Cozy Gator

The worst thing about these people is the communication, by far. Trying to get an answer out of them for even the smallest thing is nearly impossible. I think I lived in the same house that the previous person who wrote a review here lived in. When we moved in, the house was in okay shape for a shabby place in Gainesville, but it wasn’t great. There was a mildew /​mold problem in the bathroom that I notified Shepley and Anita about, but they insisted that I hadn’t.
I paid my bills on time and was very communicative with them via text, email, and phone calls, which they seemed to view as some kind of nuisance. I renewed that place for a second year, and I regret it. There are cheaper houses in that neighborhood that are roughly the same.
Stay away from them, or if you must rent from them, just be prepared to be faced with a number of frustrating experiences resulting from vague communication and passive aggressiveness. For example, when I was trying to get a straight answer from them regarding something about the lease, Shepley tried to pick a fight with me and said «I’m hurt that you don’t trust me.» Well, that’s what leases are for. Just be direct.

Even though they own/​manage quite a few houses and apartments in Gainesville, Cozy Gator is made up of only two people, Shepley and Anita. They are really friendly, regular folks who are very accommodating with their rentals. I lived in one of their houses for two years with two roommates who were into urban farming. We ended up installing a huge chicken coop in the backyard, had a smelly compost pile going, a garden, and many animals (at various points 2 hens, 4 roosters, 5 pullets, 3 cats and 4 kittens). There was always something brewing or growing or fermenting and the windows and doors were pretty much left open all the time. Shep and Anita were cool with all of it, partially, I think, because they ascribed to a similar DIY lifestyle. They were also super flexible about late rent checks (I’ve forgotten and paid up to 7 days late without them charging me the agreed upon late fee) and were really good about calling ahead of time before coming over to the house to fix or update things.
Now the bad. Compared to other similar properties in Gainesville, Cozy Gator is a bit on the high end and there’s really no reason for these particular properties to cost more. All the appliances were pretty old and not too well maintained (you know that weird craggy surface that comes from painting over everything without spackling or sanding and wood floors with deep, deep crevices). The AC/​heater barely worked and cost a fortune to run as it was old and the house was poorly insulated. We had quite the cockroach problem and the water pressure was weak and often ran brown. And even when our oven broke, it was replaced with a thrifted old model. Speaking of the oven, big fixes and replacements took a really long time to update. The oven took around 3 months to replace and other things typically took two to three weeks to resolve. Shepley did all the repairing himself (unless it was out of his league) and many of his solutions were what I would call quick fixes (a piece of white-​washed plywood to board up a broken drawer hole, leftover floor tile used to tile kitchen counters, etc.) Another odd thing was that Shepley seemed only to respond to voicemail messages left by our male roommate. I don’t know if he has a weird thing with females, or if he just respected this roommate more, but in order to get a fairly prompt response, we learned quickly that we would need to relay our messages through him.
Still, it’s hard to hold it against Shep and Anita. You can find them living in shabbiest rental they own (I’ve visited their place to drop off rent), attempting to slowly update the value of their properties a little at a time. It’s obvious that they are stingy landlords not because they are particularly money-​grubbing, but because they are naturally (or possibly necessarily) frugal people. To end on some more nice things, we got all of our deposit back and I even with all it’s problems, I look back on those two years with fondness.