We’ve all heard the complaints about student housing. It’s too expensive. The apartments are disgusting. The management is hard to work with. Any research done about student housing in Orem and Provo will lead to one company: Redstone Residential. Anyone could spend hours on Reddit threads and Yelp reviews about this company, and almost none of them are positive.
Background
Redstone Residential was founded in 2009 by Grant Collard. As banks were foreclosing on many complexes during the recession, Collard seized the opportunity and started his first student housing complex. When he attended college at Brigham Young University, he lived in student housing and had a negative experience with the complex’s management. He bought the same apartment that he lived in and completely renovated the entire thing.
Over the past 15 years, his company has grown from just one apartment complex to a multi-state student housing management company. With over 40,000 tenants and 400 staff members, Redstone Residential has been very successful.
The company’s mission has been to provide affordable and safe housing for college students. Jake Jarman, Redstone Residential’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), said that they always try to apply what they call the “daughter rule”. This means they don’t run an apartment that they wouldn’t want their daughters living in. He said, ‘If the answer is no, we know we’ve done something wrong.’ The company tries to be responsive to tenant complaints, but more importantly, keep a good enough apartment where the complaints are limited.
The complaints
The first documented complaint found about Redstone Residential was in 2019. All complaints are unverified and mostly anonymous. After reading all the complaints, they boil down to these 6 main issues:
- Slow response to tenant complaints
- Extra and unexpected charges
- Poor maintenance of the apartments
- Unreliable appliances
- Difficulties in negotiating contracts
- Redstone Residential has a housing monopoly
Students, for the past 6 years, have had these repeated complaints. There are allegations of lawsuits that have been filed against the company, but nothing can be confirmed about those suits. Any parties that left bad reviews or allegedly filed lawsuits did not respond to leave a comment.
Redstone Residential denies any lawsuits, and the CEO, Collard, stated that he has never been served papers. The company doesn’t deny that the allegations are probably true, but they claim that we aren’t getting the full story.
The response
Collard and Jarman walked through how they handle tenant complaints at Redstone Residential:
- Tenant has a problem
- Tenant contacts the complex manager
- Complex manager helps solve the problem, or higher management is contacted
- Higher management receives the complaint and talks to the tenant
- Tenant and Redstone Residential management come to an agreement
- If disagreement continues, the parties come to a compromise
They emphasized that the company can’t handle anonymous complaints because they can’t handle issues they aren’t aware of. It’s hard for a company to be scouring Reddit and Yelp for complaints when they already have tenants who are reaching out in the way they are supposed to.
As far as Redstone Residential having a monopoly, Collard shared that this is far from the truth. He stated that his company doesn’t “even have 50% of the market share in any of the markets that [he’s] in.” At Utah Valley University, Redstone Residential owns only 5 apartment complexes that are considered student housing. He also shared that he’s worked with the president of UVU, Astrid Tuminez, to ensure that student housing provides a positive experience for UVU students.
Collard shared just how much his company is willing to work with tenants. Often, when students tell Redstone Residential that they will never live in one of their apartments again, it’s because they don’t like their roommates. The company has and is willing to move around students and work with their tenants to ensure that everyone is happy.
Tenant responsibility
A company can’t know that anything is wrong if tenants don’t tell them. Redstone Residential emphasizes communication. If a tenant is having an issue, reach out to the complex manager. If that’s not solving issues, call the company. Redstone Residential’s leadership told students that if nothing is working, they can come to their main office in Provo.
Collard shared: “[The tenants] see us as the corporate landlord and we’re, you know, the big, bad, evil company and monopoly. They see it as like anything goes wrong here [and] it’s nefarious and [we] wanted this to happen…we do our best with that…at the end of the day, we’re trying to provide a service, and we want our customers to be thrilled because we have to do it again next year. Everyone has to move in, and you know, if people didn’t have a good experience, we won’t fill up apartments, and everyone is sad.”
Although someone can find a list of 50-100 negative complaints online, it doesn’t share the thousands of experiences of other tenants that enjoyed their time with Redstone Residential. The company throws events, dances, and parties at its complexes. Collard explained that Redstone Residential spends too much on these events because they care about students finding connections and ensuring that their properties are the best in the area.
Does Redstone Residential deserve bad reviews?
Every company makes mistakes. Every company has problems. Redstone Residential’s CEO acknowledged this. But because a company makes a mistake, does that mean that the company is evil? Does it mean that the company hurts its customers on purpose? No.
Every property management company that you Google is going to have bad reviews. Because they’re all evil? No. Because the majority of the time, only the dissatisfied, unhappy tenants leave those reviews.
Everyone at Redstone Residential made it clear that they want to solve tenant problems. They want to help their customers. The bad complaints may have been just misunderstood tenants. Maybe the complaints were untimely. Maybe the complaints came from tenants who didn’t try to work with the company. Although Redstone Residential has received a lot of negative reviews, they do the best they can to help residents. And no one company should be held responsible for all the tenant problems.
I’ve lived in two Redstone Residential managed apartment complexes, and they were as bad as you’ve heard. Dishonest management, terrible communication, neglected maintenance. (We had black widows at one apartment). Worse, my favorite place I lived in Idaho was bought out by Redstone after I moved out, and my old roommates have told me how it’s gone downhill too. Student housing IS an enormous issue, and was a cause of some of my worst experiences at college.