If they tear out all the drywall, the wiring, the plumbing, the flooring, and appliances, leaving you with nothing but a room full of 2x4s holding up the ceiling, then yeah, you could end up paying tens of thousands. But I've never seen a place THAT trashed, and I work for a real estate company that specializes in selling foreclosed properties.
I have. I worked in student housing. One day, the security guard gave me a call around 11PM on the day all the students were to be out and said he found a door that had been left unlocked by the students when they left. The scene inside was horrifying. Each apartment comes furnished, the living room has a couch, end table, bucket chair, TV stand, and a coffee table. The dining room has a table and four chairs. Each bedroom has a bed, desk, chair, and endtable, for four bedrooms.
Everything save the dining room table, beds, and desks had been implanted in the walls. That's eight chairs, five end tables, a coffee table, and a TV stand, made of light steel yet contorted into odd geometric shapes.. The cabinets had been ripped from the walls, the refrigerator left in the middle of the kitchen. The washing machine was full of vomit. The oven had some sort of goo in it as if it had been used to cook crack. The ceiling had unexplainable footprints all over it. Even the storage closet outside was not spared: Its interior had been removed so that the students could slip between their and their neighbor's apartments through the walls.
This was the worst, but certainly not the only one. All said and done, by the end of the summer, we had recorded over $50,000 in damages in a 648 bed complex, with bills to individual students going as high as $5,000 - that's almost the entire school years rent. It's just nuts. These kids are /so/ loaded it's not even funny. One kid reported us to the BBB because we charged him $100 to remove his TV, a gigantic 64" DLP behemoth that worked just fine. What the hell?! Why was it left behind?! And why was I supposed to have to have my maintenance men waste an hour trying to get it out of the third floor apartment?! In another instance, we evicted a kid whose car was worth more than the house I was born in.
In the US, most of the youth are wholly unprepared for life and completely unable to accept any responsibility, and their parents back them up no matter how unruly and uncivilized. I say this as a 25 year old. I had a phone call from a woman one time berating me about her son's damage bill, saying, "Shame on you for ripping off my child! He's just a college student, he doesn't know any better!" My response was that, at the time, I was a college student as well, and I had yet to have a dime removed from my security deposit, even freshman year when I didn't work for the company. I was told that I wasn't allowed to talk to an adult the way I was - telling her that sorry, I might be a "child," but I was the one who wrote the invoices, and no, my "adult" boss wasn't going to make any changes, no matter how wrong or whatever I was.
We had a kid run his car off of our private road, tumble it down a hill and into one of our buildings, prompting an evacuation and us having to house the students in a hotel room. He was drunk, but he managed to get out of the car, take his keys, and run home. On the way home, he slipped and fell. He was never charged with DUI, our insurance had to pay for the damages, AND the insurance paid for his injuries (they didn't want to fight it). Fun times.
