By Kirstin MaguireThe Daily Northwestern

Weinberg sophomore Bryan Krueger and his friends decided to live in an apartment last year on Ridge Avenue. It had dead bugs everywhere, unpainted walls and an old refrigerator.

The company that owned the building agreed to fix all of these problems before the students moved in, but come September, nothing had changed.

Krueger had no other options, so he moved in anyway. The realty company, Evanston Neighborhood Properties, upheld their end of the bargain only after Krueger had made multiple requests, he said.

“It’s just been inconvenient and a hassle when it should be like clockwork,” Krueger said. “It’s their job, what they’re paid to do.”

Krueger is one of many students who has had trouble with Evanston Neighborhood Properties, a realty group that used to be a part of B&A Associates, said Paula Haynes, Evanston’s executive director of human relations. But little formal action has been taken against B&A, Haynes said, because students – their primary customers -haven’t held them responsible.

Officials at Evanston Neighborhood Properties declined to comment for this story.

Evanston Neighborhood Properties owns several properties close to Northwestern, including apartments on Chicago Avenue, Clark Street and Ridge Avenue. The company has gone through numerous name changes since 2000, according to court documents. According to Haynes and Property Standards Inspection Supervisor Jeff Murphy, the individual brothers who owned B&A split up the properties and formed different companies.

The Evanston Human Relations Department received an above-average number of informal complaints about the companies that were a part of B&A, Haynes said, although she has heard fewer complaints about Evanston Neighborhood Properties than about B&A as a whole.

The majority of the complaints about B&A, she said, concerned maintenance issues, security deposits that were not returned and landlords not returning phone calls from their tenants.

Evanston Neighborhood Properties no longer requires a security deposit, according to its Web site, but Krueger said the company has been less clear about other fees.

According to Krueger, the company asked for a $150 application fee, but two months after the deal was settled, the company said the students owed $300. Krueger told Evanston Neighborhood Properties they were violating the contract and threatened legal action until the company relented.

“They’re not screwing us over on prices – just service is poor,” Krueger said.

Weinberg junior Dane Rogol, who lives in an Evanston Neighborhood Properties apartment on Ridge Avenue and Noyes Street, had similar problems with the company not returning calls about maintenance issues.

“We just had to call them a ton of times,” Rogol said. “It would always go to voicemail and they would never get back to us. When we were persistent about it, they finally called us back.” After two weeks of calls, the company sent people to make repairs, although they said they couldn’t fix the hot water.

In its inspections, the Evanston property standards department judged the condition of former B&A properties to be average, said Murphy.

Property owners are required to fix any code violations. Evanston Neighborhood Properties and other former B&A companies have usually made repairs on time and have been in court only a few times, Murphy said.

Both Krueger and Rogol said they have run into problems with the company not making repairs and not being responsive, but they expressed interest in staying with the company, regardless of the problems they’ve encountered, because of the reasonable prices.

Although the company has cooperated with city officials, Haynes said students might face more difficulties with delinquent companies because students haven’t educated themselves about their rights or filed formal complaints, Haynes said.

“Complacency perpetuates a very difficult situation,” Haynes said. “It’s amazing what some folks do to students until students are willing to take on the battle. That’s why B&A and other realtors are able to get away with the things they do.”

Because many students are living in apartments only for a year or two, they don’t file complaints to prevent the same problems from plaguing the next tenants, she said.

“Many students have the attitude, ‘We’re only here for nine months,'” Haynes said. “They’re not worried about the person who follows behind.”

Reach Kirstin Maguire at [email protected].