Elizabeth Hirschhorn, the Brentwood tenant who did not pay rent for her luxury Airbnb rental for 570 days, moved out of the unit on Friday.
Elizabeth Hirschhorn, the Brentwood tenant who did not pay rent for her luxury Airbnb rental for 570 days, moved out of the unit on Friday.
I know it’s sexier to paint this as a nightmare tenant story, but there’s way more to the story. She didn’t just move in after an AirBnB stay decide to live there rent free. She had a lease, and there were repairs required in the unit that the landlord refused to do. So she sued him and stopped paying rent to cover the cost of repairs.
Then it turned out the landlord didn’t have a license to rent the unit, so the lease was void.
I don’t know either of the parties personally, so maybe the tenant was being unreasonable. But if you want to be a landlord, you absolutely need to have all of your paperwork in order, and you need to keep the unit in good working order. We should not have any sympathy for an owner who illegally leases a property with mold and unpermitted improvements when his tenant takes advantage of the situation.
In sure it’ll all come out in the court room. It looks like they’re both sueing each other
Yes, he should have made sure to obtain an occupancy license, but it sounds like this tenant was preventing access to the property for repairs.
More details in this story: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-10-04/airbnb-guest-refuse-pay-leave-luxury-rental
During the original 6 month lease, the owner saw mold and water damage around a sink and wanted to repair it. He offered to pay for a hotel for a few days to allow for the repair. Tenant refused to allow the repair, and apparently the issue kept getting worse. Tenant didn’t want to allow for the repair until their lease was up. When the lease ended tenant let them stay for a few additional weeks, which was probably their big mistake here. Then when they still wouldn’t leave he called the housing inspector to start eviction proceedings. The housing inspector noted the lack of occupancy license, and an out of code shower. At that point the owner ended up in a catch 22. He could not file for eviction until place was up to code, but the tenant prevented any attempts to access the shower to bring it up to code.
Maybe there’s more to this too, that’s all just from the article above, but it sounds like there’s multiple sides to the story.
Honestly, I don’t have any skin in this, so I don’t really care which side is the truth because it doesn’t matter. The landlord fucked up either way, making a series of rookie mistakes.
The story I had heard was that the unit wasn’t legal but she was also preventing him or repairmen from accessing the unit to fix it.