Jake
I was a resident for a year. Pros - Amazing first step when moving to the City - Majority of people and staff are lovely - Easy way to make friends - Good Tube connections - Restaurant food tastes very good - Bi-weekly cleaning is nice Cons - Management is chaotic and disorganised. - There is a rubbish processing plant which has a license to operate 24/7/365 and is about 100ft from the building. As a result, I had 5am wake ups when they would start work. It took multiple emails over many months to be offered a room change. - They make policy changes without consulting the residents and also backtrack changes without telling anyone. - A team can ask you the same question, multiple times. It seems they don’t communicate with each other. - They modify events without consulting the residents. For example, they commercialised the free Friday drinks by moving them from the community venue to their restaurant. While you still had an hour of free drinks, it felt like a move to make money, and the mood went from social to a networking event. - On two occasions I’ve reported mice in the restaurant lounge. - While in-room maintenance is performed quickly, building maintenance doesn’t appear a priority. For example, if the lift breaks, we may have to wait days for an engineer to visit. Also, the faulty lighting sensor in the ground floor toilets has never been fixed, despite people raising it in the Facebook group. - The incentivised ambassadors cancelled the weekend free brunch as they no longer wished to run it without volunteers. After significant backlash, they reintroduced it. - You’re encouraged to volunteer for a company that charges you upwards of £1,100 a month on rent. For example, asking for open day volunteers, people to help run brunch or drinks evenings, while ignoring that paid staff are employed, and ambassadors are given financial incentives to work there. - The door to your rooms isn’t well soundproofed, so I could hear my neighbour making breakfast at 6am. - HS2 creates a lot of dust and your rooms can get dirty only a few days after cleaning.