But the first thing was that there are a lot of privileged young people out there whose friends might very well have thought a week of utter abandonment and breaking every possible rule would be the height of fun. And yeah, I can easily see that privileged young asshole finding it the height of humor to email the owner every now and then saying how nice the place was - more than likely laughing at how nice the owner actually found the place, if you see what I mean.
I've been a landlord. There is nothing, and I mean nothing at all, that will destroy your faith in humanity more quickly. Seriously. Even though the majority of tenants are perfectly wonderful people, and even though I only had a grand total of six tenants before giving it up as a bad idea, there were some that were just ... well. It's really like a bad dream.
This experience was worse than any of mine, and it was compressed into a single frenetic week of probable partying, but it's the same genre as one particular tenant I'm thinking of. She meant well. Her friends did not. And in the end, I was the one left with the holes punched in the wall, with the dryer stolen, with the garden shed piled to the roof with months-old garbage, with a kitchen floor that could easily have been a bus station, with evidence of a three-inch flood of water from the washing machine, with fleas in the carpet and holes in the yard after she'd signed a clear no-pets clause. (A friend and neighbor of ours owns several apartments in the neighborhood. One of the tenants she evicted had stabbed the refrigerator multiple times. Apparently on a lark.)
So even though it's more fun to imagine it as a conspiracy, I'm afraid the gritty reality is that there are people out there who just don't give a shit about who suffers from their actions, and who think it's fun to damage things.