Previous Tenants damaged rental, blocked Landlord - Please advise

[Melissa Faraias]

Hello BP community,

I am a relatively new landlord, who has a few out of state rentals in South Carolina that were managed by a friend and his property management company. I recently took over the management of the rentals and a couple of months later the tenants in one of my units decided to move out. They were two young women who always paid their rent on time and seemed very responsible. As a result we were not expecting to see what we saw when we went to get the unit ready for the next tenants. The unit was completely dirty, damaged and looked like a fixer upper. I guess they did not clean the unit for over 3 years and did not call the old property management company when things started to break.  We got several quotes for cleaning and repairs, which added up to almost $4000 beyond normal wear and tear. We decided to keep their entire deposit of $2000 and bill them the rest. We sent them the photos and videos to back up the invoice and they have decided to block our emails and calls. What do you suggest we do in such a situation? To be honest, I think we may just need to bear the costs and learn from this and do regular unit checks going forward (which was not done by the previous property management company).  However I would hate for them to do this to their current landlord, who did not even call us for a previous landlord reference. Should we call up their current landlord to warn them about these renters? Can we do something else to scare them a bit so that they never do this again? Thank you for any advice you can give.