I’ve had great experiences staying at rentals until now. So, this is my first bad review ever. The bottom line is rent someplace else and you'll be happier. But if you do decide to stay here, free to park on the grass. Everyone else in the neighborhood does. And, don’t go out alone after dark.
Here are the details: First, the property manager doesn't live in Sarasota. Moreover, when we were there, she was on vacation, as was her backup. So, there was no one to help us locally when we had a problem with the TV starting from the Thursday that we got there. We texted and got a text and a phone call back. And when we couldn’t fix it via the phone call, we were understanding about the fact that she was on vacation. But when we texted on Sunday night asking if she could arrange a service call to fix it, we got a snarky text back and then no communications whatsoever. I texted the owner, whose number was given to us as an emergency contact. He didn’t answer either. On Tuesday, she finally got someone over to take care of it. This may sound like a small thing to you. But we certainly would not have agreed to pay the price we did if we had known there was no TV. And the aggravation of not being able to even get a response from the manager added to the issue. By the way, the second TV in the bedroom never worked the whole time we were there.
Second, I wish I could show you photos of the outside: it’s located on a fairly busy street next to a parking lot with nowhere to sit outside except at an old table sitting on the driveway and facing the street. Being in Florida, it would be nice to be able to sit outside to have a cup of coffee or eat breakfast. Of course, we could do that . . . and look at the parking lot next door. We had our dog with us, so nightly walks were necessary, and I discovered it wasn’t really a neighborhood I felt safe walking around at night.
Third, we had rented the place before COVID-19 became a crisis. We had rented it for two weeks and decided to go home after a week because of the virus. Though I got an email from VBRO stating that more than 90% of its properties were providing refunds due to the virus, the owner of this place refused to provide any refund whatsoever. I recognize that he was not legally obligated to refund our second week’s rent, but it would have been the decent thing to do. I offered to go 50/50 on it. He still refused. So, know the type of person you are dealing.