Cabana Beach Gainesville, gainesville-fl

I wouldn't recommend living here if you're a student. It's really unsafe, especially if you get home late from studying like I often did. I honestly think the area is pretty rough. The security staff who are supposed to be working at night often weren't checking cars, and many times they weren't even there. Our packages were stolen pretty frequently. The employees are nice, but I ultimately moved out because I didn't feel safe. Three other residents I knew also moved out for the same reason. When we first moved in, it was the dirtiest place I had ever seen. We spent over six hours deep cleaning the apartment before it was livable. There were also many nights when I came home and saw police cars and caution tape outside. My friend who lived in another building told me someone broke in her apartment and another time that a man that was armed the police were looking for also stayed in the complex. Overall, I wouldn't recommend living here, especially if you're a young woman or a student who may be coming home late at night.

TLDR at bottom. Overall the buildings are not bad at all and that's where the niceness ends. Rent will get jacked up every year and not a few dollars either. In 3 years mine has gone up almost 50% which is why I'm moving. They will be the nicest and kindest people when you are signing the lease then drop that emotion in an instant. The lease also allows, and they do it, to force you to move apartments with only 3 days notice and they can downgrade you from a 2-2 to a 4-4. I ended up installing camera's in the apartment and on two separate instances maintenance was caught taking things out of the apartment that were mine. They claim it was a mistake and did correct it but i wonder how many times it has happened to people without cameras. Maintenance can be extremely slow and unhelpful at times. My roommate and I went 3 days in the summer with the inside of the apartment being over 90 degrees inside because they wouldn't fix it over the holiday weekend. When you don't want maintenance inside... they will show up without the LEGALLY REQUIRED notice and do whatever they do again multiple times recorded. They switched to these new smart locks and thermostat and the installer instead of locking my door back left it completely unlocked with no one home for over 3 hours then had the nerve to say I was overrating nothing was stolen. The thermostat bugs all the time and will just not blow cold air and LUCKILY I figured out if you shut the breaker off to it and turn it back on it fixes the issue since there is no reset on the actual device. I have been locked out multiple times because the company that handles the authentication was doing maintenance and you had to wait for the 1 guy doing after-hours work on the property to let everyone in 1 by 1. The thermostat is meant to be more energy efficient but my bill skyrocketed even keeping the thermostat up higher than it was before. I went to pick up a package because I knew it had been delivered and never got a text like usual and was greeted with 2 packages 1 that had been there for 9 months. It was my insurance card which I ended up having resent through FedEx because I assumed it got lost in the mail system. TLDR: Make them say everything in writing. If you want to live with a friend make them say they will let you two stay together. If you want a 2-2 split make sure they promise that you will get to say in that apartment no matter what. And get blink cameras or another brand super cheap to have piece of mind. Update 7/15/26 Not even 12 hours after the "Owner" responds they once again enter the apartment to hand out move out instructions without giving proper notice. Legally this would border on harassment and invasion of privacy.

management single handedly makes living here so miserable. they ignore emails. they’re nasty if they even respond. they refuse to fix issues that are AGAINST THE LEASE. i’ve emailed about six times about violations and was told every time that the problem would be fixed but it never was. plus there’s never a moment of peace here because they’re constantly doing some worthless renovations to the outside of the buildings and surrounding areas. i get woken up constantly at 8 am because of construction or other projects being done. every building stinks like weed day and night. but it’s mainly the treatment from management that makes it so awful. this place could be great if management actually cared about us and not our money. they’re so sweet to you to get you to sign a lease and then you’re just a checkbook to them and they’re rude and make you feel terrible for reaching out to them about issues. edit 7/4/26: i have been emailing them since saturday about an ongoing issue i have been having that was never resolved. i received a reply saturday saying that management would get back to me with a response, but that has not happened. i sent three follow up emails asking for a management response, and all three of those were also ignored. i called the office four times today and no one picked up the phone. their communication is asinine and they refuse to respond to emails or update residents with information on property construction. i don’t know how else to get a reply except for continuing to email them begging them to get back to me. it is so frustrating when residents attempt to communicate and receive nothing in return.

I would not recommend living here. The keyless locks they installed are awful. For the first week our lock didn’t work properly and one month in there was an outage and we were locked out of our apartment. Once maintenance came by and let us into our own apartment, we couldn’t lock our front door from the outside for 4 hours. If your neighbors are former Cabana employees and you have issues with them, the complex will side with them over you. They threatened to move US if we didn’t have a mediation meeting when they were the ones that started the issues. In our final year living there they were renovating a lot of the complex. They had roofers put new roofs on every building, however the roofers did a TERRIBLE job picking up nails when they were done. We would go on daily walks around the complex and almost every single time found at least one nail. We heard from other people living there that they got flat tires from the nails everywhere. A month after moving in, you start getting pressured by the leasing office to resign for the next year. We were getting emails every 2-4 days telling us we had to resign or our rates would go up. Even after saying we weren’t resigning we would get emails from different leasing agents reminding it was time to resign.

The office people are very nice and try very hard, but the actual move in process involves signing about 100 papers on a very slow app, followed by downloading another separate app for your front door, which is also slow and followed by you filling out an inspection that doesn't actually work. The actual apartment is fine, with minor scars from previous tenants, but it is cheap and overall fairly nice. The clubhouse, study area, pool and gym are all nice especially at this price point, and so far my roommates have been very welcoming and nice (which cabana doesn't really control but i thought i would add that for anyone who's not used to having roommates).