The Drake

This is a beautiful old building with a great location directly behind the Kimmel Center. It’s just minutes to South Street to the south, Rittenhouse Square to the west, the Reading Terminal to the north… you get the point. Overall, I would recommend this building.
The Drake was built in 1929 as a hotel. At the time it was one of the tallest buildings in the city. It still retains the unique charm that the original architects put into it that no new building would ever come close to today. This is very evident once you step into the lobby.
Pluses
— Great location
— I’ve found maintenance very easy. As opposed to my super in NYC where I had to wonder the building to find him, here you go online and submit a service request. Then a few hours or day or two later someone shows up to fix my sink, dishwasher, etc.
— The management is onsite, and I’ve generally found them responsive. For example, when people were smoking on the fire escape next to my windows, I mentioned this to them, and they dealt with it that afternoon.
— The management does a great job of showing the building, answering questions, even doing research to help find a good parking garage.
— There is an onsite gym. I’ve heard some people say that it doesn’t have the equipment that they need. See the point above and raise that to the management. I find the gym very convenient. It could use more deep cleaning, and I still have no idea how to work the TVs sometimes, but very convenient.
— The building is VERY quiet. At least my apartment is. I know other people who have had a bad experience. You are really at the mercy of your neighbor.
— If you can get on a high floor, then you will have some great views. I look west and love it.
— The building has temporary parking in front of the building (20 minutes), which is a great help.
— Moving in an out is usually very easy. They reserve an elevator and you can park on Hicks street to the side of the building.
— Front desk staff are very friendly and helpful. They know who the residents are. I feel that the building is safe.
— There is a community room with free wi-​fi (this used to be the bar/​lounge when this was a hotel)
— There are no dogs allowed except for the über rich penthouse floors. I have nothing against dogs, but sometimes people leave them home all day and they bark and are left unattended.
— Most of the neighbors are nice. There are a lot of millennials who are not going to say «hello» in the elevator because they are occupied reading their phones.
Minus
— They have a very serious issue with the fire alarms. They go off nearly weekly and blast a loud shreak into each room of your apartment. This can happen at 6 am or 9 pm. It’s to the point that most people just ignore it. If I give online presentations for work, I actually have to go to somewhere else to do it because I’m afraid that I’ll be interrupted by a fire alarm.
— Make sure that you understand that all of our utilities are extra on top of your rent.
–You will be required to get renters insurance.
–The electricity is provided through the building (about $ 20-​$ 30 dollars a month). Your bill will also include a line item to for the air condition. They take the cost of air conditioning the building and divide that among the tenants.
–The water bill: Through a formula they take the total water usage, divide that by how large your apartment is, and then send you a bill for the water usage. Most galling is that they actually charge you each month just to send you a bill. It’s only about a $ 4 a month charge to send the bill, but they take in about $ 10,000 a year to send a bill out to everyone in the building. Someone is doing very nicely by this. If the water bill actually had more information then the amount owed, such as usage trends, overall usage, etc, something to encourage conservation, I might not be so annoyed by this.
–It doesn’t mater if you are away for a month and don’t use a drop of water, you will still have to pay your share. So if someone leaves their sink running for hours, you are paying for a share of that.
–Also basic questions about the water bill just never get answered. For example, does the water bill exclude the water that is used in the laundry? It shouldn’t. This seems like a very straightforward question, but when I asked it I was told to make an appointment to come in and discuss it further. (I take it that the answer is «yes»)
–My water bill is usually about $ 20+ a month, which I probably OK.
— You will need to give two month’s notice before you move out.
— You are locked into Comcast as your cable/​Internet provider.
— Some might find the space small for the amount of rent. Some apartments lack closet space. This is probably par for the course for Center City.
— Laundry room is cash only. You put cash on a card, then use the card with the washing machine dryer. Would be much easier if the card machine took credit cards.

You get some great amenities such as large closet, gym, and secured entry living at the Drake.
However it may not be as nice as it looks on the outside or from the lobby. They building basically ignores the first three floors. They don’t vacuum the floors or try to prevent roaches and bugs. I have seen live and dead roaches walking to the elevator in the hall lobby and coming out of the laundry room. They try to say they are not roaches but just a different kind of bug.
The gym is usually hot, and they won’t do anything about it.
There are some creepy and weird people that live in the building.
You will smell marijuana smell when you walk through the hallways.
The fire alarm goes off a lot, which is annoying, and you have to constantly walk down slights of stairs either early in the morning or late at night.

This is probably the least professional management I have ever encountered at an institutionally owned apartment complex (Greg in particular). If you move in to The Drake, please be prepared to deal with the following:
1) Unannounced knocks on your door when your lease is expiring from Greg (Forest City’s attitude-​filled leasing agent) and potential residents. This includes knocking on the door when certain roommates are home and claiming that other roommates have told him that it was OK to show the apt (untrue), or using guilt to state that the potential residents had already made the trip there and if they liked the apt we would no longer be subject to impromptu visits. As somebody who works in multifamily real estate, this is not only illegal in some states and highly frowned upon in others (24 hours written notice is required in most), but very invasive and simply unacceptable for a unit that we were paying over $ 3,400 a month to rent.
* Note: I have heard that Forest City, who owns the Drake, has been moving towards third party management recently and this is why their management has started to suck at certain complexes. I am unsure whether the Drake is managed directly by them or not.
2) If your heat breaks, please do not plan on having it repaired at any point during your residency. The heat in my bedroom stopped working in the very beginning of winter, at which point we submitted a maintenance request. Now this is not an exaggeration — after SEVEN separate maintenance requests, management finally agreed to open up the wall in my bedroom and take a look into the issue.
The first seven requests led to the very nice in-​house maintenance man to come upstairs in the late evening and basically reset the wall-​unit which was getting blocked up from steam for whatever reason and shutting off on a near-​daily basis. So about two-​three times a week when coming home late from work I had to either deal with the maintenance man coming up to my bedroom for 20 minutes and temporarily fixing the issue, or just sleeping in the cold. Once they went into the wall, the problem stopped for a few weeks. They made sure to leave an enormous mess of dust particles and chopped up wall on my carpet which nobody bothered to pick up. They also placed duct tape on several pieces of the wall, greatly enhancing the bedrooms aesthetics (sarcasm). So after finally entering the wall, a few weeks later, the heat broke again, and once again we were back to the same routine. Luckily it was towards the end of the winter by then, and I was counting down days until move out.
Side note: Greg gave me an extremely difficult time about this whole process, stating he could not speak about apt issues with me because I had only signed a lease application and not an actual lease. I explained to him that he had mentioned to me that the leasing office was only open M-​F 9 – 5. Since I had moved to the city to start a new job, I was not at liberty to take time off during the work week to sign the lease, but would happily do so via fax or email. I was denied that request, and was told at this time that the leasing office was actually open on Saturday as well, and he would not have given me false information stating otherwise. I forwarded his original e-​mail to him, and no response or apology was given. On two separate Saturday’s I went to the leasing office to sign the lease, and found nobody there. Going back to the heat, after my girlfriend had called the first several times, Greg said he was «doing me a favor» by speaking to me about our heat not functioning for the past month, and that in the future he would only discuss apt issues with tenants on the lease. I also saw him on the property days after he had knocked on our apt door unannounced when my girlfriend was home alone and asked him to give us prior notice before doing so in the future — again, he said he could not discuss any matters relating to the apt with me, rather than apologizing for his rude and invasive behavior.
3) As a former hotel, the Drake’s is aesthetically pleasing, but they are absolutely the highlights of the property. From the poorly lit lobby and main hallway to the dingy hallways with poorly maintained carpets (our floor always carried a strong odor), the rest of the common areas are not up to the standard you would expect at this type of rent level. The gym is OK but very small. The interiors are really the worst part about the property — you can tell the apartment has not received the proper operating budget to maintain a high level of quality. Patch jobs are evident throughout– from uneven paint, to doors in need of repair (our front door rattled with ferocity any time we needed to open the windows even when dead bolted, which was often since our unit did not have central air and the window units did not provide great circulation in the unit). Also, the fridge is about a foot shorter and about half as deep as a normal one — an interesting move for a 3 bedroom apt.

DOUBLE CHECK EVERYTHING THAT IS SENT TO YOU FROM THE LEASING OFFICE. If I hadn’t done so, my roomate and I would have overpaid by $ 2679.76 over our 15 month lease.
I feel strange reviewing a place that I’ve never seen in real life but nonetheless that will not deter me from being heard!!!
A friend and I are moving into the Drake in June and have recently signed a lease. This review is re: the customer service of the leasing experience. The lady (who shall remain nameless) was incompetent and made this seemingly simple process very difficult. A few problems that were encountered:
1) After a phone discussion and e-​mail confirmation of the terms of the lease she sent us a totally different lease to sign that was 5 months shorter and almost $ 200/​month higher than what was stated in her her e-​mail earlier in the week.
2) When I pointed out the discrepancy she assumed I was wrong and didn’t double check her work. She sent me an e-​mail back that stated that I must be confused and probably was quoting an earlier price for different lease terms that we discussed. I had to forward her her own e-​mail from the week before to get her to redo the lease.
3) Since we are moving in in the middle of June we have to pay a partial month’s rent. She miscalculated this partial month’s rent by almost $ 250.
4) It is Drake policy that all tenant’s must have renter’s insurance. She gave us a number of a company and told us this place is «simple stupid and will give you a really good deal.» Geico gave us renter’s insurance for half of the quoted amount of the company she recommended.
5) For the psychologists in the room… I think she has some executive function problems. It was really, really hard to get her to summarize or systematically discuss how varying the terms of the lease would affect pricing.
6) The Drake has a really annoying policy of charging you for every single day that the room is vacant. For example if the current tenant moves out on June 1 and the apartment is ready on June 5 but you are arriving in town on June 15 they charge you for those 10 days that the room stayed vacant.
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7) Most importantly, every single e-​mail that she sent us ended with «do this ASAP» regardless of the fact that we were signing a lease in early April that started in mid-​June. It was really, really annoying. I started responding to her in kind and ended all of my e-​mails with «please get this done ASAP!!!» but she may not have gotten the point as she kept telling to do things «ASAP.»

I live in Chicago and was in Philadelphia for 2 days with the intention of finding an apartment. I found a 1 bedroom at the Drake, completed an application and gave them a 1500 dollar deposit to secure the deposit. 24 hours after I filled out the application, and after I had returned to Chicago, I received an email from Cindy the leasing agent who stated she «made a mistake» and the move in date was 1 month AFTER my intended move in date.
I obviously need an apartment as soon as I move to Philadelphia. Despite the obvious negligence of the leasing agent, she did not apologize and made no effort to rectify the situation and secure an equivalent apartment. I also called the property manager, Laura Baciu, who ignored my phone calls and my email.
If I had decided I did not want this unit after I had made a deposit and filled out the appropriate paperwork, I would be financially penalized. When the Drake leasing office made a mistake, they made no effort to fix their own mistake.
For an apartment that markets itself as responsive to a tenant’s needs, my experience with the Drake was completely contrary to their mission statement. I would warn anyone looking at apartments to avoid the Drake Apartments.

My friend lived here from 2002 on for a few years. I loved the views. Hated the bathroom. the toilet is like a hotel bathroom without a tank. So if anything happens to the toilet which often does you’re screwed. That thing overflowed all the time. God help you if your german friends are in town and you start to go beer for beer. Oy!
Some of the apartments seem really small especially the studios. My friend had a one bedroom with a postage stamp of a kitchen.
However, my most favorite part of this building are the little balconies off the stairwells. My friends flight was delayed due to one of those killer snow storms and we went to almost every balcony getting right up to under the penthouse. Amazing gorgeous snow covered philadelphia. One of my favorite crazy memories.
Another fun fact. If you look at this building from west philadelphia, particularly spruce street near the wawa/​beijing and squint during the late afternoon the top of the building looks like a buddha.

I only had to spend about 30 seconds here to figure out how bad the management is. When I showed up to ask about seeing some apartments, the woman at the front desk was incredibly rude and unhelpful. Realizing that I was not interested in living somewhere that employed this woman, I started to walk out. As I left I could hear her being equally unpleasant to a resident. Her response to everything was «I don’t know anything about that.» Then what, exactly, IS YOUR JOB? The penthouses look amazing; but in my experience living in a building with bad management is never worth it.

I lived in the Drake for a year from 2007 – 2008. I loved the one bedroom apartment I had there (shout-​out to #203!), and only left because I was moving in with my boyfriend.
In the mid-2000’s they started renovating the building, starting with the bottom floors and moving up. They’ve since ran out of money and the renovations have stopped. After looking at a number of different one-​bedroom options there, the newly renovated ones are much nicer and worth the price than the older ones (full disclosure: I’m much more of a modern girl than an «old world charm» girl).
I never experienced any cockroach problems, and my biggest complaint was probably that they didn’t have enough washer/​dryers to accommodate the large number of tenants, so there was always a wait for laundry.
Don’t let the ditzy leasing agent deter you, this is a great place to live in a great neighborhood!

I used to live in the Drake in the 1980’s. A very cool building with some rich Philadelphia history. The building was turned to condos in the mid 1980’s, but they only sold a dozen or so off, then rented as apartments currently, with a few owners sprinkled around.
The penthouse units are some of the COOLEST in town (I have been a realtor in Center City for 20 years, and have almost ALL other penthouses) that Philadelphia offers. Floor 2 – 24 are «flats» and some of the penthouses on floors 25 – 31 are bi-level…like a huge house in the sky. neat outside space to boot…

Caveat: I lived in the Drake for a summer, though not as an «official» resident. I stayed with friends in their one-​bedroom; I slept in the living room, on the fold out couch.
But on the whole, the Drake is a classy place in a great location. The elevators and hallways are always super well kept, and there are very cool common areas on the first floor, where you can entertain if you make arrangements in advance — beautiful old designs with pretty fireplaces.
The crowd is mixed: students with generous parents, young professionals, and a few families. Still, I never saw clashes from any of the tenants. My roommates complained several times about being unjustly billed for something or other, but I think, on the whole, they received attentive front desk service.
The gym is nice, though the equipment is a little antiquated. And the front desk staff are very attentive, keeping a close watch on everyone that comes in and out of the building — although, admittedly, I lived there «unofficially» for months, and I was never questioned.