Vantage or the tenants: Who’s telling the truth?
When the Queens Chronicle did a brief, informal survey of some tenants at several apartment buildings owned by Vantage Properties last week, the biggest complaint heard was about a broken closet that needed fixing.
Reeve Topchiev, a tenant at the Saxon Hall building in Rego Park, claimed that when he called the firm, the super would “come and take a look” but not do the work.
“I’ve had closets that were broken since I moved in and they still haven’t repaired it,” Topchiev alleged. “They said they would come back once they got the parts and they never came back, they never called — nothing. They take care of their grounds and they charge us for it, but they don’t take care of your apartment.”
Company records, however, show otherwise. In fact, according to Vantage spokesman Davidson Goldin, the doors were fixed within two weeks of the day Topchiev called, Dec. 17 of last year. What the firm did not know, until notified by the Chronicle of Topchiev’s complaint this week, was that they had come off the tracks again.
Within hours, company employees were on the phone with Topchiev setting up a new appointment to fix the doors.
The difference between what the tenant said and what the records show appears to be indicative of the public relations problems that have periodically plagued Vantage since it bought up 137 apartment buildings a few years ago, most of them relatively lower-class, and began upgrading them. Eighty-nine of the properties are in Queens.
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