Our Full Review: Crescent Residences Fort Worth

We had a miserable experience at the complex - start to finish- and have decided to share the details with the public. Here are some of the issues we encountered.

Move in: 

The apartment was not clean, we had to have cleaners called back twice to finish the initial cleaning (and repair broken handles on doors and other items) prior to move in. This was for an apartment that had never been lived in. There was dust and dirt , construction marks, tape and other remnants of construction everywhere when we arrived. We had reserved the freight elevator for the move, which is actually just a regular elevator at the back of the building (there is no real freight elevator). There were people parked all along the entry area at the time, and no one could be reached to have those vehicles moved for our move-in. 

Building Problems and Management Response Failures:

Immediately, we noticed our balcony flooded every time it rained. It flooded enough that water backed up into the living room area, warping floor boards in the corner by the windows. We of course brought the issue up with management, who told us 1)there were no additional floor tiles for the entire building. Per maintenance team, there was also no paint that matched the apartments available…strange. Every single flooring piece had been used in construction, and none had been retained. So it would be impossible to fix the floor without replacing all of the flooring in the apartment. (Amazing) 2) we were told that all of the balconies facing toward the pool of this facility flood, along with several others along the outside of the building. They claimed that this was a design flaw by the builder, and refused to remediate, stating they intended to sue the builder and would have no reason to fix the issue prior to winning that lawsuit. An unbelievable statement, but it was actually made. After four months of arguing and repeated threats to go public with the flooding issue, Management decided it would fix one balcony at a time with outside contractors. After watching them for the remainder of our stay, it looks like they would never fix a balcony unless someone complained loudly, or someone required it before they would move in. This set up waiting periods for everyone in the building who needed the remediation. Interestingly, this required that the entire balcony be resurfaced and re-graded, creating a lot of smell and mess during the process. After five months, our balcony had been completed. Most balconies have still not been remediated and are readily evident if you were touring the facility.

The “all new” Bosch appliances in the apartment are of poor quality. I know this is surprising, as this brand is known to be good. We had to have one new oven replaced, one new refrigerator replaced and work done on the dishwasher in to a never lived in apartment. The refrigerator repair was not addressed for more than two months, and management eventually just took a refrigerator from an empty apartment that had never been rented and replaced ours with that one.

Regularly, lights went out in the ceilings in the halls and the waste disposal areas in the apartment. This is not unusual, but waiting more than one month for them to be replaced is unusual. Again, I will post maintenance requests that went unaddressed in public areas for lighting for more than a month at the website. In addition to lighting problems, the trash chutes often didn’t work, and trash would be piled up in the trash and recycling areas.  

The security gates for the parking garage on the second floor break intermittently - and fixes take months. We had more than 3 months of the 2nd floor gates being wide open. There was no additional security until two months in with the lack of gate functionality. I never saw the ‘security’ that management promised, but they did promise they would start with security at night. In any case, there was never any security present at the open gate where people could drive in at any time during this three month period. Just so you are aware, while that gate is open, parking is quite tight around here, and other people regularly drive up and park in the reserved spots for residents. Management’s advice was to report any such thing, which can’t be taken care of quickly, and to ‘make sure your car doors are locked so people don’t steal things when they are in the parking garage and shouldn’t be.’  Helpful. 

Twice while we lived there, pipes burst in the Canyon Ranch facility and flooded the bottom basement parking area for residents. We moved our car from the bottom parking lot to avoid the ceilings pouring down on us as well as the hotel valets speeding cars out of the shared parking area, terrifying residents. 

Canyon Ranch also likes to leave its dirty linen open out in the parking garage every week, allowing for rodents and pests to nest in the linens prior to them being picked up for cleaning by Canyon Ranch’s linen service. Complaints have been made to the city of Fort Worth about this situation, and I am surprised people use Canyon Ranch, considering all of the nice robes and towels have been outdoors for days at a time, open and unattended.  Yuck.  

Interestingly, all of these issues go unaddressed for long periods of time and investments are not made in the building while the residents got to watch a giant stuffed alligator and a grand piano lifted by crane (that shut down traffic flow) into the Crescent executive offices next-door to the Residences. These were apparently too large to fit through the office stairwells  (Per his maintenance team).  The Crescent’s own staff stood around, watching this with several of us residents, in amazement. Comments were made that were at the best, unkind.

The environment: 

Everyone is aware of the ongoing construction on Camp Bowie, right in front of the apartments, and now everyone is quite aware of the massive construction project going on next to the Residences. This is an eight story office building, commissioned by Crescent. The new building will house JP Morgan Chase, which is relocating from downtown Fort Worth. There is constant pounding, constant traffic and an inability to access the facility and parking due to work trucks and personnel. For months, the entire air conditioning and heating system reverberated with repeated hammering from the worksite next-door. This happened from 8 AM - 5:30 pm every Monday through Saturday. It has been excruciatingly loud, and there is no peacefulness in living in your apartment. The noise reverberates through the entire building through the vents of the air conditioning system, it is not confined to the side of the building facing the actual construction project. Please note this if you are thinking about renting here.  I will post video of the construction noise on crescentinnameonly.com. Please also note that there is now a giant crane that swings over the top of the Residences while doing work on the new building. It is unsettling at best to see a crane of this magnitude hovering over the interior of the facility and pool area.

Staff: 

The staff here is constantly turned by the management company. Some are fired (and applying for work st other local apartments here in town, to no avail), others are moved. You’ll never know who you’re dealing with. I’m not sure how many managers we had (at least 5 in 16 months), but any person who had been potentially good at their job were moved to the Crescent in Dallas. Many of them did not want to make this move (their own statements), but the company decided to move people around. My husband and I thought that we would have excellent management here and an excellent product because we are familiar with the Crescent in Dallas.  Unfortunately, Crescent Fort Worth is not like Crescent Dallas.  Notice as you tour, there are no towel bars in any of the bathrooms, there are no shelves in the entry closets, the balconies are misgraded, trash is kept in the open in the garage, the hotel’s valet services interfere with resident parking, etc. 

I’ve been told that the owner believes there aren’t enough people in Fort Worth that just will pay for a nice property and that is why he thinks the property won’t fill. The truth is, people in Fort Worth don’t want to pay someone claiming luxury with an average or less than average management and environmental structure.  Proof? Deco downtown is 2/3 full and much larger. The Westside development funded by the Bass family will have hundreds of luxury units available in the next two years. There’s a market, just not for facilities like the Crescent Residences Fort Worth. 

As our lease expired at Crescent, we scrubbed and videoed every part of our vacant apartment. It was in perfect condition. I will post the videos on Crescentinnameonly.com. We took this precaution of videoing the site because of what we anticipated, and did happen, next…

Crescent notified us that they would be keeping 80% of our security deposit, not a surprise to us. When we told them that we had video of our spotless apartment upon move out, and that we intended to post that along with all this information in a review of the facility, they called and tried to discourage us with offers of remediation. This is the first management response we’ve ever had to anything within an hour, and it was because we advised we were going public with all this information. 

Even if the management company is replaced, which it surely should be, the new JP Morgan building (per the city and JP Morgan) will be under construction until “Early“ 2027…. you can count on at least another 15-18 months of construction. And I promise you, you won’t have a moment of peace in your apartment while it happens.  You also will have to suffer, fixing your balcony from flooding if it has not yet been done. There are no gutters on the building anywhere for water flow, so I’m anticipating they will have many problems over the years with damage from that situation.

This is a long review, but we wanted it to be thorough. 

We note that on Google reviews management keeps denying that people who have posted poor reviews of this facility have ever lived there. Management has lost documentation on who has which parking spaces, who has which storage units, and they send out emails about it regularly asking for people‘s assistance to straighten out their records. Perhaps they’ve also lost the records of who actually lived there at the beginning of their operations? Believe what you’re seeing online, you’ll thank us later.