Camarillo Oaks

I understand that beggars can't be choosers and this is all we can get for "cheap" housing in southern California. But I did not expect the customer service to be this unbelievably bad. My roommates and I have been pleading them to give us a renewed lease so we can live here legally and peacefully. We are international students, we need to have foolproof documentation to show to any officials that end up at our door. When we tell this to customer service, they act like we are talking in Latin… and refuse to send us a fresh, renewed lease and keep messing up the names of the current residents. When we first tried to renew it (as mentioned above, we are students, some seniors moved out, and freshmen moved in to replace them), the customer service managers were vague about the conditions, sent in placeholder documents, and confused, and then went radio silent for months, despite the primary tenants sending emails after emails asking for updates. Now, they refuse to make a renewed lease, saying that it's already been six months since we moved in, and can't do anything except write a flimsy document that we (apparently) can claim is proof of residence. If you think this is ridiculous and convoluted, try living through it. I'm so tired of arguing with them and still struggling to sign into their residential and rent related apps because they refuse to put me on record, even after taking multiple pictures of my identification documents.
On top of that, every maintenance request takes multiple attempts to get one worker to come in during the day. The pool is rarely non-toxic to enter. There's no one to clean the carpets, which is obviously to leech off the hefty security deposit once we leave. I can't wait to leave. Read More

Tagging everywhere, no one picks up their dogs poop, broken down cars everywhere. Pools are hideous you will definitely not go in.

Washing machines always broke down and room smelt like mold 9/10 times you'd go in there. Shower water always smelt like rotten eggs. Put on the move in lease that walls weren't painted when we moved in, they still charged me for painting at move out. Hot tub looked like urine for weeks and no one could be bothered to care. And lastly, my car got vandalized next to the office, asked the office if they had cameras, they told me they don't. Filed a police report. My wife posted about the negative… experience online to which management replied that they do infact have cameras. So either they lied to my wife or they lied to me. Either way, shady business practice. Read More

Do not apply to Camarillo Oaks.

Camarillo Oaks has unfair business policies that are made to take your money during the application process if you decide to withdraw your application. They ask for $48 in non-refundable application fees for each applicant and $300 for a holding deposit which is supposedly "refundable." However, I was not explicitly told during my tour of Camarillo Oaks with Katie nor in the email acknowledgement for the application that it is only refundable for 24 hours after… submission of the application. I was made aware of this policy when I got an email to sign the "Receipt of Application Holding Deposit" SIX days later. After the vague acknowledgement email, they only reached out about me and my roommate's application after the 24 hour clock had passed. On top of that, Katie and Essex had poor communication with us as they only emailed me the acknowledgement email and not my roommate who was also an applicant.

This policy is unfair because we did not even know the status of our application before we could reclaim our holding deposit within that 24 hours. Other apartments I applied to asked for less money for the holding deposit and gave at least 72 hours to refund the money. Furthermore, those apartments actually followed up with me within that 72 hour time frame about my application. This is an extremely impractical policy as it does not give you options if you are trying to apply to multiple places.

For such a large sum of money ($300), I would have expected an honest and transparent business to mention this policy to us when touring and in the main text of their email acknowledgement of our application, but Katie and Essex purposely avoided mentioning it to take our money. I would have hoped a business providing more affordable housing would not try to deceive people to get their money but that is what Camarillo Oaks has done.

They will most likely respond to this review with fake sympathy and hide behind this deceptive policy that they buried in the text somewhere in the application but did not explicitly/verbally tell me and my roommate until it was too late. We gave them a chance to rectify this issue by returning our holding deposit but they have decided not to by giving a generic response that lacked any professionalism and just hid behind this policy.

Imagine the lack of care they will have if you actually move in to Camarillo Oaks. Read More