You can never know how a tenant will maintain an apartment until they move in. This is why we do regular inspections throughout the tenants lease to make sure that the property stays in good condition.
Also before any new tenant moves in or when a tenant moves out we do inspections before and after. We fill out a walk through form when the tenant moves in so that we can write down what ever issues are in the apartment ( i.e. marks on the wall , a cracked tile ) anything that is not a major issue but still something to notice so that the tenant is only held accountable for things that they have done.
Then we reuse the same walk through form on move out to make sure that the apartment has not changed since move in. We explain to all of our tenants that they must return the property to us in the state that it was given to them. If for whatever reason there are differences, we will deduct from the security deposit the price of the repairs and refund the balance to the tenant.