Bri T
3/5
My partner and I rented from Happy Place for one year. We paid $3300 for a home in Halifax.
Move in: It was very hard to get a hold of anyone initially, and once we did Maryann was an absolute peach and helped us find the perfect home for us. Maryann is a truly caring and wonderful part of the team.
Living: Rebecca who does repairs is incredible, flexible, talented and timely. All issues were fixed quickly, and she always made it feel comfortable when she had to come into our home. Which was often - I don’t think this was in anyone’s control, but we had many plumbing issues in our year here and all were fixed well and timely.
Move out: This is where things were very disappointing in our experience. Upon move in, we were reassured by Jenna multiple times that this would be a long term rental and the owners had no intention of moving in/selling. It was important to us that we wouldn’t have to move the following year and we wanted something we could be in for 2-3 years. We chose this home with Happy Place because of that. The owners wanted to do a walk through in the summer (10 months into our rental period) which Jenna assured us was because they loved their property and wanted to check in on it. Afterwards, Jenna told us the owners were very happy with how we were keeping the home and that all was well. 3 weeks before our one year lease was up, we received a very casual email alerting us that the owners would extend our lease only until February as their plans had changed. February is quite literally impossible to move out during as the driveway is on a slope and you can hardly walk up it when there’s snow and ice. They offered to extend by two months. No one called us to communicate. Everything was done over email. We were passed on to someone named Amanda who we had never spoken to before. We requested a month to month lease so that we could find a new place, as we wanted to be settled in a home and not have an imminent move hanging over us. We were placed in a bind where we had either 3 weeks to find a place, or to re-sign with Happy Place at a minimum of 3 month's. Amanda was extremely short and rude with us over email.
Jenna and Maryann had a great opportunity to call us, explain what was happening and offer to find us a new rental with happy place and we would have completely understood and worked with them. We understand that things change, but when it comes to working in housing with folks - you need to do better. Everyone deserves to feel secure in housing and know what’s coming next and be met with compassion. Especially when there has never been an issue with your tenants. The whole team was extremely disorganized and the ending of our time with them was disappointing. In the end, we were able to find new housing on our own elsewhere but needed one extra week to coordinate the move. Happy Place would not accommodate that and insisted we sign for two weeks (and pay for two weeks). No one contacted us after that.
The day our movers were there, Maryann contacted us to ask if they could bring some new tenants through. We had already told them weeks ago that we would be gone the following day and the house would be empty and clean and to let us know what to do with the keys. Still, no one coordinated a goodbye or key pickup. We ended up leaving the keys in the mailbox and told them this, and heard nothing.
Weeks went by and still no one reached out and we had to follow up to ask for our despot back. When we did, we received it.
Overall - we are very disappointed with how disorganized and uncaring the team turned out to be. My partner and I were so optimistic about Happy Place as the team seemed like very genuine caring people, but with all of the above being shared it feels important to us that future folks know what the process of working with Happy Place looks like and to ensure you’re making the right choice for you when working with them. There was a lot more that could have been done to ensure secure housing was considered for us and to create a lasting and joyful relationship.
