collapsed due to the roof leak that was reported on our inital walk through. In those 9 months, they never fixed the roof. They just continued to contract the work out for months until it collapsed. We were left without a bathroom, no ac, water had to be turned off and water leaked everywhere. No one would answer the phone, not even the emergency line. We had to reach out to the owner of Promise Homes on social media to even get a response. We had to fight for hours/days but they finally moved us to a hotel. We lived in hotels for 2+ months, constantly moving between hotels because they swore the work would be done in a week, then another week, and so on. We were left with an insanely high electric bill because of the industrial blowers needed to dry the house out. Meanwhile, we weren't allowed to leave the lease. They offered us a different property, that cost more on the complete opposite side of town if we wanted a different solution. The last year of living at the property, Promise Homes took back over the lease. Michelle Childs, their internal leasing manager could not get my lease correct. It took over three months to get the dates correct, one of which was never corrected and led to a roommate being able to leave the lease without paying. She had the months wrong. The days wrong. The term wrong. The years wrong. She couldn't get it right. They would randomly send emails stating the rent was changing, despite having a lease with a set rate for 12 months. Upon move out, I was never given an inspection despite asking for one. I was told to just leave the keys in the mailbox and I'd receive my deposit after an inspection was completed. It took over three months to receive my deposit. The lease stated I had 30 days (not 30 business days) to receive my deposit. The house has serious water and foundation issues. This house is also now available to purchase. They've covered the water damaged hardwood floors with carpet (per zillow) and painted the house. As a long term renter, this rental company is the worst I've ever experienced. Please rent at your own risk.
