The application process was very unpleasant.

Right off the bat, I was honest and truthful about all of our information, and that did include some things that were more of an embarrassment than scandalous. I reported our income to the last dollar, which was well over their requirements.

Then "Ericka Gonzalez" and her boss (forget the name) told us the application would be reviewed shortly.

The better part of 2 weeks went by. Meanwhile, I pulled our tenant screening reports under the FACT Act for my records. Then I get a call back from Ericka to say that my husband's Social Security Number was "invalid".

What that turned out to be was that it was issued <5 years ago by SSA because he's an immigrant, and when I called the screening company, they also told me that she only reported 1/3rd of our monthly income, which was causing us to be denied, and that she told them we were applying for a more expensive unit, which also wasn't helping.

They also mistyped our address and then accused us of not living where we said we did, even though they had photocopies of our licenses and the mistake was obviously theirs.

So then I went, in person, with all of our documents, to try to get this sorted out so that the application process could proceed. When I went to the office, Ericka's boss said it was "suspicious" that we lived in an extended stay motel for a year and a half (Why is that suspicious?) and that we pulled our screening reports (Why is that suspicious?).

When I informed Ericka's boss of the FACT Act she said she'd never heard of it and that it was (apparently) a major red flag that I was exercising a legal right passed by Congress so that you know what a credit report said about you and have a chance to respond to non-factual information and errors.

A few more minutes of me trying to get through to them turned into Ericka and her boss screaming "WE HAVE BETTER APPLICANTS THAN YOU! YOU'RE DENIED! YOU'RE DENIED!" and going into a vituperative and childish meltdown against me.

Meanwhile, they got on the horn with their boss guy, Ibraham, down in Chicago at the HQ "Creative Designs", who I had also been trying to deal with, and just flat out lied and claim that the reasonable discussion I came to have with them was me "being intimidating", which is comical. When I called him again to see if we could still work something out, he wouldn't let me get a word in edgewise and kept shouting "YOU INTIMIDATE THEM YOU INTIMIDATE THEM!!! LEAVE PROPERTY NOW!", followed by the maintenance guy pulling up in a pickup truck and.....trying to intimidate me until I left the place.

These people are impossible to work with, they use a fly by night screening company, they can't seem to do simple data entry jobs yet they manage an entire apartment complex. Personally, I've never been so insulted in my life.

Do not walk. Run. This was a waste of an application fee and the extra money I spent at the motel dropping to a weekly rate expecting to hear back from them.

I can't say definitively whether my spouse being an immigrant or us being gay had anything to do with the treatment, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Every time I tried working with them to solve one of the problems they created, they would create more.

The truth is that they simply don't have better applicants than us. I have ZERO landlord actions on my report because we pay our rent in full, without demand, EARLY, and I have been doing so from age 18 to 36.

In this household, we do not spend outrageous sums of money on ridiculous things. We're frugal. We're polite. We're quiet. They would have never known we were there except for the rent coming in on time with no excuses, but they think they know everything, and I'm sure that's why they had to point out that "If something goes wrong, we can't evict.". Because they've never mistakenly moved in people that couldn't pay and wouldn't get out. /s But I digress...

Do you really want to deal with people like this?