In other news...

Don't ever rent from ICM Properties. I'm currently renting from them and really they're terrible landlords. I started renting from them a year ago, because they offered me a place that was in Lincoln Square, near some friends of mine. I answered an ad for a garage apartment and after a brief interview, they told me that the garage apartment was really pretty dingy, but we should drive around a bit and I could maybe find something else. What they showed me was the apartment on 4903 North Seeley Ave, where I currently live. It was spacious and light and they were willing to give it to me for a discounted rate. The only real problems with the place were a giant hole in the closet floor, missing tiles in the bathroom, a few broken window screens, the fact that it wasn't clean, and the fact that the back porch door had a broken window. All of which I was assured would be fixed when I moved in.

Long story short, none of these things were fixed when I moved in. I moved into a filthy apartment. Postitively filthy. And I'm not one to complain about things like dirt. But this place was disgusting. The electricity was off. The gas was off. The hole in the closet floor was still there, as were the missing tiles and broken window screens. There were several other holes in other floors that I had missed when I first looked at the place. I called them up the day after I moved in and told them I needed to put in an order for repairs. Collected a list of the repairs to the place that were supposed to have been done, and faxed that to them. Some they did. Most, they did not. I guarantee they will glut my security deposit to make those repairs when I move out.

Somewhere in there, a fire broke out in my building. I was making pie, and smelled the smoke, but didn't think anything of it until my neighbor banged on my door to tell me, at which time I noticed that the hallway was full of smoke. Afterward, I wondered why I hadn't heard a smoke alarm go off. The simple answer was that ICM Properties had failed to install a smoke detector in my apartment. I quickly called their maintenance line to alert them to this fact and that they should not only install a smoke alarm, but bring the closet that held my furnace up to code (Chicago fire code requires a metal grate on the furnace door to allow oxygen intake for the fire...I told ICM this the first week I moved in...the fire was about two months later). A month passed. No smoke detector. I told them again. This time the smoke detector came, but the grate still wasn't installed. I forget exactly how long it took me to get them to finally do that. When they did, I came home to an apartment full of sawdust. They didn't bother to clean up after themselves.

Anyway, after almost a year of having put in repair requests, most frequently for the gaping hole in my closet floor, I received a call that my apartment was being shown, because my lease is up soon. I told them I'd like to renew, but would like to discuss the problems with maintenance I've had. The woman I got on the phone took my maintenance request and then informed me that they would not make my lease contingent on the maintenance request being met. I told her that I wouldn't sign the lease until these things had been met to my satisfaction, that they had consistently failed to keep up their end of my lease in that they haven't maintained the building at all since my arrival, and that I wasn't terribly happy with them as landlords in general. Her response, ICM's general idea of keeping their tenants happy, was to tell me that if I wasn't happy, maybe they just won't renew my lease.

I'm not the only one unhappy with them. In a blog entry entitled "Home is Where the Roaches Are", a Metrobloggin' blogger writes:

When I first rented my completely rehabbed apartment three years ago, a small two-guy company owned the building. They were fantastic. Not only was my apartment the only rehabbed unit in the place, they kept the building in fabulous shape. They had someone on staff whose responsibility it was to make the entryways free of spider webs and dirt and they cleaned the carpets and they put up a list every couple of weeks in the laundry rooms that let the tenants sign up for FREE bug removal. Yeah. You could sign up on a Tuesday and your place would be sprayed for bugs the following week. Imagine that.

In short, our rental company sold the building to ICM Properties. Within the space of six months, we couldn't leave our rent checks in the little box down in the laundry room, the washer and dryer beneath my portion of the building were removed, the washers and dryers in the other part of the building were removed with no possible notice or promise of new units, light bulbs in the hallways started going out and not getting replaced and, in general, the building started sucking.

On another blog entry for Metrobloggin', someone named Chicago Monkey writes:

avoid ICM altogether
while the apartment was greatabout 1600 square footin Lincoln Park (shut it)for $1000
the people I had to deal with was not worth it
I actually yelled at the guy when I picked up the keys because he called me a liar.
also had no fridge for first 10 days I lived there
avoid avoid avoid

In opinions given of ICM Properties spaces, we also see this opinion, as well as this one:

ICM Properties Inc. recently purchased this property and their business practices can only be characterized by such phrases as: disrespectful, unethical and felonious.

I can't speak for them being felonious (although I'm reasonably certain neglecting to install a smoke detector before a tenant moves in and after a tenant calls to complain qualifies), but I can say that they have broken the Chicago laws that state a landlord must alert a tenant 24 hours before coming into their home. I have on at least one occasion been awoken by one of their maintenance men. In the incident in question, nobody called me to say they would be showing up, and I was still in bed when their electrician came into my house without knocking first.

Thus ends my gripe. Don't rent from ICM Properties. They claim they are a family-run, family-based business. They aren't. What they are is a large corporation interested in only making as much money as possible from their tenants. Those who complain are quickly singled out as difficult and management becomes impossible to deal with. We'll see where all of this leads. Frankly, I don't want to stay with them. Though I love my apartment, the folks who own it are shit to deal with. And that makes staying there more difficult than you could imagine.