General Information Only. This article is for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice. Laws may have changed since publication. Your situation may differ; consult a licensed Virginia attorney about your specific matter.
The information in this article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Laws change and individual circumstances vary. Consult a licensed Virginia attorney about your specific situation. Reading this article does not create an attorney-client relationship nor does merely contacting our office through this website or any other means.
Checkout was at eleven. It is now Tuesday, someone is still in your house, and the messages have stopped being friendly.
Almost every instinct at that moment points toward doing something immediate. Change the code. Shut off the water. Show up. Virginia is one of the places where the value of pausing first is unusually high, because the same act can be lawful or very expensive depending on a classification most owners have never had to make.
Two Questions, Not One
Va. Code § 55.1-1201(D) separates transient lodging from residential tenancy. Owners tend to collapse that into a single question about the occupant. It is actually two questions, and the first one gets skipped.
The first is about your property. The exemption reaches a hotel, motel, extended stay facility, vacation residential facility, boardinghouse, “or similar transient lodging.” A whole-home short-term rental is not named. Whether a given property falls inside that phrase is a question of fact, and it is not obviously answered by the statute. If your property is not transient lodging, none of the rest of subsection (D) does the work you might be counting on.
The second is about the person. Under § 55.1-1201(D)(1), a guest of such a facility is not a tenant living in a dwelling unit if that person does not reside there as a primary residence. No day count appears in that provision. A guest with a home elsewhere is on the transient side whether they have been in your property four nights or forty. The 90-day figure people repeat applies only once the property is the person’s primary residence, and the full sequence is worth reading in order.
So before anything else: does this person have another home, did they give up housing elsewhere to be here, and what did they represent when they booked? Those are facts, and facts are what decide this.
What the Statute Grants, and What It Assumes
Here is where Virginia departs from what most owners expect, and from much of what circulates online.
Section 55.1-1201(D)(1) provides that the innkeeper or property owner, or their agent, “shall have the right to use self-help eviction under Virginia law, without the necessity of the filing of an unlawful detainer action in a court of competent jurisdiction and the execution of a writ of eviction issued pursuant to such action, which would otherwise be required under this chapter.”
That is an express statutory authorization, and it is genuinely unusual. Most Virginia landlords have nothing like it.
The thing to notice is what the grant rests on. It exists because the occupancy is outside the Act. If either of the two threshold questions comes out the other way, the authorization is not there and the conduct is being measured under a different set of rules. The power and the risk come from the same sentence.
Two provisions sit alongside it. If the person does treat your property as a primary residence but has been there 90 consecutive days or less, § 55.1-1201(D)(3) requires a five-day written notice of nonpayment before self-help, and permits it only after those five days pass without payment in full. And § 55.1-1201(D)(5) confirms that using self-help does not give up other civil or criminal remedies otherwise available.
Notice matters independently. Under Va. Code § 18.2-119, a person who remains on premises after having been forbidden to do so by the owner, lessee, custodian, or their agent is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor. The prohibition may be given orally, in writing, or by posted signs placed where they may reasonably be seen. Whether a particular set of facts fits that section is for law enforcement and a court, not for the owner standing in the driveway.
The Other Side of the Line
Where the VRLTA does apply, the picture inverts, and it inverts hard.
Section 55.1-1243.1 gives a tenant a court remedy where a landlord has “willfully and without authority from the court (i) removed or excluded the tenant from the dwelling unit unlawfully, (ii) interrupted or caused the interruption of an essential service to the tenant, or (iii) taken action to make the premises unsafe for habitation.”
The exposure is specific. A tenant who proves that conduct may recover actual damages, statutory damages of $5,000 or four months’ rent whichever is greater, reasonable attorney fees, and restoration of possession or services. The section was added in 2021.
Read the three clauses against the three things an owner most wants to do at hour thirty-six. Changing the locks is exclusion. Shutting off the water or the power is interruption of an essential service. The statute names them because they are what people do.
The lawful path where the Act applies runs through court. A summons for unlawful detainer is heard in general district court, must be served at least 10 days before the return day, and for residential tenancies under the Act the initial hearing occurs as soon as practicable and not more than 21 days from filing. One timing caution: § 8.01-126 was amended in 2026 with changes taking effect July 1, 2027, so the current procedure is worth confirming rather than assuming.
What Is Worth Doing While You Decide
None of this depends on knowing the answer yet, and all of it helps whichever way the classification lands:
- Write down the facts that decide classification while they are fresh. Where does this person actually live? What did they tell you at booking?
- Pull the booking record, the agreement, any primary-residence representation, and the consecutive-night count.
- Communicate in writing that the stay has ended and that permission to remain is withdrawn, and keep the timestamp.
- Photograph the condition of the property and preserve every message from the occupant.
- Leave the utilities and the locks alone until the classification is settled. Those are the exact acts § 55.1-1243.1 names, and they are difficult to undo.
The Questions Worth Sitting With
- If this happened next weekend, would you know which of the two paths applied before you had to choose one?
- Does your booking process capture a primary-residence representation and a home address, or would you be reconstructing that afterward?
- Who besides you is authorized to tell a guest to leave, and does that person know where the line is?
- Has anyone ever looked at whether your particular property fits “similar transient lodging,” or has that been assumed?
An occupancy that looks obvious from your side often looks different from the occupant’s, and the statute cares about facts rather than about which of you is being reasonable. If you are dealing with this right now, the order of what you do next matters considerably more than the speed. A Virginia attorney can work through the classification with you before an irreversible step gets taken, and that is the conversation worth having first.
This article is general information only and is not legal advice. Laws change and individual circumstances vary, and outcomes depend on the specific facts of each situation. Do not rely on this article to make decisions about your specific situation; contact Valley Legal or a licensed Virginia attorney to discuss your case. Reading this article does not create an attorney-client relationship, nor does contacting our office through this website or any other means. Attorney advertising.
Valley Legal, PLLC is located at 107 Pepper St SE, Christiansburg, Virginia 24073, and serves the communities of the New River Valley of Virginia, including Montgomery County, Blacksburg, Radford, Pulaski County, Floyd County, and Giles County.