Long & Foster

Long & Foster Property Management is your worst nightmare. They were DEFINITELY mine. My husband got stationed at a military base in another state and we didn't have enough time to sell our house in Parkville. Therefore, we decided to rent it. We had a great experience with our L&F Realtor when we bought the house, so we decided to go with their property management. Biggest. Mistake. Of. My. LIFE! From the get-go, they were slow to respond and even when they did, they sounded pushy and unprofessional. When they finally got around to listing the property, they didn't even go out to the house to take pics. They posted TEN YEAR OLD PICTURES of the house that they dug up on MRIS (from when the house was a bank repo and boarded up!!!). It took them two weeks to get good pictures of the house up. Who knows how many potential renters I lost in that time. Two months went by and they finally contacted me saying they had an applicant. They failed to properly screen and vet the people. Two adult children used their elderly mother's SSN to apply for the house. When I found out about it and asked our PM (Dottie Saul) what to do about it, she said there was nothing they could do. Almost from the very beginning, they tenants were consistently late on rent. Dottie said there was nothing L&F could legally do until the tenants were 10+ days late. After about 6 months, I called the district HQ to complain. The man I spoke to tried to play it all off and said that it was my and my husband's fault for not having at least 6 months worth of our mortgage payment in the bank because tenants all over rarely pay their rent on time!?!?!?! Then when the tenants ended up destroying our two concrete porches that winter by using industrial grade salt (to melt ice), L&F tried to tell us that WE had to pay someone to get out there and fix the porches!!! When the lease was up, the tenants ended up losing their entire deposit because of the condition they left the house in. Dottie said most of it was used to pay a cleaning service to come in and so clean-up, but when my husband and I moved back in to the house THERE WAS NO CLEANING DONE Everything--the fridge, walls, ceiling fans, cabinet faces, ceiling, windows, carpet--were covdered in a thin film of grease (where the tenants deep fried every single thing they ate for a year). When I confronted Dottie about this via email, she failed to address it. I think L&F kept the deposit and just had one of their handyman lackeys come in and haul out the bags of trash the tenants supposedly left behind. I said supposedly, because L&F refused to provide with with photographic evidence of the "before and after" clean up when the tenants moved out. This is the WORST company I've ever dealt with in my entire life!!!!!!

The cost was 10% of the rent. There was a problem with a leak. They took more than a week to respond to an urgent issue with the house which contributed to a secondary damage to my house. They charged me for repairs related to the secondary damage. They were unwilling to pay for it or cost share even though the secondary damage was a function of their delay for an active leak. I was with them for three years. Since fall of 2011, their responsiveness decreased dramatically. Sometimes I wanted answers to key questions, and it would take multiple e-mail or phone calls to get a response. I think that was linked to the changes they made in their structural management over side. They moved from individual property management to a team of work where they divided the work into teams. They were not all kept up with each other to what they were doing, and I got passed around from person to person. Then, they took a long time to respond. I eventually got some though.

I am writing to express my extreme displeasure with Long and Foster both the with the Realtors and the Property Management side of the house. Selecting Long and Foster was the greatest financial mistake that I have ever made. I will begin with the Realtor. The Dionne Smith was referred to me. She took advantage of my inexperience with renting properties to select a compensation package that heavily favored herself over the realtor representing the renter. This combined with her unprofessionalism caused realtors to steer their customers away from my house. As a result, despite a great deal of interest from high income customers, none of them actually rented the house. Dionne had trouble having a professional phone conversation. She rambled on at length. I eventually began to consider lower income renters after she had driven all others away. Eventually, she found a walk in which resulted in Long and Foster getting both ends of the commission. They are not responsible. They are not professional. They have their fee structure set up so that the more trouble that they make for you, the more profit they take in. It is actually often against their financial interests for your contract to be will executes. Both the realtor and the property manger required separate professional cleanings of the same house within weeks of each other. Each cleaning cost me $300. This brings me to the real problem, the Property Manager. Will Rodgers is extremely unconcerned with doing his job. He did not know when the tenant moved in. He tried to get me to pay for her utilities indicating that part of the time was time when I lived there. He didn't know how much rent was due or when the rent was due. The tenant moved into the house in December, by February she was behind in her rent. In February, Will contacted neither myself nor the tenant. At this point, he should have begun the eviction process. He did not. He did not even contact me. By not contacting the tenant when she fell behind in the rent, he sent the message that rent was optional. In March, he didn't even send a statement. The statements that I did receive are largely incoherent and full of errors with wrong amounts and wrong dates. It became clear that he was a problem employee. Do not think that this was just one bad property manager. I tried to get help from his supervisor and his supervisor's supervisor. They did not care in the slightest. Even with their involvement I could not get a summary of all the receipts and expenditures. The only thing that they would provide me with was a bunch of different documents with the errors that I previously described. He is more than happy to let her pay whatever she feels like. The only time that he lets that me know what is going on is when I ask him. In April, I expressly directed him to begin the eviction process. Even by June, he has not started. Every month that he waited, doing nothing; he cost me thousands of dollars. They will probably try to rebut my comments by saying that I just had a bad experience. I did have a bad experience that was entirely manufactured and exploited by the unprofessionalism of Long and Foster and their complete disregard of my financial interests. You should not trust these people.