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.
A guest falls on your deck stairs and hires a lawyer. Most owners assume the case will turn on how badly the guest was hurt.
In Virginia the first question is something else entirely, and the Supreme Court of Virginia answered it in a case about a beach house rented for one week. The answer surprises almost everyone, including people who write about this for a living, because it does not match the framework most national guidance uses.
Virginia Answered This With a Vacation Rental
Haynes-Garrett v. Dunn (2018) is worth telling as a story, because the facts are the holding.
A family rented a seven-bedroom house at Sandbridge in Virginia Beach for a week. The owners lived in Northern Virginia and used the place as a second home, renting it May through October through a management company a few miles away. On arrival day, one of the renters walked from a carpeted room onto a tiled hallway, caught her toe on the transition strip, fell, and injured her elbow badly enough to require two surgeries.
She sued the owners and the management company. Her argument was the intuitive one: the house was turnkey, everything was provided, the only real difference between this and a hotel was the shape of the building. So the owners should owe her what an innkeeper owes a guest, or at minimum what a property owner owes an invitee.
The circuit court struck her evidence. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed, holding that on the evidence presented, the owners owed only the duty a landlord owes a tenant.
That holding is the reason a lot of general advice about “your duty to your guests” does not describe Virginia accurately.
What the Landlord Duty Involves
The rule the Court applied comes from Isbell v. Commercial Investment Associates (2007). A landlord has “no duty to maintain in a safe condition any part of the leased premises that [is] under [a tenant’s] exclusive control.” And where the right of possession and enjoyment passes to the lessee, “in the absence of concealment or fraud by the landlord as to some defect in the premises, known to him and unknown to the tenant, the tenant takes the premises in whatever condition they may be in, thus assuming all risk of personal injury from defects therein.”
Two things are worth pulling out of that sentence.
The general rule is considerably more favorable to owners than the ordinary-care standard most people expect. And the exception is narrow but real: concealment or fraud as to a defect the owner knows about and the occupant does not. That exception is where records and disclosure keep their value even under the more favorable rule.
The Court also noted, in a footnote worth knowing about, that the Virginia General Assembly has not enacted a statute imposing a habitability duty on lessors of vacation homes. North Carolina passed one after its own supreme court reached a similar result. Virginia has not. That is a legislative gap rather than a settled policy, which is a different thing from a rule you can count on indefinitely.
The Line Runs Through Control, Not Length of Stay
The interesting part of Haynes-Garrett is what the Court said separates the two relationships, because it is not what owners assume.
An innkeeper owes an elevated duty. Quoting a 1944 decision, the Court described it as a duty “to take every reasonable precaution to protect the person and property of their guests and boarders,” and quoted Kirby v. Moehlman, also from 1944, for the proposition that “[t]he responsibility for the premises is primarily on the innkeeper, and the guests may generally assume that they are safe.”
What justifies that elevated duty is presence and control. Citing Taboada v. Daly Seven, Inc. (2006), the Court explained that “unlike a landlord, an innkeeper is in direct and continued control of the property and usually maintains a presence on the property personally or through agents.” An innkeeper also, per a 1946 decision, “holds out his house as a public place” as an “accommodation for travelers,” and the controlling factor is the intent of the parties.
Then the sentence that decides these cases. A federal court had earlier found an innkeeper relationship for a rented cabin because the stay was short and the place was advertised to travelers. The Supreme Court of Virginia disagreed with that approach directly: “The proper inquiry, however, is not whether the parties intended a short-term stay, but whether parties to a short-term rental agreement intended that the occupants be entitled to exclusive possession and control of the premises during their stay.”
Applied to Dolphin’s Paradise, the facts that mattered were these. The owners were not present and were not even permitted to enter without notifying the manager. Cleaning happened only between stays. There was no food service, no room service, no daily maid service, no security. And the house was not offered to the public generally, since it was rented only to families and carried a minimum age requirement.
Which points somewhere useful. An operation that keeps control looks different from one that hands the keys over. An on-site host, daily service, shared common areas, room-by-room rentals in an occupied house — those facts run the other way, and no Virginia decision located applies the innkeeper duty to that kind of modern operation. That is an open area, and where a property sits in it depends on how the property is actually run.
Two Frameworks People Conflate
Two clarifications from the case are worth holding onto, because both get muddled constantly.
An occupant is not an invitee. The Court said so in a footnote: the renter “was an occupant of the premises, and, therefore, could not also be an invitee.” The invitee framework you find in most premises liability writing is about people entering land, not people occupying it. So the familiar language about ordinary care and reasonably safe conditions is not automatically the standard for the person renting your whole house.
And the landlord-tenant question here is separate from the VRLTA question. The Court noted that whether a common law landlord-tenant relationship exists “is not dependent on whether an occupancy or tenancy is a residential tenancy subject to the rights and obligations of the VRLTA.” An occupancy can sit outside that Act, as most short stays likely do, and still be a landlord-tenant relationship for purposes of a negligence claim. Those are two different analyses that happen to use the same vocabulary.
Where Your Own Conduct Still Governs
None of this makes what you do irrelevant, and reading it that way would be a mistake.
The concealment-or-fraud exception turns on a defect known to you and unknown to the occupant. That is a question about what you knew and what you disclosed, which is a question your records answer. It also means a specific written disclosure of a specific condition does real work, in a way a general recital that the guest accepts all risks does not.
Areas you keep control of are analyzed differently from areas you hand over. So are injuries to people who are not the renting party, and claims that arise from your own affirmative conduct rather than from the condition of the premises. And Virginia still recognizes contributory negligence as a complete bar rather than a proportional reduction, which is unusual, and which is worth understanding in the amenity context where these claims tend to arise.
Finally, this was a decision on a particular record, reached on a motion to strike, about a particular way of operating a house. A different operation produces a different analysis. That is not hedging; it is the actual holding, which turned on facts about presence and control.
The Questions Worth Sitting With
- During a stay, who has control of your property, and could you describe that in specific terms? Presence, service, and access are the facts that matter.
- Do you or your manager provide anything during the stay beyond turnover cleaning? Each service point moves the analysis.
- Is there a condition at your property you know about that a guest arriving for the first time would not notice? That is the fact the narrow exception is built around.
- Does your agreement disclose specific conditions, or does it recite that the guest accepts all risks?
- If you rent rooms rather than whole houses, or live on site, has anyone looked at whether you are in the same category as the owners in Haynes-Garrett?
Where a particular property falls depends on how it is actually operated, and the difference between the two sides of that line is substantial. If you own or manage short-term rentals in the New River Valley and have never had anyone look at which framework your operation sits in, a Virginia attorney can work through that with you against your actual documents and practices.
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.