Wedgewood Hills is a decent place to live if you are comfortable forfeiting any civil conversations when you have a disagreement with the landlord.
The lease will include that you show off your apartment to inquiring future tenants. This was really not an issue at first, but after the first couple times of individuals viewing our units, our apartments were scheduled to be viewed w/o our approval & on short notice.
There were a couple maintenance issues during our lease,. Wedgewood Hills took
...care of these maintenance issues promptly, but we received more attitude the more we called with routine maintenance issues, as if it was our fault she needed to do routine maintenance on her units.
Lastly, my roommate and I were deducted $125 from our security deposit for routine carpet cleaning. I am no attorney, but to my knowledge, there are active tenant protection laws in Illinois which state landlords must provide an itemized receipt of deductions from a security deposit within 45 days of tenants moving out. In addition, I believe the law states the landlord cannot charge tenants for normal wear and tear damages of a property, regardless to what is said in the lease. For example, if you trash an apartment, you will be liable. However, if something breaks because it has not been replaced in X amount of years, that is the landlord's responsibility. In my opinion, this makes sense because that's essentially the whole point of renting. I called to ask Loretta what damages we had to the carpet to cause her to deduct the money, to which she stated the charge was for routine carpeting cleaning. In my opinion, if she needs to do this, she should increase her monthly renting rates rather than taking it from her tenants' security deposits. I told her I believed she could not charge for that by law, to which she got very upset with me over the phone and told me she was very disappointed in me, which I thought was very unprofessional. She told me, "one day you'll learn relationships are more important than money, but you clearly haven't learned that." My roommate also inquired about the security deposit deduction, and she told my roommate that we were making such a fuss over such a small amount of money, to which my roommate explained to her it goes both ways.
After this interaction, I also wish I had received an itemized list of the deductions from the security deposit because I have no way of knowing that the carpet cleaning actually cost $125.
Max of 1. $500 non-refundable deposit/fee.