AA&J Properties

Great experience. I have known this family for years and several friends have rented from them. Bill Hessi is good people!

RENTERS STAY AWAY. AA&J Properties owners Bill and Beth Hessi rent out multi-​family buildings throughout South St. Louis City. While you may think you’re getting a good deal on a decent apartment, you will absolutely be sorry in the end.
Short version: Deceitful, law-​breaking landlord; very cheap finishes in apartments; unsavory neighbors in your building; bad building upkeep and incomplete repairs; and questionable people in your home.
Long version: I really regret renting from Bill Hessi. He patronizes and cheats, and ultimately doesn’t care about his tenants’ safety or wellbeing.
When I moved into one of his buildings, I overlooked the shoddy finishes and general wear to the apartment. After all, it was on a quiet street in the zip code I wanted, and the old charm and layout of the building won me over. Not long after though, I had a refrigerator that leaked and was never fixed properly after three visits by a guy known only as «Shorty.» The six inch gap between the balcony and the exterior of the building was also never correctly fixed – talk about scary. The laminate floors in the kitchen were coming up; the bathtub hadn’t been sealed in probably a decade, which made normal shower water start to look like sludge on the floor; cockroaches came up through gaps in the flooring from the downstairs apartment the first summer I lived there; the thermostat didn’t work ever; the heat worked occasionally; the A/​C units are a joke; the windows and wiring are probably not even up to code… should I go on? Oh, I also spent four hours just cleaning the place enough to put my stuff away on the day I moved in.
If you want to rent a cheap place and don’t shortcuts, Bill Hessi has got a spot for you. But do not ignore the basic safety concerns of his units. Let’s start with the handyman who usually seems drunk and has no problem chatting up single female tenants for way too long when he’s over to fix something simple. He cornered me in my own bathroom one day, and while I thought before that he must be harmless, that was the last time I let him over while I was alone. My female neighbor had her apartment broken into through the glass of her back door, and only after questioning Bill about it were we given safety grates (granted, they were so cheap you could pop them off with a little pressure). And then Mr. Hessi moved in a man as a charity case with apparently no background information on him other than a referral from a friend. This guy asked me upon the first time he met me, «So are you gone during the day? Do you have a dog? Do you have a boyfriend?» Seriously?! He assaulted my downstairs neighbor and had the police called to our building multiple times. After complaints from all the other tenants in the building, Bill finally told this guy he had to go… and then gave him a month to do it. Soon after that incident, I came home several times over a few weeks to find signs that someone had been in my apartment. Interior doors left open after I was sure I’d shut them, unexplainable candy wrappers on the floor, and my underwear left in a pile by my bed – all of this with the exterior doors locked. Naturally, I had the locks changed… and then magically, the creepiness stopped. The only people with keys to my home were Bill, my best friend, and me.
After the issues piled up and then after watching all my neighbors leave, I decided to go too. And when I did, Bill Hessi kept more than half of my deposit without proper documentation or allowing me to be at the move-​out inspection (which is a violation of Missouri Tenant Rights). I’ve never once had a landlord withhold deposit money from me, but after learning that he’d done the same thing to three of my friends and former tenants, I figured out that this is one more of his trashy business schemes. I’m happily filling a lawsuit against AA&J Properties at the beginning of next year.