By their nature, PMCs are after profit, and improvements are an expense to minimize. The nature of college towns mean that there is a constant supply of “fresh meat” in the market, often moving to or from other cities, further disincentivizing improvement or good behavior on the part of the PMC. Why bother to replace moldy carpet, if the tenants don’t stick around to take you to court for it?

Having rented from PMCs in the past, having worked in college housing, the idea that you would feel sympathy towards a PMC in a college town is pathological.

I grew up in a tourism economy and absolutely hated it for this reason.

Not having to do repeat business allows businesses to do all sorts of sleazy thigns that would have gotten around and had them out of business in short order anywhere else. Because their bad behavior never comes back to get them the scumbags can out compete the honest businesses for all the things businesses need so the cost of commercial rent, a plumber's services, tires for a skid steer, etc, etc, all reflect an income level that a business needs to behave badly to obtain. Eventually the entire local economy runs in a mode where prices are massively variable because everyone rips everyone else off as much as they think they can and you can never trust anyone you do business with to give you a fair price and a massive amount of time and effort is wasted on price discovery because nobody can trust that they're not paying some integer multiple of what someone else got charged for an equivalent.

Deriving income from a large transient population is just an all around recipe for a crappy low trust society.

Good landlords are hard to find. There is so much information asymmetry when choosing a rental property. They can get large troves of data on you, but the reverse is not so easy if possible at all.