Pointe on Rio

It’s a great place to live. It is very close to UT and the amenities are superb. Its located at a very ideal spot in West campus. The people that live there are all super fun. And the admin staff is out of this world. I definitely would suggest considering this place to live.

I really wish I had good things to tell people about Pointe. Besides its location and beautiful view (if you’re facing MLK), everything apart from that starts to go bad.
Since day one my experience has been bad. They signed me and of my roommates to the same room. Which means that I currently live in a room that I never signed up for.
Whenever we get heavy rains, it also rains inside the apartment, but don’t worry! You’ll get at least 3 giant fans in your room that can’t be turned off for at least a week. Your electricity bill will go up 3 times and they won’t compensate you for that.
Also, we don’t get hot water for more than 3 minutes in the shower.
If your fridge breaks down and you lose all of your groceries, they also won’t compensate you for that — it’s not their responsibility.
Ah! The printer always runs out of ink too! Because students apparently just «print too many things out». they don’t keep back up ink either.
If I were to renew my lease it would be because of Sherri. She takes care of the maintenance of the building and she’s the most friendly and helpful person around.
Thanks Sherri! You make the Pointe experience a little more tolerable.

Facilities are nice, but the building still only feels half finished. Water damage was never fully resolved. Rent is through the roof for the size of the units. Security could be better. Grey paint scheme is a little drab. Elevators are slow. If you want to live in West Campus, go for it, but you’ll find cheaper with better amenities elsewhere.

I am absolutely in LOVE with my apartment! It’s spacious, beautiful, receives a ton of natural light, and has everything needed to make me feel at home. My favorite amenity is the gym, of course. It’s always clean and never too busy to get a good work out in. The maintenance and building custodian are terrific and the staff is awesome. I would definitely recommend. This is a great home away from home community. :)

New property but I think they are doing an okay job. The people in the office have always been nice to me personally, and I love the apartment.

I feel like this place gets a bad rep. Yes, the maintenance requests take forever to fill and yes it doesnt exactly count as «premium living» (in my opinion) but the people that work here are fairly nice, and I’ve never run into any issues in my own apartment. Besides, it is fairly priced compared to similar floorplans at other complexes, and its right off 21^st which is a huge plus for me. It doesnt look super fancy, but I’m happy. ish.

I was so excited to live at the Pointe but after a few months, I don’t think management is doing as good a job as they should be. The building while new, is not the best quality. The elevators break on a regular basis. No one ever cleans the stairwells so there is trash everywhere and disgusting spills on the stairs. Maintenance is extremely slow. My roommates’ water heater was broken and it took over a month for them to fix it. They barged into the apartment 3+ times a week, disrupting my sleep. Maintenance has keys to the whole place so they can literally come in whenever they want.
Management is slow to take action on everything. It took too long to get my move-​in gift card. After the flash flooding last weekend, it took too long to respond to the water leakage in my apartment. Now management has sent in this company to dry up my apartment with loud, massive fans but it doesn’t fix the actual problem and it makes the quality of life worse for everyone in the apartment. This is just a cheaper way to try to appease residents without actually spending the money to fix the leaks. I think the Pointe should also enforce quiet after a certain hour. This open building plan means I can hear everyone else and it is the apartment’s responsibility to make sure it provides a good atmosphere for residents. People blast their music and shout until 5 am, and it makes it hard for me to sleep.
The amenities are ok. The fitness room is nice. The pool table is cleaned up so you can’t play at night. The printer is pretty spotty. It took them a long time to refill the ink. Overall, it’s not the best deal for the amount of rent you pay. The best thing about the place is that everyone has individual leases and therefore cannot be held accountable for their roommates’ fees.

The staff (including the handymen and women) are excellent and I love living here. My apartment is beautiful and I feel comfortable and at home.

All they do is lie to you. The management doesn’t know how to handle the property. The maintenance is great, Sherri is AMAZING. Get some pest control! Should not advertise «community amenities» on website if some of them don’t exist.

Time for an update. Unlike most reviews, I will not be strictly commenting on the customer service; that would be like going to a restaurant and only writing about your waiter. That being said, since one of the top 100 worst managers in the U.S. and one of the top 10 worst employees in U.S. are no longer working here, the current staff is great! We get it, they don’t have anything to do with the delay. However, imagine going to a restaurant labeled «upscale» or «luxurious», placing your order, and then you wait. Then the waiter comes out and tells you 5 times that your food will come out in the next hour. The last of those 5 time she/​he tells you that it will actually be 3 more hours until you get your food. So they give you free French fries while you wait. You ordered surf and turf and when the food finally arrives, 6 hours later, you get some scrawny shrimp and half a piece of a some beef fajitas. That’s not even what you ordered! That is exactly what happened at The Pointe and they offered zero explanations as to why that might have happened or why there was a delay. But since the staff is great, you should act as if that never happened! Could you imagine that happening to you and then having the staff’s friends tell you it’s completely fine because the staff is great! No! That’s not how it works. Nobody took responsibility for the epic delay this property had. Nobody! Then when we did move in, they waited to tell us, after we had all of our things packed in boxes and waiting outside to check in, that we must sign an agreement stating that we would be fine with having no access to the amenities while construction was still going on. It also included that we would still have to pay full rent and not say a word, even thought the loudest banging and drilling would continue for an unspecified amount of time. If that doesn’t sound like something that would make you upset, I don’t know what would. Living here today, you’d think construction is an amenity!
Also, don’t go off the reviews on their website… they are obviously all hand-​picked reviews about the staff. Majority are also mainly from before we even moved into the building. There isn’t even a place to submit reviews on their website so why would you even trust that as a source? Check any other source like Unilocal and you’ll get a better idea. Anyway, the current staff is great and hasn’t caused any confusion and that’s all I have to say about service.
Now for the actual building. You would think this place would be complete after a 6 MONTH DELAY during a school year and having us live at Dobie. Well, it isn’t. Today, 3 days short of 10 MONTHS AFTER the original August move in date, there is still LOUD banging and drilling every week and sometimes every day of the week. As I am typing this up, there is construction going on straight outside my window. Also, don’t bother looking at the renderings they have posted on their website. The actual building only looks like 70% of those pictures. The website also claims the building has «solid bedroom doors to minimize noise» and «electronic key access… at the front door of each unit.» That is 100% not true. I am sitting in my room with the door closed and I can here my roommate’s laptop across our 5 bedroom apartment and we live on complete opposit sides of the apartment about 80 feet away from each other.
The main point about I would like to make is that this building labels itself as «the premier living option in Austin with luxury living at an affordable price.» A short visit while walking through the garage-​like hallways and rusty courtyard and I’m sure there won’t be any confusion about how luxurious this place is. My roommates and I decided to stay here because we did not want to go through a 3^rd move in less than a year and that’s really the only reason we’re staying another year. Last thing is like to add, please don’t believe the manager if they tell you something along the lines of, «good luck finding another apartment in West Campus! They’re all 99% full!» I was actually told that around March this year and I have 2 witnesses. In March! Most places are probably lucky to be 75% full at that point.
That being said, would I recommend this place to someone else? Possibly. The room itself isn’t too bad and that’s where you’ll be spending about 90% of your time here. However, when you look at how much you’re paying, I don’t think there is a great value here. Especially when you’re paying for «upscale» or «luxury.» You want to see luxurious? Walk across the street. I can easily think of two buildings only a block or two away that can actually live up to the title of luxurious/​upscale. Maybe I’ll change my mind if they actually ever finish construction here. As for now, I am still pretty bitter about the way I was treated by the past two managers. Everyone has their own experience here. That doesn’t mean me being forced to move rooms at Dobie in the middle of the semester last year didn’t happen.

So far this experience has been terrible. I signed a lease for a 4×4 apartment with 3 other people, so each person would have a private room and bathroom. And obviously they have not finished construction in time for move-​in. So instead of putting us in a different apartment or hotel room like every other management company in Austin has done, they stuck us in dobie which is a 2-​star freshman dorm built in the 70s and not renovated since then. And to make matter even better they put us all in shared bedrooms no matter what your lease says. So welcome back to shared room dorm life. But that’s not even the worse part. Dobies room were apparently designed for people who are less than 4’6″ because everything in the room is tiny. The show head is about chest level so I have to take showers bent over. And the shower itself is less than 2′ wide. The toilet which is also stuck in that tiny 4×5 room nearly fits next to the shower and the toilet paper dispenser literally sticks into your side when you sit on it. The toilet bowl itself is not big enough to actually use normally so that’s fun. And the beds feel like they have been there since it opened in the 70s. They are basically just a spring and a board with no padding.
The best part is we can see the actual building from our room at dobie. And in the last week that I have been looking I have seen 0 workers on the building. Like literally not a single worker. You would think if a complex is 2 months behind they would actually have people working on it. So far this experience has been completely unacceptable. Especially for a «luxury» apartment that want to charge ~$ 800/​month for a room w/​o parking.

Let me start off by saying that my father is a structural engineer, and we have been keeping an eye on the Pointe on Rio construction site since I signed a lease with them. I have called the leasing office once a week all summer, since we knew around April that there was no way they could possibly have it built on time. Every single time we called, the realtors lied about their progress. They even went as far as to say that windows had been put in a month before they actually were, something anyone with eyes could see was not true. They waited until the very end of July to admit that they were over a month behind schedule, and they only admitted it after you called their office. They waited until the beginning of August to notify the people who hadn’t bothered to call to find out about the building’s progress (or lack there of).
Also, the Pointe on Rio took my debit card information down when I signed my lease in November to charge for a security deposit. They did not charge my card until the middle of July, around the time they admitted the building was not going to be ready on time. There is no reason that they should already be charging a security deposit if I can’t even move into my apartment for another two months.
There is no way that they haven’t known about this construction delay for months, and I fail to see why they didn’t mention it to their residents sooner. I wish I could say that I think things will get better once we move in, but I don’t. A management team that continually keeps their residents in the dark is not going to be fun to deal with in the future.

I cancelled my lease with this place due to the construction delay.

Let me start by saying I am not one of the unfortunate people who signed a lease here. If you are, I would start looking into other housing options for when you can break your lease. Don’t give these people your money (or your parents’ money for that matter). ;)
However, I do live just adjacent to this building.
There is LITERALLY no way this building will be finished at any point for fall move-​ins. They’ll be lucky to have it done on time for Spring, but the cost of rushing construction to meet these deadlines will surely show in the quality of the build. From what I’ve seen, it’s still in the early stages of having the structure put up (e.g. there are no walls put up inside). Fit-​out (where they put in cabinets, rugs, paint, and all the «finishings») alone can easily take a good few months in a building this size, and it’s no where near the point of even being ready for that yet. Nothing seems to have progressed from the first time I saw it back in May.
My boyfriend works in the real estate development industry and has heard some pretty horrible things about ACH’s work. I think it’s speaking for itself with this building.
A couple side complaints:
–Their construction crew regularly block off access to the alley and my parking lot with their lifts. They’ll put up signs saying that the road is closed, and prevent you from even getting through to park. Parking in the campus area can be a nightmare. I pay for parking at my place and shouldn’t have it obstructed. (Also, some of the workers have parked in my spot before. Not cool man.) All of my efforts to resolve this with Pointe on Rio were blatantly ignored, so I have had to file a formal complaint with City of Austin to hold them accountable for the illegal vacationing and blockage of the right of way of the alley.
–One of the lifts DESTROYED the phone cable and pole that connect to our building. AT&T has been out a couple times to work on it, but they said it’s so jacked that they need to send a construction team to fix the pole before we can get internet that’s faster than .25 mbps (I pay for 6 mbps, fyi). This is all due to the improper usage of the alley for their construction equipment, as noted above.

Are you serious, Pointe on Rio?! This is beyond unprofessional and I would be utterly embarrassed if I were them.
I was the one of the first people to sign the lease all the way back in fall 2013. I am supposed to be moving into an efficiency. I wanted to room by myself because I’m taking my MCAT in October and I didn’t want any distractions whatsoever. Now I may have to live in Dobie, which I’ve heard horrible things about. I even asked if it would be possible to have a single occupancy since that’s what I wanted in the first place and unfortunately, they said they couldn’t provide that option. Ha. Absolutely ridiculous.
I’m appalled by how this entire situation has been handled. I’m supposed to be focused on studying for my MCAT, but this debacle has me completely frazzled. Thanks for everything, Pointe.