Croft V.
Yelp
I am a 4 time Edinburgh Fringe Veteran, and the artistic director of a theater company that specializes in bringing shows to International Fringe Festivals. This past year in 2012, I used SouthSide to let a flat (rent an apartment). I am posting this review, because enough time has passed and I believe I've calmed down enough to accurately report my experience.
When my company arrived, the door opened and the entire flat was reeking from sewage. Imagine the inside of an overrun port-a-potty without any sanitary fragrance to cover up the smell. The representative that let my company members in commented, 'This is the worst flat I've ever seen.' They determined the cause to be from the the main bathroom that had been backed up for quite a while. There was dried scum on the sides of the tub, sink and toilet from the sewage, which was also spilled all over the floor.
My group couldn't move in, and they ordered a cleaning person to come in and take care of it. We were hopeful that this would solve the problem. By the time I arrived that evening, the cleaning was hastily done, but the stench permeated the apartment, and the shower curtain was grimy and moldy from the sewage bath it had sat in.
We spoke with N from Southside Management about our situation. The right thing would have been to transfer us to another flat. Our production was about the global sanitation crisis, and we are very familiar with the acute health dangers of untreated sewage. The flat smelled for the first 2 weeks out of the month that we were there.
To her credit, N was polite, and offered to replace the mop and shower curtain and had the cleaning person come back. But that was as far as they were willing to go to reconcile the situation. They never offered to come by to experience first hand what we were going through. They claimed that the sewage couldn't have been festering for more than a few days, if that, because they are always showing the apartment around.
This is where we caught them in a lie. The cleaning person that came by on day 3, casually mentioned how they tried to get in the prior week to prepare the apartment, but couldn't because the place stunk so badly. So in essence, a week before our arrival, they know that the place was a slum and didn't do anything about it.
At this point, either they are liars, or terribly misinformed. Either way, I began to fear for the return of our deposit. The cost of doing a show a the Edinburgh Fringe has skyrocketed, and we overpaid for our flat by far already. The last thing I needed was to lose my deposit because they claimed damage to the apt (either from lying outright, or just being misinformed.)
This bathroom uses a machine to force the waste water from the toilet, sink, and bathtub up through a small pipe to the main waste water pipe at the center of the flat. This machine broke once while we were there, and the repair-person came to fix it, but left the mess for us to mop up.
SouthSide had multiple opportunities to do the right thing, and they did not. I've seen the same property listed with old photos (I will never forget that brown polka dot shower curtain). They even had the gall to reach out to me, with a form email no less, inquiring if I'd be interested in renting from them again, perhaps the same apartment on Laureston Street. Apparently they don't read their customer review forms either. I remember filling that out and explaining our situation quite plainly there too. No follow up, no attempts to do anything to ameliorate our experience.
I've advised American companies to avoid renting from them. If our experience was handled differently, I'd be singing their praises. Perhaps you'll rent from them and score a great flat for the festival and have a marvelous time. Just pray you don't run into trouble with the apartment. Based on how they treated me and my company when we ran into difficulties, I seriously wouldn't recommend them.
