Beach Rental Horrors
From Filthy to Foul, Summer Leases Gone Bad

By Fredrick Kunkle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 4, 2006

OCEAN CITY No doubt most people have left a mess in a beach rental at one time or another -- some Goldfish crumbs ground into the carpet, maybe a fuzzy watermelon dissolving in the fridge.

But holes in the walls? Towel racks yanked loose? Cigarette burns? Broken chairs? Overflowing toilets?

And yet, as the beach season draws to a close this weekend and the seaside condos and cabins revert to their rightful owners, the people who rent and clean these properties want you to know that the above-mentioned folks -- the sloppy nicotine addict, the shower-stall oaf, the double-fisted 3-year-old Goldfish grubber -- are all minor leaguers, maybe not even in the Triple-A league of destruction.

Living among us, the real estate agents and housekeepers say, are champion slobs who have turned stomachs and seared memories. Their deeds: leaving pools of vomit, hiding a blood-soaked pillow between two mattresses, tacking condoms on the wall, stacking every stick of furniture -- even the patio chairs -- into a heap in a single room, ripping a ceiling fan down after hanging on to its blades while trying to take it for a ride.

The agents and housekeepers often wonder: Was it malicious intent, too much booze or too much youth? All of the above?

"I call it the Mental Department, not the Rental Department," says Lynne Greenleaf, who has been renting properties for more than 25 years.

Samantha Wichmann, who works for Atlantic Coast Realty, said she was fine about renting her Ocean City townhouse to a group of high-achievers from Potomac last year because she had spent so much time on the telephone with one of their mothers.

The place was nice: four bedrooms with a pool, a view of the bay, a tennis court next door. The six boys seemed nice, too. The mother on the phone said they had excellent grades, college scholarships, that kind of thing. Their parents were all professionals. The mother was a psychologist, like her husband.

"They were all brainiac, wealthy children," Wichmann said. After they signed the $2,000-a-week lease, she stressed that parties were forbidden. If they wanted to party, she told them, go downtown.

They wasted no time. That Saturday night, hours after moving in, the boys strung Christmas lights across the balcony, tapped a keg and passed out fliers inviting the rest of Ocean City to join them in a beer-filled romp.

Wichmann said she knew there was trouble when she went by to pick up her mail the next day and followed a trail of beer cans to her place. She banged on the windows, rousing the boys with difficulty, finally mustering a few who shuffled around in boxer shorts as she explained her feelings anew about having a kegger in her home.

"I went down there and had a Doris Day tantrum -- where you stand there, stamp your feet and scream and yell," Wichmann said. "They assured me they wouldn't do it again. It was all, 'Yes, ma'am,' 'Sorry, ma'am' -- and two nights later they had another hellacious party."

Before the week was out, the crew hosted three frat-style fiestas at her house. The aftermath:

"Of course, all my brand-new rugs were ruined," Wichmann said. "There was puke in the porches and in the sink upstairs. The place smelled like an old, dank bar."

There was more. The refrigerator was foul with rotten food. The garbage disposal was jammed with broken glass. In the bathroom, a towel rack had been yanked out of a wall, not far from a small crater -- she thinks it was about the size and shape of someone's cranium -- and the toilet paper holder was missing.

But what really got to her was the two-piece, louvered door to a walk-in utility closet that someone had crashed into. The boys thoughtfully tried to fix it -- or at least make sure it escaped notice.

"They had gone in the closet and hinged the door together with duct tape so that it would stand," Wichmann said. "They were very creative."

It took seven hours to clean and repair everything, forcing the next group of renters -- girls -- to wait on the curb until the mess was gone.

"They did about a thousand dollars' worth of damage," Wichmann said. She decided going to court would not be worth the time or hassle, but she sent a letter to each of the six boys and their parents. One replied with a written apology and a $300 check. And to think that Wichmann had reduced the rent after signing the lease because one of the parents had called to say their son would be a no-show.

"I was paranoid that the next two groups of kids would repeat," Wichmann said. "I felt like I had been violated."

That was her first experience renting to "Junebugs," those hordes of new high school graduates who descend on beach towns at the beginning of each summer. They are the reason that some agents avoid rentals altogether.

But Greenleaf, of Crimmins Ocean Realty, said she has had some doozies with seasonal rentals, which usually go to young foreigners and other out-of-towners who come for summer jobs.

Six years ago, she rented to a group of exchange students (she declined to identify their country of origin) attending a university in Nebraska. At the end of the summer, they left two things: a buddy sleeping in a bunk bed and a huge mess.

"I said, 'What the hell are you doing here?' " Greenleaf said, remembering how she first saw just a pair of stocking feet peeping over the end of the bed. "He said, 'My friends told me I have 10 more days.' I said, 'You have 10 minutes.' "

Then she surveyed the damage. On the patio -- in the rain, of course -- lay cushions from the living room sofa alongside a screen door that had given up the ghost. In the bedroom, several buckets were propped under the air conditioners, brimming with water. (No one had called to report that they were leaking, Greenleaf said.)

But the kitchen -- the kitchen was the worst. Everything lay under a strata of food that seemed geological in its complexity.

"I'm telling you, the stove -- it looked like they never used pots and pans. It looked like they actually cooked on the burners, it was so nasty," Greenleaf said. "They had a glass of milk that had maggots in it."

The only thing more repulsive to discuss, she said, was the time she found a half-dozen condoms pinned to the wall of a room vacated by young women.

For Kirsten Schultz, the rental manager of Century 21 New Horizon, one of the worst discoveries was the bloody pillow between the mattresses, which remains a mystery -- and then, midsentence, the worst postrental memory popped into her mind.

"There was poop in a drawer, a dresser drawer," she said.

The time was June. The renters were not, surprisingly, teenagers. Schultz said a family had rented the condo, and she suspects the dresser-drawer deposit was the work of children who were about 5 or 6 years old. The worst part: It was found by the people who rented the unit next.

"I'm sure everyone has his own story. There's nothing tame here," Schultz said.

Ruth Donnelly has been a housekeeper for more than 17 years, mostly dealing with low-level stuff: sand in the linens, food in the fridge, that sort of thing.

But at her brother's rental property in Ocean Pines, Md., they once had to fix a ceiling fan after someone, presumably children, tried to take it for a spin and ripped it loose.

Derek Perkins, manager for Fredericksburg-based Dial-A-Maid, said he thought he had seen everything in the two years he has been doing this sort of work. There was the place where the renters had piled all the furniture -- beds, nightstands, dressers, patio furniture -- into one room. He had seen apartments smeared with human waste, even. But he had never seen or heard of anything as rank as the dead dog that one of his housekeepers found in a rental in Ocean City this year.

"It was a poodle, actually. It was just lying there in the closet. The dog probably expired while they were there on vacation, and they just left it behind," Perkins said. "It's the most bizarre thing. We're still trying to figure that one out. This was a family, believe it or not."