Overture Rancho Santa Margarita 55+ Apartment Homes

David

My father moved to the independent living community of Overture Rancho Santa Margarita 55+ Apartment Homes. It's a very modern, convenient, 55-plus community with terrific privacy and good staff and management. They have a lot of interesting amenities for a 55-plus community. It's wonderful. It's a two- or three-story apartment building. It's not assisted living, so it doesn't include meals, but that's all outside. It also does not include caregiving, so we have private caregivers now. They have a very limited set of activities. It's not really an activity-driven place. We picked it because it was a little more intimate than the other places we had looked at. They had a couple of things. Number one, they have a first-floor apartment available with generous square footage. It is important because with my father's disability, he wanted to be able to very easily take his dog for several daily walks outside, so that was important. They accept pets. I believe 50 pounds or smaller. There is also an additional monthly pet fee that I can't remember. They are very security conscious, too. They have a very robust security system for people entering and exiting, mostly entering, and they have a brand new website-driven entry system that all the residents have access to. It works on your phone. It's an app where somebody can ring your call box and let you in. There are also security fobs for entry, and all the doors are locked more or less all the time, so you need to be admitted entry either by a fob that the community provides or somebody has to let you in using that app, so very high security. The rent and the added fees are very comparable to just a regular apartment you can rent in Rancho Santa Margarita. The only reason I give it a 4 is that in addition to the rent, they put on five or six added monthly fees for things like sewer and pest control, trash, and things like that. It's like an la carte service with extra utility-type things. I wish they would just roll it into the rent and have a single number. One thing I will rate them low on is their paperwork and their monthly billing and things like that, which are not very good. They're very confusing. I keep having to go to the Management Office to have things translated for me in terms of what exactly the statements mean, things like that. They do have a resident portal online that makes it very easy to find everything, although the itemization is a little bit confusing sometimes. The resident portal is supposed to make things easier on residents and limit the amount of time you have to go and bug management about questions and things like that.

Reviewer#AT0322B

We lived in Overture Rancho Santa Margarita 55+ Apartment Homes since 2015. The management for the past two years has been very bad. The manager has moved to another location and someone is going to be coming in eventually, which I think is a breach of the terms because they are not telling the residents who's coming in and what's their name is. As far as many of us are concerned, the upkeep is not getting an 'A' rating. It's a very nice setup with one-bedroom and two-bedrooms with a nice pool area. It's a very nice arrangement, but it suffers from a lack of management. In light of the cost, it's not cheap, but it's not over the top. There's no food or entertainment. It was cut short because of the pandemic. There's always a budget for events and I just wonder what happened to that budget, because it's not been used. We paid into it. There's a lot of bitterness around here. When you enter the door, there's a kitchen and a view from the kitchen into the living room, which is quite large. All the rooms are good sized and we had a two-bedroom, two-bath, and a large living room. We've set it up and we're pleased with it. We also have a pool and from that standpoint, we're very happy with the facility, but the maintenance is poor. We had activities. Some people participated. Some didn't. I started a Friday night wine time which was quite successful. We would have, maybe, forty five people show up with "pick-up" food and drinks if they wanted to have that and it was nice. People were friendly and chatt, and that was cut off right away. We had a movie night.

Provider Response

Brenda

Overture Rancho Santa Margarita is very nice. We like it. My mother-in-law just moved in yesterday, and the staff has been fabulous. The dining area is beautiful. Her room is very nice. They have a nice gym, a swimming pool, and a movie theater. Everything is pretty good there.

Provider Response

Lori

My mother-in-law moved into Overture Rancho Santa Margarita 55+. The place seems to be great, and she's enjoying it there. Her apartment is under a thousand square feet. It has recently been renovated with new flooring and new countertops. The activities are nice, the amenities are nice and the staff is also nice. They have a wide variety of things you can choose from, there's something going on every day. The common areas have all recently renovated. The property was sold late last year to new owners. They have a nice library and the common areas are also really nice. One of the things that we liked was that from the time you made a deposit, you have 45 days after move in to start paying rent. That was very important to us because we actually had to move my mother-in-law from Northern California to Southern California. So that was a big selling point for us. Overall, the place looks very clean.

Wendy25

Buena Vida is an apartment complex. It’s a very nice, spacious community with a gym and a cafe.

Audrey9

Mom is at Buena Vida and she is doing okay for now. It's an active senior living and she has been there for at least six months. It's a nice facility and they offer a lot of activities that the residents could sign up for. They also have a theatre and a pool. The staff are very nice.