400 Duboce #113, Now from “Greg Apartments”

So things are continuing to get a little weird at my current building. First, management was “transferred “ to FirstApts. I put transferred in quotes because, really, it’s the more of the same: same phone numbers, same people, same lackluster management. Apparently an exercise in branding, trying to excise the CitiApartments name from people’s memory (for some reason ). You could write a case study about how not to rebrand yourself in the 21st century based on this. Their old email addresses start bouncing, their old domain doesn’t even redirect. Hell, even some of the email addresses they put on the letter to residents bounce as non-existent. (When calling to let them know, the receptionist is hardly interested, telling me, “someone ought to update that sign.” Yes, someone indeed.)

So it’s a little strange, given all this effort to present a new, uniform brand, to see the following on Craigslist (thanks, Richard!) (cached copy ):

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Huh, that looks like 400 Duboce. But “Greg Apartments”?

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Yup, that’s unit 113, the first one I looked at when I was looking at the building (it was leased to someone else before I got my application in two and a half years ago).

Greg Apartments website also has contact information ; that’s a different phone number than Citi, er, FirstApts uses, but 2099 Market sounds awful familiar. Oh, right — that’s the same address at Citi and FirstApts. Digging a little (but not much) deeper, we find that gregapartments.com is registered to none other than FirstApts, with Greg listed as the technical and administrative contacts.

All these shells, and they’re still trying to raise the rent.

Updated 2012-10-24: Removed Greg’s contact information.