Park Central Apartments

The setting is green and pretty, and the spa area is beautiful when lit up at night. I appreciate the landscaping, and have had a good experience with the management and maintenance departments.
I will say though that the complex can be noisy at night.

We stayed here for two years and let me tell you the leasing office management made sure they were the worst years of our lives. Please pay a little more and live somewhere else, anywhere but here!

Kevin and Samantha and the team at the complex are awesome! Just got back from a really fun beer tasting event that Kevin put together and it was a great way to socialize and catch up with neighbors. This team really cares and is great at what they do. Kevin remembered my dog’s name after one time of meeting her and if you ever want to get on my good side, just be nice to my dog and we are golden :) Anytime I’ve picked up a package from the office, I’m always greeted with smiles and the team just knows how to take care of their tenants. I also love the maintenance team who responds to requests in a timely manner and who works so hard around the complex to make it a great place to live. Love this place!

I recently moved into Park Central with a roommate and the experience has been great so far. While there are loud gardeners at certain points in the day, I have yet to hear one at an unreasonable hour and the communication with management has been great. Everything has been working splendid and I would recommend this apartment complex if you’re looking for a well manicured and comfortable place to live.

TL;DR: IF YOU ARE A SCU STUDENT, please consider DOMICILIO apartments as opposed to this complex. More bang for your buck and the management seem to value their tenets. Heard nothing but good things about it from my friends who live there.
Full Review:
I’ve been living here going on three years now. As an SCU student, the convenience and proximity to the University is a big plus. However, this complex is far from being perfect.
As far as pros go, the premises is decently maintained and the pool and Jacuzzi are of decent quality WHEN they’ve actually been cleaned. Generally, the management allows both of these amenities to become fairly dirty before they take the initiative to clean them.
Speaking of management, the property is and has never been managed well. Take the leasing process, for instance. Just to renew my lease, I’ve had to make multiple trips to the office with all sorts of different documentation because they always seem to forget to request a vital form or contractual agreement. The entire affair would be a lot easier if they would just explicitly state what they needed from you initially, or if they had the tact to just give you some form of checklist outlining what specifically was required. It would save time, reduce the number of office trips necessary, and seem more professional altogether. Given how many leases they sign/​renew, you would think this would be fairly routine by now.
I’ve also had a disagreement with the new manager of the property regarding a late fee because he went back on his word and then acted as if he had never made the agreement with me in the first place. He told me it was due to a «miscommunication» and if this was indeed the case, he definitely needs to improve how he conveys information and listens to the customer (as is evident with the leasing process). I was hoping he’d be an improvement over the old manager but it appears to be the same old, lousy business as always.
As far as noise level goes, the property is meticulously maintained by a crew of gardeners who make it their duty to lessen your sleep quality by utilizing extremely loud leaf blowers in the early hours of the morning. While I appreciate that the management wants to maintain the aesthetic quality of the complex, they definitely go overboard at the cost of the community.
Furthermore, at nights there’s usually some homeless individual rustling through the dumpsters for who knows what. Definitely does not make the complex seem safe and it also brings up the problem of identity theft if these individuals do come upon documentation with personal details. Last year, the complex’s mailboxes were burglarized THREE, yes THREE, separate times before management had the brains to install stronger lock boxes. Another instance of managerial incompetence.
I won’t even say much about the fitness room. It’s small, cramped, and has only a few machines for cardio and lifting. Another hilarious feature of this amenity is that it only offers 1, not one set but one individual dumbbell, of each weight class. This effectively prohibits you from doing 80% of exercises that require an actual complete set of free weights. Again, management is either very incompetent or very apathetic. Maybe both.
Finally, the room quality is not on par with the rent. The carpeting is cheap, the walls are thin, and the rooms do not allow for optimal airflow which results in them being very hot in the summer time (at least this was the case in my building). In the 2 bedroom units, the guest bedroom does not have an AC unit (for some inane reason) so there’s no way to really alleviate this problem unless you want a giant fan blowing in your room ²⁴⁄₇. The rooms also do not have ceiling lights which gives the apartment an almost cave-​like quality. Let me repeat myself, ridiculous for the pricetag.
Despite my disagreements with the complex’s management, the people in the office who take care of the day-​to-​day matters have generally been polite. The maintenance men are also top notch and attentive.
IF YOU ARE A SCU STUDENT please consider looking at the DOMICILIO APARTMENTS, which is another apartment complex located near the university. The rent is on par with Park Central’s but you get a lot more bang for your buck in terms of quality of living conditions and general competence of management. If I could go back in time, I would have definitely chosen that property over this one.
I’m sure management will provide some sort of response stating that they’re sorry and that they’ll rectify a few of these problems. However, take it from someone who has actually lived here for three years… they will not take the extra steps to make this complex actually worthy of its EXORBITANT pricetag.
Pretty much all of the problems mentioned in previous reviews have not even been addressed. These include…
–No gate to keep the transients out of the trash
–AM wake up calls courtesy of the gardeners
–Large groups of people living in small units

Loud

If you don’t enjoy sleeping-​in then Park Central Apartments is for you.
Park Central Apartments has a loud gardener or leaf blower underneath your window EVERY MORNING. It’s lovely waking up to the rambuncious motors every morning…
I wish they limited the gardeners, maintenance, leaf blowers, noisy machines to ONCE a week instead of every damn day, it’s literally impossible to get some peace and quiet to sleep-​in in the mornings. I guess that’s what you get for some well maintained landscaping.

I recently viewed Park Central in a quest to find a cheaper but nice/​safe place to live in Santa Clara. I booked a viewing online and went in the next day and met with Samantha Bettencourt. Samantha is great – professional and informative, but also friendly and personable. She showed me a 1-​bedroom 700 sq ft unit and around the complex. PC actually has a pretty residential feel to it, which I liked a lot, and the apartments themselves are nice. Good construction, fairly up-​to-​date appliances, etc. The rent isn’t cheap, but it’s not crazy for the area. Shout out and thank you to Samantha for taking the time to call me back, help me reserve a quote, and check in!

LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE. unless…
You want to hear everything going on between your neighbors — live here.
You want to deal with horrific management — live here.
You want to swim in an unheated pool that’s covered in bees — live here.
You want to pay too much for a shitty white box apartment — live here.
You want to have access to a broken, mildly warm, hot tub.
Sorry, park central. Your apartments are garbage. Homeless people everywhere. Horrible managemenT.

not a safe place: my car was broken in in the underground parking alot.

Pool cold and dirty.
Hot tub constantly broken.
Noise late at night is very, very loud.

I’m happy living here. The maintenance team has gone above and beyond with my requests. They are super responsive and trustworthy. Mike Perez is the Maintenance Supervisor, and he’s done a great job with the team. I thought since this community is close to the college it would/​could be noisy, but it isn’t at all. Nice place to live.

Thanks for a great place to live. Kevin and Samantha have been the best managers I’ve experienced. They are on point regarding leasing terms, signing for packages, and keeping the community well maintained! Kevin and Samantha are extremely approachable and have been more than helpful in maintaining our apartment. Regarding the reviews below about leafblowers, this goes to show how we’ll see how often this complex is maintained. As a dog owner, the well kept landscaping is key.
The one insignificant comment I have is that the pool and especially the hot tub are much too cold!
Hope this helps any prospective tenants!

I moved here with my boyfriend in January 2013 and signed another year-​long least this past January. I really like living here; it’s one of the better apartment complexes I’ve lived in, and I’d probably stay another year if it weren’t for wanting to move out of Santa Clara altogether.
There’s a lot of good and a little bad to living here. I’m going to be as brutally honest as possible.
The Good:
–Beautiful property, lots of green, flowers, and wildlife. If you don’t like crows, it may not be the place for you, but there are tons of crows all over the bay area. You see a lot of squirrels too.
–Deluxe apartments that fall just shy of «luxury.» They’re pretty well constructed for the most part; the double-​paned glass means I don’t hear my neighbors at all if I shut the windows. They’re attractive, fairly spacious, and painted neutral colors.
–Absolutely top-​notch customer service. They hang a little bag of candy on your doorknob before your birthday. For Valentine’s Day we got little metal mailboxes filled with candy. At Halloween, they erected a big screen at the pool and had a party where they watched «Zombieland.» We were given a free carpet cleaning as a thank-​you for signing another year’s lease.
–Exceptional security. They contracted with Silicon Valley Security Patrol to keep the students from screaming their heads off for hours at three a.m., and to keep the dumpster divers from spreading trash everywhere. This afternoon I got a call stating there was a «distress call» from my apartment. I explained that the battery in the smoke alarm had started to die, so we took it out, intending to pick up a new battery this afternoon and replace it. They had maintenance come in, make sure everything was okay, and they replaced the battery for us. It definitely made me feel more secure in my apartment.
–Great amenities. Our apartment has an in-​unit washer and dryer that’s rather small but works very well. Not every unit does, so there are on-​site laundry facilities too. The pool and hot tub are salt water sanitized, not chlorine, so you can get in the pool without feeling gross afterward. The in-​wall heating and A/​C units work really well and are energy efficient.
–The community is really nice. There’s a farmer’s market next door on Saturday mornings, and lots of cute little restaurants and businesses nearby. The nearby supermarket is kind of blah, though.
The Bad:
–Students. SCU students aren’t that bad, but occasionally they get a little loud. Usually it doesn’t last that long, but it does get a little loud in the spring/​summer if you like sleeping with your windows open. They do what they can to curtail the noise. They’re not any louder than your average shrieking little kids, but they’re up later.
–Smokers. This is a non-​smoking property, and Park Central enforces it as much as possible. But you know smokers… I’ve had to put out carelessly discarded still-​lit butts on the sidewalk from smokers and close off my bathroom when my neighbor decides to 420 erry day. Again, this isn’t something Park Central can really help, since they can’t exactly conduct smoking stings by busting into suspected offenders’ apartments.
–The gym is simply a small room with three machines in it. Probably not an issue since SCU students can just use the campus gym, but if you’re a regular working adult, you’re going to want to find an actual gym.
–The cabinets in the kitchen are kind of poorly constructed. The first few weeks we were here, a cabinet door fell off its hinge, requiring a maintenance visit. Another shelf wasn’t properly constructed, so we couldn’t put anything on it without another maintenance visit. Now, one of the shelves is bowing under the weight of food in the cabinet, so we’ll probably have to call maintenance again.
–If you decide to go month-​to-​month, your rent goes up a LOT. For us it was about a $ 1000 per month increase.
The Average:
–Rent is kind of high for the amount of space we have, but no higher or lower than other apartments of the same quality. If you look at other major complexes near SCU, they charge much more and their construction is really cheap.
–I won’t know if they’re fair on returning deposits until we move out, but my guess is they’re standards across the board for this area.
EDIT: THIRD mail break-​in in less than a year. We haven’t gotten mail in two weeks, and won’t get it again for another month at least. Six weeks without mail. We can go get it at a post office 2 miles away (even though there is a post office literally across the street. And it’s only open M-​Sat 9 – 4. OK, I take a day off work to go get my mail, I guess?

I lived here from 2012 – 2013. I went to law school at SCU and Park Central is very close to the university.
The actual apartment is standard. Nothing special or extraordinary from what you should be receiving for the rent that they charge. I think it’s important to note that we were told water and trash were ‘included’ which I assumed meant included in the rent that the landlord quoted us. It wasn’t. So every month we were charged about an additional $ 70 that we hadn’t expected to pay for.
My major issues with the complex:
1. The homeless that wander around the complex on a daily basis.
2. The dumpster divers that come by every night around 2:00am — 4:00am.
3. The lack of enforcing penalties against noisy, unruly neighbors.
THE HOMELESS:
The fact that there are homeless people wandering around on a daily basis, with no fear of getting kicked out, raises a huge issue of security!
Constantly they are going through the dumpsters or hanging out around the parking lot. There are a few (I’m not trying to be funny) that spoke to themselves or would be yelling to themselves. The lack of any security in the complex was so bad that I became familiar with certain faces. Several times I either run from my car to my apartment or vice versa out of pure fear that one of these people are going to rob me or do something to hurt me. I also always had to constantly make sure that my blinds were closed so as to avoid any potential people peering in through my window.
THE DUMPSTER DIVERS:
By far the most annoying part of the complex is this aspect.
*Unlike* most apartment complexes in the area Park Central DOES NOT gate off or restrict access to where the tenants throw out their garbage. This attracts way more homeless people and dumpster divers to the parking lot *right* outside the apartments. Because dumpster diving is illegal these people come during strange hours in the AM. You would think they would do their best to stay quiet while they dive into the trash — but they don’t. In fact they are so loud that I had to buy earplugs and sleep with them every night because I could hear the trash divers through my windows banging around the dumpster or even arguing with one another.
It is also important to note that I called the cops, I called the landlord the leasing office, I called anyone I could to try and put a stop to it. The landlord and leasing office were the MOST UNHELPFUL. They simply didn’t care. This should make any prospective tenant uncomfortable. Among the weird pieces of random furniture or clothes they find, dumpster divers are looking for identities to steal. This is why it was so bothersome to me, I was super paranoid about anything I threw out — bc I was seeing it there right before my eyes people that were ready and actually stealing identities.
Fortunately, I formed a cozy relationship with the local cops because I called in so often. So after a while the cops just began driving over immediately when I called. They were patient enough to wait around for the dumpster divers to come back and catch them when they supposedly ran off.
It still didn’t solve the problem though. The best solution would have been for Park Central to have cared enough to lock up access to the trash — but they never did and were extremely lazy about doing this.
THE NOISY NEIGHBORS:
Lord have mercy on me. Again I mention most people living in this complex were students. SCU was only a few steps away from campus and was convenient to live at if you were a student. However, there were some that had large families that decided to live there as well.
I am not judging those with large families that choose to live in a small apartment complex but I am annoyed again with Park Central for not monitoring the amount of children a family manages to sneak by and squeeze into a cramped 2 bedroom apartment.
I kid you not I counted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 … 6! KIDS only kids! living below us. This is not including their mother and father. So a family of 8 was living in a two bedroom beneath my roommate and I. Every night and every day for the last few months of living there I had to hear babies, kids, TV blaring cartoons, stomping, crying, wailing, annoyed children screaming at the top of their lungs. Constant noise until they finally went to bed. I felt like I was living in a low income housing unit. A family of 3 or 4 is expected and should be expected but 8? It was a zoo beneath us and Park Central turned a blind eye over and over again to this.
Although we lived above them, the amount of noise created and doors constantly banging actually would shake our apartment floors — it became unbearable. I would avoid going home and spend unnecessary hours studying at the library than be comfortable in my own place.
I know it will be tempting to live here DON’T. Your peace/​quiet and most importantly SAFETY isn’t worth losing.

Live somewhere else.
So I lived in PC for about 4 years. I had a pretty great time there because I lived there through law school and almost a year after I graduated. I was happy because PC is super close to campus, and a bunch of great restaurants.
After my 4 years here the old manager left and a new one came in. At the same time I was basically kicked out. Rent was due to increase by about $ 200 a month. It had steadily increased before, but never by that much! So I needed a new place to live. They increased the rent most likely so I’d leave, they’d be able to renovate my apartment, and get some poor schmuck to pay top dollar and live there. So after 4 years, never having one complaint against me, I’m just kicked to the curb.
They also were pretty terrible with the deposit. Though they were going to repaint the walls and redo the carpet anyway because of the remodel they still only gave me less than a dollar back on my deposit. I fought with them over a stupid tiny dent on the dryer door. They said it would cost over $ 100 to fix. I disagreed. So they reimbursed me an extra $ 30. I bet they didn’t even end up fixing it.
Also it can get loud, but you live next to a college campus AND two bars, so you really should have expected that…
So unless you have a lot of money, AND go to SCU (otherwise you should seriously move somewhere cheaper) don’t bother.

Loved it. First year was rough because we had the typical college kids above us but (not sure if intentional) eventually they made our building more family friendly which I loved! Spent three years here and loved the staff and maintenance crew!

It looks so nice and quiet during the daytime, but not at late night/​early morning. The best way to protect your sleep is 408−615−5580 (SCPD) and officers do give $$$ tickets to violations.

I lived here between June 2011– June 2012. I have to say I’m impressed by the apartments.
Pros:
–Akee and the other employees are very friendly and helpful. I once was late for a rent payment, but waived the $ 50 penalty fee (which, by the way, you should never miss).
–Pool and hot tub are cleaned DAILY at 8 sharp in the morning. Needless to say, very clean.
–Good balance of building and nature. I’ve seen squirrels, hummingbirds, and other flora/​fauna that combine to make this a very peaceful community.
–Apartment is relatively new, so no mold, etc.
–Did I mention it’s peaceful? Very quiet, and great to relax. You can hear the Caltrain once in a while, but you get used to it and don’t hear it anymore.
–Post office and Santa Clara Farmer’s market is literally 1 minute away! I can’t emphasize how much I love this.
Cons:
–Watch out for pests as it gets hotter in the summer. As long as you vacuum constantly it shouldn’t be a problem, but on occasions I’ve seen silverfish in my house. No cockroaches though, thankfully.
–Although grounds are kept clean, constant leaf blowing gets loud sometimes.
–Packages sometimes are just left in front of your door. It’s never been stolen, but then again, it’s completely up to the discretion of FedEx/​UPS whether they take it to the office or not.
–Rent, as consistent with other professionally managed properties, rises on average of $ 80~130 every year you re-​sign (which is why I couldn’t afford to stay here). It’s a bit high, but reasonable for what you get.
-«Gym» is literally a tiny room that barely stuffs 1 treadmill, 1 stationary bike, and 1 elliptical. And one vertical chest press. That’s it. It gets awkward in that tiny space.
Overall it’s been a good stay. I love this apartment but after the rent hike I can’t afford to live here anymore.
Thank you Park Central Apartments, it was great while it lasted.

So far so good.
Good apartment with nice finishes if you get a remodeled unit (w/​d, granite, nicer cabinets, etc). It is a bit pricey, which I hear is due to proximity to the university. I haven’t experienced any of the university parties, noise or hooplah that I read on other reviews and we’ve been here for a few months now. Maybe it depends on where you are in the complex.
Good neighborhood. We have a pooch so a good walking radius is important. This complex is smack in the middle of a bunch of historical homes in Santa Clara which are way more fun to walk past the apartment complexes and 7-​Elevens. Its close to a variety of parks that I can walk to with my pup, plenty of restaurants, and you are literally right next door to the SC Farmer’s Market every Saturday.
Staff has been good from the tours, to signing the lease to the one or two service experiences we have had.
We are on the ground floor, and we haven’t heard anyone on either side of us, but our upstairs neighbors can be heard from time to time (a few times its been enough to be displeasing).
I’ve lived in 4 different apartment communities in the Bay Area and this is one of the good ones.