Adalberto Toledo | Senior Staff Writer

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Kyle Martin | Staff Writer

@Kyle_Martin35

Scott Brown Properties has been in Denton since the 1990’s and currently rents to roughly 3,000 tenants, but many current and former residents have recently been vocal about bugs, mold, foundation issues, bad customer service and other issues on the properties.

Roughly 3,000 tenants dwell in 1,400 Scott Brown Properties, which translates to 13.1 percent of Denton’s renting population, of whom 75 to 80 percent are UNT and TWU students.

Biology senior Zoe Pratt is one of those students. Pratt looked into a duplex on the 600 block of Amarillo Street in August 2014 after a frantic search for a place to live yielded little return.

When seeing the house for the first time, Pratt said the first thing she saw walking into the duplex was a dead bird hanging from the front porch section. Walking in, Pratt said, revealed a distraught, unkempt house with a two-foot-wide hole in the ceiling with drywall hanging from it and mold throughout. She said the agent guiding the tour of the house told her not to worry and that Scott Brown Properties would fix all the damage in time for them to move in.

“They fixed the hole in the ceiling, but I started moving my stuff in and was walking around the carpet, and I realized that there were bugs on me,” Pratt said. “So I called my friend and I had him come over, and we walked around and he was like, ‘These are fleas.’”

Pratt said because she is allergic to mold, the discovery forced to wait another month before moving into the house, due to unlivable conditions. Further inspection of the residence, Pratt said, revealed multiple other flaws, including visible holes in the floors that went down to the foundation, as well as mold in one of the closets.

According to the Center For Disease Control and Prevention, people who have immune system complications and chronic lung diseases have increased risk of fungal infection in the lungs.

“There was so much mold that I just couldn’t even breathe at all, but there wasn’t anything that you could do about that,” Pratt said “They just said it was an old place, so I was like, ‘That sucks I can’t breathe in my own home.’”

Pratt is not the only student who has had problems with mold. Other Scott Brown Properties residents found similar conditions in their houses.

One particular current Scott Brown tenant, who has asked to remain anonymous because he is still a tenant, used a home testing kit to find toxic mold in his property. They said that after notifying Scott Brown’s offices of the mold, “they refused to check for toxicity” and gave them “a bottle of some bleach spray and said to clean it.” After repeated calls, e-mails and visits to the offices, the resident said their mold problems still have not been taken care of.

A former Scott Brown tenant, marketing senior Colin Wheeler, began renting in June 2014 and said during his 12-month lease, he and his roommates still came across issues with his house, including mold.

Though the properties may be in poor condition when a tenant views it, Scott Brown property manager Jay Brakefield said the company tries hard to make repairs. He added that it’s difficult to deal with both the tenants and the investors and owners of the properties they manage, calling the owners the backbone of the business.

But Brakefield said a student would never rent out a place if they saw it in poor condition.

“If a house is bad, nobody needs to be living in it,” Brakefield said. “But what do you do? The owner’s calling you, ‘You got that place rented?’ You’ve got to tell the owner something. We work for the owner.”

Brown said his company is trying to “weed out” the owners who do not meet his company’s standards, and that what he really wants to emphasize is neither he nor the company owns everything that their sign is on.

A local business

The company’s standards have developed along with Brown.

When Brown was 17 years old he bought his first rent house with $10,000 his father gave him for his high school graduation. Brown said when his father offered to buy him a new car after graduation, he instead took the money and invested in a house, with his father as co-signer. In 1992, he began his surge into the housing and real estate business with Scott Brown Properties.

“The way I bought the other ones through college is I’d sit down with older couples who already had their houses paid for, they didn’t have any debt on them, and I’d go have dinner with them or take pizza over or whatever,” Brown said. “And I’d sit in there on Friday nights and have pizza with these people, and they would own or finance for me so I didn’t have to go to the bank.”

Brown graduated from UNT in 1986 with a degree in management and real estate living. He drove a bus for most of his time at UNT to keep money in his pocket and bought the current offices of Scott Brown Properties in 1999 – a five acre plot on the 1400 block of Dallas Drive.

Since his business began, Brown said he’s made an effort to keep a one-on-one relationship with his investors and his tenants. He also said owners need to take responsibility for their properties – not just the company.

“Scott’s taken a personal interest to go out into town and look at the properties that we manage, and he’s looking to really get these owners in here,” Brakefield said of Brown. “I mean [the house on] Amarillo, if you look at every house around there, it’s been remodeled. And the guy who owns that, I’ve personally contacted [him] and said, ‘Hey every house around you is been remodeled. Let’s do something with your house.’”

Mold only the beginning

After dealing with the mold, fleas and other problems at the Amarillo Street house for a month, Pratt decided to get out of her lease, though it was not an easy process.

She finally moved out of the property in November 2014, believing she was in the clear with Scott Brown Properties. However, Pratt received a call from her roommate in January long after she had already left the house because her name still appeared on the lease.

She decided to formally break the lease, and over the next few months she created an itemized list of things wrong with the house that she believed were violations on the part of Scott Brown Properties and hand-delivered it to their offices. In the end, she said Scott Brown Properties agreed to use the owed first month’s rent to waive her lease-breaking fees, but having no record of the agreement, Scott Brown Properties could not break the lease.

Brakefield said breaking a lease is a very difficult process because the tenant signed a legal document agreeing to pay rent until the term is over. He said the typical process is to ask the tenant to find a new tenant for that property, and then the lease could be broken. “We’re very personable people up here,” Brakefield said. “I mean, what’s to stop anybody from coming through that door and saying, ‘Hey, I need help.’ We’ll do our best to help out anybody.”

The duplex on the 600 block of Amarillo has since been off the market. Brakefield said the property is not currently being rented out due to foundation issues, and leasing agent Maggie Quam said the house is currently going into “pretty heavy construction” and does not know when it will be available to rent out again.

More concerns from more tenants

Pratt and her roommate said they had been to the Scott Brown Properties offices several times before and met people with the exact same problems as her. She said one time in particular, she arrived to the offices to find a line out the door of tenants, all of whom were looking to voice complaints.Wheeler shared similar objections about his time with Scott Brown Properties.

“The previous tenants were just terrible. It was really, really gross,” Wheeler said. “They hadn’t moved out yet at all. We walked in and it was still lived in, they just weren’t there, and it was disgusting. It looked like they had five or six cats and they just peed everywhere all the time. It smelled awful.”Wheeler didn’t stress about the mess because he knew it would be cleaned before they moved in. For the most part, according to Wheeler, it was cleaned upon move-in.

This is because, according to Brown, the company conducts a “make-ready” on each property to prepare for a new tenant. He said they do about 300 make-readies during the summer months – their busiest time of the year. But even after the make-ready, Wheeler said other issues, including mold and a damaged bathroom, were things he had to fix himself due to lack of response from Scott Brown Properties. “We tried to get that at least looked at or fixed pretty much from the get-go whenever we first moved in,” Wheeler said. “But that never got looked at, I don’t think, once.” However, he couldn’t fix one particular incident. He believes Scott Brown Properties lost one of his rent payments.

After checking with his bank and confirming the rent check had been withdrawn from his account, Wheeler still received a notice in his mailbox from Scott Brown Properties, warning of missing rent. Wheeler said he had to pay rent for a second time and later received a call from Scott Brown Properties that said they would refund his missing check combined with his security deposit.

But a month and a half after moving out of the house, the solution went awry.

“It was strange because they divided up the security deposit three ways, because there were three people living there, and I think he also divided up the money he was going to pay me back,” Wheeler said. “So I never really got all of my money back for that, but I just stopped caring. It had been such a long time.”

Overall, Wheeler said his time with Scott Brown Properties wasn’t “that bad of an experience,” but still found drawbacks and failings on their part.

UNT senior Maddie Migis said her time with Scott Brown Properties has been good, saying she’s had only good experiences, feels her rent price is “more than fair,” and the maintenance have been “good, quick, and polite.” She added she has nothing negative to say and that she “absolutely love[s]” Scott Brown Properties.

A “First Class” company

With all of these problems that some of Scott Brown Properties residences have, many previous customers have made it clear that they would never rent from the company again and added that they would not recommend them to new tenants.

Scott Brown himself sees a problem with previous tenants leaving properties messy and said those are usually the people with the most complaints.

“It seems that the tenants that pay their rent late or don’t pay and then they party and tear the places up, they’re the ones it seems like with the most talk,” Brown said.

Brakefield added Scott Brown Properties is doing everything “within [their] limits” to keep their properties in the best condition possible, but admits “there are some bad rent houses out there.”

Brown said he feels that “without a doubt” his staff adequately manages the properties his company owns and manages. He said his office is “first class.”

“I’ve worked since I was 17 building all this stuff, and I’m doing the very best I can do and I care about people,” Brown said. “If they’ve got a problem, they come sit right here and talk to me.”

He said his work is made more difficult by these types of situations, and that he wants to do everything in his power to keep his tenants happy.

“I mean, [if] the tenant’s miserable, we’re miserable,” Brown said “We don’t want mad tenants. I don’t want any tenant leaving us unhappy.”

Featured Image: 609 and 611 Amarillo St. Graphic Illustration. Tomas Gonzalez | Visuals Editor