It is unsafe, according to this resident who writes:

Every contact with apartment employees was wife is wheelchair bound. The staff responded immediately to help her- five stars. We live on the 28th floor and we felt very insecure when 2 elevators were disabled at the same time.That left one elevator to use. I cannot believe that in 2018 neither elevator could be fixed rapidly! We are looking for a different place to live when our lease expires. We need ground floor so we don’t need to depend on elevators.

We have extensively documented on this site that the elevator failures are systemic and have not been adequately addressed by Toll Brothers.  A full 32% of Yelp reviews for the building (currently at 2.5 stars out of 5) mention the elevators, with complaints going back for at least two years.  Maybe this resident should be looking for an FHA/ADA lawyer in addition to a new apartment?

We earned performance bonuses and management fees, as well as income from the properties we own long-term. [Apartment Living] is a high return on equity business and we are excited about its progress.

• Marty Connor – CFO, Toll Brothers

Toll Brothers fired the Property Manager and Assistant Property Manager for The Morgan in March 2018 with no replacement plan other than having Absentee Jane parachute in a few days a month to look in on things.  Five months later, both positions remain open despite repeated promises that they would be filled.  A conservative estimate of salaries for each role of 100k a year (fully loaded with benefits) means that Toll Brothers has saved over 80k by leaving these roles unfilled.  Now we start to see where the high return for the Apartment Living division comes from.

Looking back at 2018, we also see that Toll Brothers is shortchanging residents in other areas.  The building infrastructure and amenities continue to fall into disrepair, with little action taken to address the problems.  Of the items that have been fixed in the past year, all of them are small budget items like replacing missing attachments in the gym, adding a small weight set, and buying new seat cushions for the outdoor areas.  Big ticket items, like fixing the elevators, cleaning the windows, replacing the broken outdoor TV, fixing the grills, and holding resident events are promised but never delivered.  But Absentee Jane never misses a chance to complain to residents about how expensive it is to maintain the building.

Toll Brothers, we know you read our blog.  You cannot continue to market The Morgan as a luxury building while you save money by understaffing it and letting the infrastructure deteriorate.  You cannot collect over 200k a year from residents for amenities that are broken and never repaired.  Fire Absentee Jane and fill the full time Property Manager position now.  Your residents are fed up with the safety issues, the broken promises, and the general lack of responsiveness.

Good news and bad news today.  Mostly bad news.  But first the good – the missing gym equipment has been replaced!  The rope pull and various attachments are back, and a square on our management promises scorecard flips from red to green.  Let’s take turns and not fight over them though.

Bad news is that the building internet is still out after the “upgrade.”  Residents who like to work from the Library or Living Room should think about upping their cell data plans, as we have a feeling this outage isn’t going to get fixed for a long time.  Even though the gym TV now displays more channels, this item remains soundly in the red due to the loss of Internet that worked fine before.

Running down the (mostly broken) promises list shows little progress from Absentee Jane.  In fact, the more cynical among us would speculate that Toll Brothers is only fixing the cheap items while big ticket items continue to deteriorate.

Window cleaning – not done, still filthy.  Absentee Jane: “large expense”

Resident events – nothing since May, only one this year.  Absentee Jane: I’m sooooo busy.

Heavier weights in the fitness center – nope, just the lighter ones management picked up on clearance from Sears.  Absentee Jane: “I hope to have that added shortly“.  In June.

Pool passes – is this even still a thing?  The lifeguard just has a notebook and the pool is filled with “guests”.  And poop.

Replace broken outdoor TV – of course not!  Absentee Jane isn’t made of money, you know.

Fix the elevators – the past two weeks have been a good run, but only a fool would think they are fixed.

Hire a building manager – 5 months and counting.  Stay tuned for a longer post on this topic tomorrow.

Residents are reporting that a fight broke out in the 8th floor gym yesterday, with JCPD called and responding to the scene.  We don’t have many more details, but don’t let the humidity, elevators, or anything else make you lose your cool with your neighbors.  We’re all in this together.

Completely predictable, but disappointing nonetheless.  The Morgan Internet is still not working and it has been out since Friday.  Residents asking on Activebuilding (the building-run message board) when it will be fixed are ignored.  Great job on the upgrade Absentee Jane!

Absentee Jane back in June:

The outdoor television on the 8th floor amenity deck has officially been declared not repairable. We are in the process of purchasing a new one. They run $10K or more so I am obligated to obtain bids before purchasing. This process is nearly completed and we should be placing the order in the next day or so.

Annual amenity fee at the Morgan: $600 per apartment.  At 80% occupancy, that’s 200k a year going to Toll Brothers for amenities that never work.  We have a suspicion where all that sweet cash is going though: one of our residents spotted an exterminator working on the residential floors today.

 

The building Internet has been out for 3 days thanks to the “upgrade” to Comcast.  Residents logging on to the building wifi are greeted with this nice error screen:

I’m sure Absentee Jane will get right on fixing this like all of the other broken amenities, at least when she isn’t busy “managing” five other properties.

From:	Jane Ashwood (ENTERPRISE)
Date:	August 9, 2018, 6:57 pm
Subject:	Building Internet

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Hi All

We started converting from Verizon to Comcast so you may experience a lack of internet in the building until all is completed. It will be up and running shortly. I will keep you posted.

Thanks
Jane.

From:	Jane Ashwood (ENTERPRISE)
Date:	August 9, 2018, 7:19 pm
Subject:	Building Internet

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Hi

This change to Comcast does not affect your personal accounts. If you have Verizon now you can stay with them.

Thanks,
Jane

Absentee Jane is sticking with her favorite “blame the vendor” theme.  What are the odds of this actually going to plan?

July was a brutal month for residents at The Morgan. The elevators had the worst performance since the memorable week long failure in March as you can see in our outage log.  For a building that opened in 2015, the increasing frequency of breakdowns really highlights the poor maintenance, construction quality, and equipment put into this building.  The hope we had of significant improvements when Toll Brothers cleaned house and fired the old management in March has all but faded away. The official line at this time is that they are replacing Otis with another elevator maintenance company and this will magically fix everything.  We remain skeptical.

There is still no full time property manager, just corporate-types who parachute in for a day or two while managing 5 other properties.  Emails to management don’t get returned and they are rarely in the office.  Between poomageddon and the frequent elevator failures this month, they lost much of the resident goodwill they had built up since March.

The leasing staff is still there working full time to fill their vacancies in our “luxury living” building though.  I wonder if they disclose the extra 15 minute wait for the elevators when hyping the 15 minute commute to the city?  Meanwhile, our building management promises scorecard remains mostly in the red.

The new concierge company is in place and seems fine so far, we haven’t received any resident reports of missing packages since the switch over.  The trash chutes were cleaned last weekend, which hopefully will clear up the festering garbage smell reported by residents of the lower floors.

Residents, any other items or problems to report that we haven’t covered?  Use our contact us form, and remember all submissions are kept anonymous.  Have a better one and stay cool.

 

From:	Jane Ashwood (ENTERPRISE)
Date:	August 8, 2018, 8:32 am
Subject:	Building Cleaning

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Good Morning –

I understand that there have been some situations in which trash rooms were not cleaned as well as other areas. We were in the process of changing cleaning companies when the current company decided to stop taking care of the building days prior to the agreed upon end date. The new cleaning company is in effect and are taking care of these areas that were neglected. If there are any areas you feel need attention please let us know.

Thank you.

Best,
Jane.