In a college town, apartment horror stories are the stuff of suburban legend.

Landlords swap stories about young tenants who didn’t let rain deter their plans for a barbecue. Instead, they brought the grill inside. In Orono, one classic tale involves students who opened a makeshift – but fully stocked – bar and served drinks to passers-by. Then there were the guys whose furnace poured clouds of black smoke into the basement. Their solution? Keep the door closed. For months. Without calling the property manager.

On the other end of the spectrum are the tenants, most of them students, many first-time renters who don’t know what to expect. Some get swindled out of their security deposit. Others endure drafty windows or leaky pipes. Still others have fallings-out with housemates that leave them broke – and legally bound to a lease – halfway through the school year.

As September approaches, thousands of students will move into hundreds of apartments in eastern Maine’s college towns. For many, it will be the first time they’ve lived on their own, without an RA to crack down on the partying – and, perhaps more important – without mom and dad to do the cleaning, maintenance and day-to-day things, like changing light bulbs and replacing smoke-alarm batteries.

The landlord-tenant dance can be tenuous at times, especially when each party has differing expectations of the other. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

“The biggest thing between landlord and tenant, tenant and landlord, is communication,” said John Robichaud, Orono’s code enforcement officer.

But even that can get tricky.

“When they’re trying to sell you an apartment, they always say they’ll do things and then you have to press them to do it,” said Corey Gardiner, a senior at the University of Maine who just moved into his third apartment in as many years.

Gardiner and his roommates expected to find freshly painted walls – as promised – when they arrived. Instead, there was a bucket of paint in the hallway and the instructions: “If you guys want to paint it, you can.”

Katie Paixao, who works with Gardiner at Margarita’s Mexican restaurant, is a recent UM graduate who still lives in the area. She had a similar experience with a previous landlord.

“They never fixed anything,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You just basically take what you can get.”

And what you can get varies wildly, from a clean, new space to a ramshackle two-bedroom with stained ceiling tiles and missing windowpanes. And really, who needs windows?

Orono lawyer and landlord Theodore Curtis served for more than a decade as counsel for Student Government Legal Services at UMaine, and he wrote the long-running “Legal Affairs” column in The Maine Campus, UM’s student newspaper. In those days, he heard his share of horror stories from the tenant’s perspective.

Curtis says knowing what to look for – and what questions to ask – can help renters avoid an unpleasant experience. Peeling paint, messy common areas and rattling or missing windows are good indications that a landlord doesn’t maintain property as well as he should.

“Does the plumbing leak? Are the windows good-quality double-paned? Or are they rattling single-paned? That’s an indication that there’s not much insulation. Is the apartment being rented heated or not heated?”

But questions are just the beginning. Once a tenant has signed a lease, the lines of communication should remain open, which is a shared responsibility.

“A lot of tenants won’t call you about anything,” said Chad Bradbury of KC Property Management, which manages and maintains about 110 units in Orono and Old Town for a handful of landlords.

They don’t call because they don’t want Bradbury to see the pile of beer cans in the hall after Saturday night. Maybe they’re hiding a not-quite-potty-trained puppy. And a three-foot bong may be decorative, but it’s hard to pass off as, say, a coat rack.

That said, Bradbury and his wife, Karen, can count the number of bad tenants they have annually on one hand. About 99 percent of their apartments are occupied by students, which has its advantages over renting to “adults” as Bradbury used to do in Bangor.

“The advantage of college kids is they have a future, a financial future,” Bradbury said. “They do care about owing you money. If you take them to court, they’re scared about [bad] credit.”

There are several downsides, however, including the fact that many young tenants won’t call about a leaky faucet because they don’t want their landlord to see beer stains on the carpet.

And then there are tenants who call about everything – last year, a group of girls, all first-time renters, didn’t dare flush their toilet because their electricity hadn’t been turned on.

“Feel free to call for maintenance, but also know, if you broke it, you fix it,” Bradbury said.

Who fixes what is a hot topic this time of year, as parents come to town to help their children move in. What seemed like a perfect fit in May, when Junior and his friends signed their lease, may not seem so hot in August, when mom and dad arrive with potted plants and oven mitts.

“Students have less expectations of a property they’re looking to rent,” Robichaud said. “Very often, if a parent isn’t involved … the students are satisfied but when mom and dad arrive, they’re far less satisfied.”

Torn linoleum and a few strategically disguised holes in the drywall may seem perfectly acceptable to a group of 19-year-old guys, but they don’t exactly scream “good living” to their parents.

To avoid this, Robichaud urges young renters to understand their role as consumers. They need to know what they’re signing a contract for, request that any problems be solved by moving day, and if they’re dissatisfied, they need to complain in writing.

“From the student perspective, it’s buyer beware,” Robichaud said. “Don’t enter into it blindly. Do some homework. Research the history of the property as far as complaints and problems. We certainly can open our files up.”

Of course, even the best landlord-tenant situations have their moments. Just ask Chris Lunn, who lives in Old Town. If he has a problem, his landlord usually resolves it within a couple of days, and his apartment is in a nice neighborhood, though not quite as close to campus as he’d like. But the walls are so thin that he can barely play his music. His landlord once told him to quiet down while he and his roommate were talking – not partying, not yelling, but chatting.

“If you’re in college, you want to listen to music,” Lunn said.

Music? Not exactly grounds for eviction. But if you want to roast a pig in your living room, hold a raging Halloween party or run a bar out of your dining room, expect to get tossed out pretty quickly. Sure, you’ll become a suburban legend, but Maine isn’t the best place to be evicted, especially in the middle of January.

Of course, there may be a few guys who have a smoking room available in their basement.

Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 and kandresen@bangordailynews.net.

How to be a savvy tenant

Following are excerpts from Theodore Curtis’ “Legal Affairs” column, reprinted with permission:

. Read Chapter 14 the Maine Attorney General’s Consumer Law Guide, online at www.state.me.us/ag. If possible, have a copy of your lease reviewed by a lawyer – many campuses have a student legal services office.

. Check with the municipal code enforcement officer to see when the apartment was last inspected.

. Be sure you know any prospective roommates well and are really comfortable with co-signing a lease with them. If a roommate moves, you probably will be responsible for meeting all obligations of the lease.

. Ask the previous tenants if the landlord is reasonable, respects tenants’ rights, fixes apartment problems cheerfully and returns security deposits promptly. Is the landlord local or absentee?

. Know your neighbors. Does the landlord have rules? Will the landlord enforce them if a neighbor turns out to be noisy?

. Begin looking for your apartment in the spring, even though you may not be moving in until August. This way, you’ll have your pick of rentals.

. Know that a landlord has 30 days after the lease expires to return your security deposit or provide a written reason for not returning the deposit.