Complaint Review: Roma Investments LLC

Roma Investments LLC of Lakewood, OH, has easily been the worst rental experience of my life.

While I never had anything in writing with either the company or the owner (Tom Romanini), they purchased a building that I had been renting an apartment in months after I had moved in. The building, at the time I had moved in, was quaint, relatively quiet, and was filled with more or less normal tenants. Once Roma Investments took ownership of the building, things slowly but surely began to spiral downward.

The first sign of trouble was when our new landlord/company made the decision to turn the gas down on the water heaters, leaving half of the building without hot water for days. When called about the issue, the landlord initially refused to come out, but after I became more persistant, he eventually did show up: stomping his feet, swearing profusely, and muttering under his breath about "working on a Sunday." Even after this incident, the issue persisted, finally culminating in a building-wide effort to phone him one after another until he showed up to remedy the problem. At this point, many apartments had been without hot water for days on end, and again, our landlord showed up acting both indignant and outright unprofessional at the notion that tenants of the building would demand fully functioning utilities. All this, while he had chosen to inexplicably raise the rent by ten dollars per month, for no conceivable reason other than that it was too small an amount to trouble anyone.

Things only went downhill from there: as old tenants began to leave for obvious reasons, the company filled the empty apartments with what could only be described as the absolute dregs of society. I was treated to hard partying upstairs neighbors who argued excessively, blasted music/their television into the wee hours of the morning, and generally made themselves a nuisance (when called about the 3am pounding from above, the landlord was extremely reluctant to discuss the matter, and told me to "report them to the police" as he was unwilling to do anything about it), the new tenants who walked around the hallways with lit cigarettes and caused the entire building to reek of smoke, and the lovely new neighbor who held all of her angry, profanity-laden cell phone conversations just outside my living room window (when she wasn't otherwise occupied with her gaggle of friend who she invited to sit on milk crates and lawn chairs on the front steps, blocking the entryway to the building).

When I moved out (again, reasons being quite obvious) I was as amiable with the landlord as possible, and when he said "Leave your new address and I'll return whatever of your security deposit I see fit," I brushed it off as a mere slip of the tongue. Apparently, despite my utter joy at getting away from Lakewood's newest slice of ramshackle urban living, I should have clarified just what he meant. I received only a small portion back, too little to sue over as is Roma's modus operendi, with a small list of nonsensical "charges", the largest of which being an entirely invented "deposit" (curious that no deposits were ever mentioned prior to my moving) that seems to exist of the sole purpose of giving Tom Romanini an excuse to ply just a little more money from an exiting tenant. This despite the fact that the apartment was in significantly better condition than it had been when I rented it.

In short, this company is disgraceful, disagreeable, and conducts themselves in a fashion that could at best be described as smarmy, and at worst patently illegal. Avoid them at all costs!