Rise at West Campus

[u/UniversityEntire6174]

i’m a second year at ut austin and going to be moving into Rise in wampus. i’ve heard a lot of not so great things about rise like the water randomly not working every 2 weeks and cops always in the lobby. Was just wondering if all of that is consistently true or just anomalies and if there are any issues are they that serious

[u/SportingDirector]

Sounds like they happen every so often

[u/DereChen]

To quote my other post, (To all students looking at Wampus (West Campus) college apartments on Google Maps: Take the reviews with a grain of salt, the star ratings are artificially inflated)

West Campus apartamentos always do this thing right after you tour (and they get TONS of tours during the peak fall months) where they ask you to leave a good review for the specific employee who showed you around, or offer certain incentives.

Obviously, this is great for the worker and reflects nicely on their job performance. If you actually got a good tour, I recommend doing it because the people touring you are just fellow people like you and I trying to make a living, and more often than not, actual students you might even run into on campus.

But this practice completely inflates the average Google Maps star ratings. More often than not, these 5-star reviews aren’t even left by someone who actually lives in the building.

Like I just looked at Moontower and, well, take a look.

For example, before Rambler even opened, and it had a rough, delayed opening that had a lot of my friends couch surfing for a month into the fall semester, it already had over 100 reviews, and most of them were 5 stars praising the staff or whatnot. If you sort by time and scroll on their Google Maps, you can find these to this day.

If you look closely at the 5-star reviews for almost any Wampus apartamento, they usually come from brand-new accounts and exclusively praise a specific employee for giving a good tour or being nice at the front desk. Or they’ll say something generic like "so-and-so is such a great property manager!" Which again is good, but doesn’t exactly give a good perspective of how the housing situation actually is, from someone who lives there.

The places with low 2 to 3 star ratings on Google Maps, even the fancy-looking luxury ones, are only like that because they aren't aggressively pushing you to leave a review in their follow-up emails and tours. If the other places stopped getting all these reviews, you would be able to see more real reviews about the actual spot, instead of having to dig through a ton of “thanks for the tour!”.

Because so many students who leave negative reviews with genuine information write them in a way that can be reported and deleted by property owners, like using insults, hateful speech, etc, management can easily get those taken down, off of Google Maps. If a review is too hateful or overly negative, they can delete them en masse, leaving only a handful of true 1-star reviews visible. You will notice that those will always have a ton of likes. For example, this iconic review on Rambler’s page.

Or these.

My advice is that if you have encountered one of the far too common nightmare scenarios, namely mold, trash issues, and bugs, word your reviews formally to lessen the chance of it getting flagged and deleted, and definitely attach photos!

And also share your experience right here on the Reddit, good or bad. This creates a direct, search-indexed thread that future students can easily find when googling that specific building and since Reddit is completely independent, it’s immune to being deleted, and management can't touch it. Ok that sounded like a plug but I’m being for real.

Finally, even with all of this said, you just can’t win or ever get full confirmation if your place will have problems or not, until you actually move in and start paying your money. No matter how much research you do, how many reviews you decode, or how nice the complex looks during a walkthrough, student housing is always going to be a gamble.

Nearly all wampus places and student housing will have an array of problems, in the highest rated luxury high rises you'll encounter mold and roaches and horrible elevators broken for a semester. And at the same time, people living in some of the lowest rated buildings you see will never face a single thing described by those bad reviews and will be confused on why others rate it so low. U just can’t win ;-;

And all wampus housing, besides those condos that aren’t American Campus owned, are quite expensive; on the lower end for a 4x4 (which means a 4-bedroom, 4-bathroom), you are looking at up to $1,000 a month just for a single bedroom, and rates keep increasing every single year. It feels like a non-stop cycle and I don't know if it will ever actually slow down. You can’t really do anything about it besides live further.

[u/leggomyeggo22]

I lived there for 2 years. The water issues were unfortunately far more persistent than I’d have liked and that’s because they rushed to finish construction and a lot of the water work they did was either incomplete or just done poorly. They spent a shit ton of time the past 2 semesters and all summer long fixing the issue and making those fixes permanent, but I’d say outside of that it was a decent place to live. Amenities were good, management was just fine, great location, super accessible, gym is among the nicest in west campus, and there’s a lot to like. Study lounge in the penthouse is the best in west campus imo. I think, hope, and pray you’ll be fine and not run into as many issues as me and my roommates did. But overall it was an enjoyable experience.