I'm starting to get actively hostile to my new apartment office staff.
They have the most byzantine web of shit set up here, and so far the office staff have incorrectly told me how things work, sent me form emails claiming I've defaulted on move in requirements when I haven't actually done so, and now possibly incorrectly billed me.
First off, they use RentCafe.com, because they're owned by RentCIP.com, which controls more than half the large rental properties in my town.
So RentCafe.com is the backend for pretty much all apartment websites, and if you register with one, it "remembers" your email and tries to give you cross-site accounts so you can use the same one.
Except it never fucking works. EVER. It knows you already have a registered email, and refuses to let you sign up with the same email, but also acts as though it should remember one global password for the account, except it doesn't, and if you try to tell them you forgot your password for your account, it won't email you a password reset, because their tech sucks ass.
Moving on. Water and trash are handled and billed by yet ANOTHER company, who is probably just a subsidiary of RentCIP.com. They send me a separate bill for my water and trash removal. Cool. Except my first month's bill was $362 fucking dollars!
Turns out, the bill I get from YES ENERGY is actually sent by my apartment complex, and includes my monthly rent as part of the statement. Rent I already fucking paid for this month. I was told I deal with YES ENERGY myself, pay them myself, separate from my rent. Yet after talking to YES ENERGY, they say my apartment takes all the payments. On my statement, which has YES ENERGY's header on it, no where does it indicate who I'm actually supposed to pay, so I reasonably assumed based on what I'd been told that I pay YES ENERGY, which lead me to their website to make an account, which led to the above bullshit with RentCafe.com.
And so I go to my actual apartment complex resident portal and check the billing section.....nowhere are these charges listed. They may not post for weeks yet. But the amount due is patently not what I owe, unless its factoring in NEXT month's rent......
Holy shit. I knew this was going to be a clusterfuck as soon as I heard a 3rd party handled some portion of my monthly billing at this apartment. I'm the kind of person that pays bills immediately as I get them, so I don't forget. So this all makes very little sense to me why I receive a bill weeks ahead of time from someone I'm not supposed to pay for charges I owe to someone else in another fucking month. I don't even know how I'm supposed to pay my apartment complex what they supposedly owe YES ENERGY, because I was specifically told it was NOT GOING TO SHOW UP AS PART OF MY MONTHLY STATEMENT FROM THE APARTMENT COMPLEX. And yet somehow I'm supposed to pay them anyways.
I swear to god they make this complicated just so they can attempt to get people for defaulting on their bills.