Darwin Homes Property Management

They have attempted to automate property management and leasing -EPIC FAIL!
Property managers don't respond, no direct way to contact anyone. It took almost a month to get questions answered about a property I was interested in. Once I leased it and paid, I got a call two days before scheduled move-in date that the property was occupied by squatters. I picked another property had to chase down the property manager for two days to get the lease signed. We drove 14 hours to property arriving at 5am with a 20ft U-Haul - The key pad was disabled and I realized it was occupied when I looked in the window and saw sofas and pictures on the wall. I called Darwin and the customer service agent could not get anyone on the phone to come out. I filed a police report and left. Darwin refunded my monies after trying to convince me to pick another property. Never! The way Darwin "manages" property is beyond incompetent. Owners and potential tenants should beware.

Most dysfunctional property management company on the planet! We signed our lease with Renters Warehouse & the day before move-in we found out that the house will be managed by Darwin instead. It has been a complete desaster from day one & their assistant manager Annie is completely incompetent but she fits right in! They didn't even have us as tenants in their system & two out of three HVAC systems stopped working the day we moved in. It took numerous calls to get a work order submitted - a month later one unit still doesn't work properly but radio silence from Darwin. Then their system would show that we owed September's rent even though I emailed the payment ledger multiple times - it took over 2 weeks for them to finally update it. A week ago our power company calls us & informs us that Darwin has taken power out of our name & put in theirs. I have called multiple times & emailed Annie but no response as to why this happened. Today she emails me & asks if we have put the utilities in our name yet? What a complete joke! I have went to the extend & emailed the CEO and various other Ops members but zero response or accountability!

We have lived in our home for almost 4 years. Darwin homes bought our home 3 mos from our original Landlord. We paid our rent like normal on 11/29/22. On 12/01/22, we received a 30 day vacate notice. 24 days before Christmas! Plus it’s Illinois, temp was 22 F today! After some prodding, the company finally told me the vacate was because they want to renovate our home and then re rent it. Darwin said, we could reapply to rent our home when the renovations are done! So no Christmas this year! We will be moving on Christmas! Horrible people!

After a week of the original leasing agent ghosting my husband, I requested to be shown a property via the Trulia app. No one ever called me, and a couple days later I started receiving emails to "finish the application I started" for the home. I never started any such application but started receiving these emails every day. After a week of no contact other than the pushy emails, I responded to one stating that I could not apply for a property I didn't own and requested for someone to contact me to schedule a showing. After a couple more replies complaining that no one would contact me, someone finally reached out and gave us a code to enter the house for a self-guided tour. Once we entered, there was an alarm that no one mentioned that was armed and started going off. We could not reach anyone with the company to get help. The house itself was in horrible shape and the photos on the app did not accurately portray the pitiful state it was in. When contacting the company they just apologize for the inconvenience and say they contacted the leasing agent. The whole experience was absolutely ridiculous. As a tenant, I would not rent a property managed by this company, and as a home owner, I would not recommend using this company if this is the way your property is going to be managed.

The absolute worst experience with any company I have ever had to deal with. They've been overseeing us as renters since March and I've never dealt with such unprofessionalism. We've had a broken window, which is covered in the home warranty, that we were told we had to fix ourselves. We've had issues since February, such as broken ice makers and lights, that are only just now getting replaced (in July). The worst is our broken refrigerator. It stopped working Friday, we put in several emergency maintenance requests, called them, emailed them, texted them, and no one answers! Finally, when we do get an answer (nearly a week later) they send out maintenance people without giving us a heads up!! Who is just sitting at home waiting for a service person all week?! Then we were told they'll send someone out in a few days since we missed that service person. Why is someone not coming today?? Why is no one replacing the $100s of food that have spoiled while we've waited for this issue to resolve?! The absolute worst service I've experienced. If your home is being covered by them, STEER CLEAR!! Darwin homes= THE ABSOLUTE WORST!!

Please stay away from this company. Thank God we did our research before moving into the property upon preparing to move in the property ,The property was dirty baseboards not clean dirt including dirt on the floor stains on the carpet .

The houses was not professionally clean.

When you try to speak with someone from Darwin directly the only thing you will get is a text or an email this company needs human interaction because this company has a lot of problems. Please please please rent from another company or another individual.

Very disappointing.
We originally signed a lease under a different management company named Berkshire, but 3 months into our lease, the transferred our account to Darwin.
1 - when we moved in, the place was filthy and damaged. So naturally we took video and very detailed reports on the move in sheet provided. Not to mention, they added “late fees” during a pandemic. Which is illegal - and we currently are investigating.
2 - when we moved out, our contract stated we would receive our deposit back WITHIN 30 days of our leave. To make it simple, we put a $3,300 security deposit down. Outrageous, but we need a place to stay. They did not process our deposit in the time frame AND they didn’t have the proper documentation (they didn’t realize how much our security deposit was). They are charging us $900 for PAINT (after 1 year of living there when the condition on the form AND video was clearly not good) $400 for Carpet (carpet was heavily stained, damaged and coming up) and other small miscellaneous “repairs”. The representative Jessa is trying to say we only will receive $300 back. Which isn’t even the correct math. Their staff can’t even get their documentation correct.
This has been a headache. But we hope that others can please reach out to us, as this has probably happened to others and file a group complaint against the lack of professionalism and unjustifiable charges. I invite anyone with similar concerns to please email me directly at ***@gmail . Com to bring this company to justice. Bless you all during this pandemic.

As we have dealt with Darwin Homes, me and my wife highly appreciate the amount of support we have got from them. We would lock further to buy another property as getting good deals.
Thanks

Meeting Claudia at our home was a great experience. I liked how I was able to meet a human being before having to sign paperwork! That was a big relief for me.

It was great to have Claudia as a resource when I was thinking about repainting my living room. She talked me off the ledge and make me think about the ROI!

Jennifer in *** is a PRO. She is very knowledgeable and made sure my unit was rented quickly.

Darwin Homes is not very great as a landlord- there were roaches in our property when we moved in and they view it as our responsibility for removing them. They sent someone out to look once as a "courtesy", but will not do anything else and consider it the tenants responsibility. I could understand this if the tenants had been living in the premises for an extended time and were possibly responsible for the infestation, but this one was present when we moved into the property. It is a little unprofessional to move someone into a property like this and then claim it is their responsibility to do anything about it.

Darwin Homes managed my property and did not succeed in collecting the rent on several tenants. After more than 2 months of management, I was told by my property manager that Darwin keeps the late fees. I looked at my contract and nowhere in the contract does it state this. I noticed on my ledger that when a tenant paid rent, Darwin began deducing late fees off of their rent, leaving me with less than the amount of the rent. I asked them to correct this matter and they refused. This is the response I received:

"Darwin Homes has decided that this falls within the bounds in your contract and we will not be adjusting any ledgers to reflect 100% disbursement of late fee income to you."

Darwin Homes helped me purchase my first investment property in *** about 8 months ago. We evaluated around 5 different homes, and finally arrived upon one that made sense according to my investment needs and model. Through a couple of quick docusigns, we formalized the agreement and they took over responsibility of finding a new resident. Within around 25 days, they successfully screened and placed a resident who had 3x the income to rent requirement. Have received timely payment and have been very satisfied.

I had somewhat of a unique situation a couple months ago. My current Property Manager was ripping me off by marking up maintenance bills. For a simple screen door fix, he charged me $400. Enough was enough and I decided to search for new Property Managers in Austin. I chose Darwin after interviewing 3-4 different companies. The transition and on boarding process was easy, and I really like their online portal. All the bills and invoices for maintenance are uploaded and provided for me to see. 5 stars for the transparency, responsiveness and low management fee.