AMSI

This review is for Nathan Murdock and Jimmy Bastos. Luckily for AMSI it seems like not everyone at this company is as blatantly apathetic, cowardly, untrustworthy or just plain lazy and incompetent as these two dolts. Less than a month into the lease, I started getting repeated complaints from various neighbors about the tenants that Jimmy placed into my rental unit (after taking a over a month to do so for a sweet place in the heart of the mission no less). Their noise and smoking violations were clearly prohibited by the lease terms and yet it was only after many weeks of repeated inquiry did Nathan finally send out notices for the various violations. At this point I was already beginning to question why a property manager was necessary in the first place if he could hardly be bothered to deal with multiple lease violations. A few months later after the tenants seemed to settle down and stop throwing raging parties (but still unable to stop smoking on the premises), I get an invoice for an unexpected maintenance fee for a repair that was made for the thermostat and remote control. Apparently the battery in the remote control needed replacing, which meant that the majority of the nearly $300 bill was for the thermostat. The problem was, the unit has no thermostat, only separately controlled heaters. (Oops!) So I asked Nathan to explain. Unfortunately that took about a month - with regular reminder inquiries the entire time as usual - for him to look into it. Finally failing to come up with an adequate explanation for the repair of something that didnt exist, he graciously reinstated the maintenance fee to my account as a courtesy. Wow, what a mensch! If only I hadnt asked about the repair and just assumed it was legit, who knows what other repairs couldve been made since. Not quite as amusing is the time that it takes AMSI to send you the rent they collect on your behalf. I figured that switching to direct deposit would surely expedite getting the funds over waiting for the check in the mail. But regardless of the method, the average time I could expect the funds would be about half the month. The delay, I would soon learn, was because the tenants werent actually paying their rent on time and had been doing so for several months. But at least there was a penalty for late rent, except that according to Nathan Murdock, in the state of California, the property manager is entitled to keep the late fees for their efforts to collect that rent. How fortunate for AMSI that they have someone like Nathan who knows the law and the benefits of such laws for their interests. Most other property managers dont seem to be aware of that law so theyre just collecting those hard-to-collect fees on behalf of the owners. And now for the really good part. A few weeks ago the building my units in gets a notice of inspection from the city. This means that those ashtrays and cigarette butts scattered about the backyard might be an issue. Again, an email goes out to Jimmy Bastos and Nathan Murdock informing them of the inspection and need for immediate remediation and not the 3-day notice to quit that takes 3 weeks to draft, review and deliver. I express my frustration with AMSIs inability to keep the tenants from smoking on the property per the citys health code and my desire to be done with the tenants and AMSI. And so Nathan responds by informing us that he was ending our management agreement with 3 days left in the month. Not only did he break his companys own agreement by not heeding a 30-day notice but he just walked away from doing anything to wrap things up (which was not so different from when he was actually supposed to be managing). The tenants didnt even know what happened until after the month was over, when I had to go a meet them and introduce myself. And they seemed so happy b/c any new manager couldnt possibly be worse than AMSI. It turned out that they had their own maintenance requests that were simply ignored for months. Wow.