Tim Hubbard explains when Airbnb hosts can remove guests. Guests staying under 30 days usually aren't tenants, so police can remove them for violations like parties or too many people. Prevention matters most: clear house rules, written agreements, and documented evidence.
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Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. This week, we're going to talk about a really serious topic and something I get asked a lot, and that is, can we kick a guest out of our property? Let's dive right in. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. Quick, actionable ideas to help you along your real estate investment journey, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. So what happens if you have a guest at your property that's breaking the house rules, disturbing the neighborhood? Maybe they're having a party, or maybe they're just doing something there illegally and they shouldn't be there and we need to get them out. Can we kick them out? And how do we kick them out? What's the best plan of action? That's what we're going to talk about this week in this episode of the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Stay tuned.
So I've been asked lots of times if we can kick a guest out of our property. Now, obviously, we're not literally going to kick the guest out, but can we call the authorities and get someone removed from our property? Short answer is yes, but it's not that simple. So we're going to break down the steps you should take if you have a bad, bad guest in your property that shouldn't be there. And also so that you know and your team knows how to. How to handle a situation like this.
So the first thing we can do to prevent having to kick someone out of our property, as always, is just take the correct preemptive measures. And this really is the same thing that we do for any issue we anticipate with a guest. And we want to make sure all of our house rules are as clear as possible. No smoking.
No parties, a certain amount of guests. So these house rules are essentially a contract between our property and our guests. Now, we can take this a step further and have an actual rental agreement that we send out to guests. We do this for all of our listings outside of Airbnb because they don't quite have the protection that Airbnb offers. So we will send out our own rental agreement to make sure that everyone's agreeing to. To these rules. So that's the first step is making sure that our guests know what they can and cannot do in our properties. So assuming we have all those steps in place, I guess a good question is, you know, is this going to happen to you? Are you going to have to kick out a guest? Well, probably. If you're in this for the long run and you add lots and lots of properties, eventually Sadly, I hate to be the one to say it, but you are probably gonna have to kick a guest out or at least ask a guest or involve authorities at some point. We've had to do this more than our fair share of times.
So we have had to call the authorities for parties. And if an officer or police officer shows up and there's a big party there, well, then that's pretty obvious, and they're gonna help at least get everyone out or off of the property. But it's not always super clear for the authorities if they can kick someone out of a property. The short answer is, yes, they can. Because if they're staying less than 30 days, in most places, your guests are not considered tenants. So they don't have resident rights. They're not a resident of your property. They're short term guests. And if they're breaking your rental agreement, then you have the right to have them removed from your property. So you will want to have this rental agreement or the contract or the place where your guest accepted or acknowledged your house rules. This could be your Airbnb reservation that has it listed. You want to have this to show the authorities to say, hey, look, they're breaking our house rules. It clearly says two people. They had 12. Hopefully you caught them before that. And I don't want to freak everyone out because this isn't something that happens very often. It doesn't. It happens very rarely, actually, if we take the proper measures. So. But if it does happen, you want to have that agreement so the authorities know. It could be that the authorities or the police officers don't quite understand the rules. So initially, they may not want to kick someone off the property. And if someone wasn't breaking the house rules, then they can't really kick them off the property. And we want to make sure that whatever reason we've brought up, the reason we call the authorities isn't going against Airbnb's discrimination policy, and that the reason we're asking our guests leave the property is properly justified. But as long as it is, and we have our contract in place, we can show that to the authorities. And we need to just be firm with it until we can get those guests out.
So the first step, as always, is having the preemptive measures before we involve the authorities. Of course, we want to notify the guests and involve Airbnb. So notify the guests of the rules. Give them the chance to rectify whatever has gone wrong. If they don't, then you want to involve Airbnb as soon as possible. Tell them what's going on, and then if they can't fix the problem with the guests as soon as possible, then that's when you call the authorities. So this isn't going to happen very often, but the short answer is yes, we can. Let's just make sure we have our rental agreements as evidence as proof that our guests are breaking the contract. And because they're not residents, at least here in the US and in most places there are guests and we can have them removed from the property. So hopefully it doesn't happen to you too often. But just know that it is something you can do. Hope you guys are doing really well out there, wherever you are in the world, and I hope you have a wonderful week. Talk to you next time.
