Miami Airbnb Injury Lawyer
You booked somewhere to stay for a few nights, came home hurt, and still cannot get a straight answer about who owned the place. We can take it from here. Call 844-643-7200 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our Miami personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Miami-Dade County since 1993.
Airbnb Injury claims in Miami
The host will say you were a guest who should have watched your step. Meanwhile you are the one with the hospital bill, the time off work and no idea whether the deck, the stairs, the gate or the water depth met any standard at all. Finding out what the law required of that property, and who was answerable for it, is our job from the first call.
Miami-Dade has the highest short-term rental density in Florida and most of it is vertical. The unit belongs to the host, and the lobby, the elevator, the garage, the amenity deck, the gym and the pool belong to the association, which means a guest hurt anywhere except inside the unit is rarely making a claim against the host at all. The regulatory position is unusually messy: several municipalities here restrict or prohibit short-term letting, many buildings ban it in their own documents, and a host operating against either is in a far weaker position when asked what authority they had to put you there. Miami Beach in particular enforces against it aggressively. Establishing whether the letting was even permitted is a useful early question in a way it is nowhere else in the state.
Most Miami short-term rentals are condominium units, so a guest hurt in a lobby, garage, elevator or pool deck is usually claiming against the association rather than the host. Several municipalities here restrict short-term letting and many buildings ban it. Most claims must be filed within two years.
What to do after a airbnb injury in Miami
- Screenshot the listing before you report anything. The whole page: photographs, title, amenity list, house rules, the description of the stairs or the pool or the dock, and every review going back as far as it loads. A host can edit or delete all of it in five minutes and they routinely do so the same week. Screenshot rather than bookmark, because a bookmark points at whatever the page says tomorrow. This is the single most useful thing anybody does in the first day of one of these cases.
- Photograph the thing that hurt you, with something for scale. The tread, the rail, the loose tile, the missing bulb, the gap, the water. Put a shoe, a phone or a hand in the frame, because heights, gaps and depths get measured later rather than described. Photograph the whole room or the whole approach as well as the detail, so it is clear where it was. Then photograph it again from where you were walking or standing when it happened.
- Keep every message in the thread, including the ones after. What the host said when you asked about the property, what they said when you told them, what they offered, and anything a manager or a cleaner sent. Hosts frequently admit a great deal in the first hour and become careful afterward. Export or screenshot the conversation rather than trusting it to stay in the app, because accounts get closed and threads disappear with them.
- Get seen in Florida before you fly home. An urgent care or emergency room visit here anchors the injury to the property and to the date, and that record is worth a great deal later. People routinely decide to wait until they get home, and a defense lawyer then argues the injury happened somewhere between Florida and their front door. It takes an afternoon and it closes an argument that is otherwise available for the life of the case.
- Find out who actually owns the place. The county property appraiser will name the record owner from the address in about a minute, and it is regularly a company or a trust rather than the person you were messaging. Write the name down. It decides which insurance is in play, and knowing it early stops a claim being aimed at somebody with nothing behind them.
Where these happen in Miami
Miami-Dade has the highest short-term rental density in Florida and most of it is somebody’s apartment.
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The unit itself
The only part the host actually controls, and the part with the fewest serious injuries.
- Balcony rails and glass, in buildings where the balcony is the selling point
- Bunk beds, lofts and mezzanines put in to raise the guest count
- Appliances and water heaters in an apartment used a few weeks a year
- Locks and doors that do not work the way the listing described
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Everything you walk through to reach it
The lobby, the elevator, the garage, the corridors, the gym and the amenity deck belong to the association.
- A different defendant and a much larger policy than the host carries
- Camera coverage that exists and gets overwritten within days
- Access control, and who could get into the building behind you
- Where the building has five or more homes, a statutory security checklist that is checked rather than assumed
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Buildings and cities that prohibit the letting
The regulatory position here is messier than anywhere else in the state, and it cuts against the host.
- Municipal restrictions, enforced hardest on Miami Beach
- Association documents that ban short-term letting outright
- What authority the host had to put a guest in the building at all
- Whether the unit was registered or licensed, and whether either was current
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Rooftop and deck pools
A guest using an amenity the host does not control, in a building the guest knows nothing about.
- A public swimming pool under Florida law, with a permit and equipment requirements
- Water clarity and lighting, at a pool open after dark
- Whether an attendant was advertised and actually provided
- Deck surfacing, drainage and the route from the elevator to the water
What causes them
- Balcony, deck and stair rails that are loose, low, or spaced widely enough for a child to pass through
- Docks with no ladder, and water too dark or too shallow to judge from above
- Lighting that was fine when the host set it up and has since failed on a path, a step or a landing
- Hot tubs and spas left with unbalanced chemicals, no cover, or a temperature nobody checked
- Grills, fire pits and outdoor heaters set up close to seating or under a soffit
- Locks and doors that do not work as the listing described, including a door that cannot be locked at all
What actually injures people at a short-term rental
Head and spinal injury from entering water
Diving or jumping from a dock, a seawall or the edge of a pool into water shallower than it looked. Florida water is frequently dark with tannin or stirred sediment, the bottom is invisible from above, and depth changes with tide and with the season. The property knew all of that and the guest could not.
Burns and carbon monoxide
Hot tubs run too hot, outdoor cooking set up badly, and appliances in a house that is used a few weeks a year and serviced rarely. Carbon monoxide is the one that kills people in their sleep, and in a rental there is frequently nobody who has checked whether an alarm exists, let alone whether it works.
Injuries to children who were staying in the house
A rental is a house arranged for whoever lives there rather than for visiting children, so the hazards are the ordinary contents of somebody else’s home: an open loft edge, a bunk with no rail, a heavy unit that is not fixed to the wall, chemicals in an unlocked cupboard. A listing that advertises itself as family friendly is making a statement about that, and it is a statement worth holding them to.
What Florida law requires you to prove
A rental is a business, and the guest is an invited customer
The full licensing scheme, the inspection exemption and the safety requirements sit on our Florida short-term rental page rather than being restated in every market. The short version is that a place let to guests more than three times a year for stays under thirty days is treated as a lodging business under Florida law, which puts a guest in the strongest category the state recognizes rather than in the position of somebody visiting a friend.
The deadline, and the share of the blame
Most claims from an incident on or after March 24, 2023 carry two years under Fla. Stat. § 95.11, and an older one keeps the four years that applied when it happened. Fault is divided under Fla. Stat. § 768.81, and since 2023 somebody found more than half responsible recovers nothing at all. Unfamiliarity with a property is the point of renting one rather than a fault in the guest, and it is answered with what the host knew.
Where the unit sits in a building of five or more homes
Fla. Stat. § 768.0706 gives the owner or principal operator of a multifamily residential property a presumption against liability for a crime somebody else commits there, but only where a listed set of measures was substantially in place: recorded cameras at the entry and exit points held for thirty days, lit parking and walkways, a deadbolt of at least an inch in each unit door, locks on windows and sliding doors, locked gates on pool fencing, and a peephole where a door has no window beside it. That is a checklist rather than a defense, and it is checked.
The full statutory detail, and the parts that differ by claim type, sit on our statewide airbnb injury page rather than being restated in every market.
How we prove it in Miami-Dade County
In a Miami rental case there are usually two record sets and they are held by parties who do not talk to each other.
- The full listing screenshotted before anything is reported, reviews included
- The booking, the house rules and the whole message thread with the host
- Photographs of the hazard and of the route you were taking, with scale
- A written request for building camera footage, sent within days
- The association’s management contract, maintenance records and incident log
- Whether the letting was permitted by the municipality and by the building
- The record owner of the unit, from the county property appraiser
- A Florida medical record made before you left the state
Ask the building for its footage in writing immediately. Miami towers overwrite on a short cycle, and the same request two weeks later produces a truthful answer that nothing survives.
Who would handle your case
Being hurt in Miami is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled airbnb injury claims across Florida since 1993, and one of them will take yours from the first call to the last check. They will tell you what your case is worth and why, and they will be straight with you about the parts that are hard.
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Brett J. Yonon Senior Trial Attorney Selected to Florida Super Lawyers in 2024 and 2025. Nearly two decades in Florida courts, including a $3.5 million funeral home negligence verdict. Full profile → -
Richard P. Pravato Founding & Managing Attorney Board Certified in Civil Trial Law by The Florida Bar since 2004, and by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. Injury cases exclusively since 1996. Full profile →
What the insurer says about a short-term rental claim
The arguments here are unusually predictable, because there are only ever four of them and they arrive in the same order.
- The host does not own the place, so take it up with the owner
- Frequently true and rarely the end of it. A host who takes the money, sets the rules, arranges the cleaning and holds the keys has control of the property whether or not their name is on the deed. The owner is usually a defendant too, along with whoever managed it. Naming all of them is ordinary practice rather than an escalation.
- This was a short-term let, so the homeowners policy does not respond
- A real coverage problem and not a reason there is no claim. An ordinary homeowners policy is written for somebody living in their home and commonly excludes commercial use, which is exactly what letting it to guests is. Where that exclusion bites, the host remains personally answerable, the owner and the manager have their own coverage, and the booking platform operates a host liability program that regularly responds. Those are found by asking for the coverage position in writing.
- You were on vacation and you had been drinking
- Some version of this appears in nearly every one of these files, and it is aimed at the share of blame rather than at liability. It is answered with the condition of the property, the maintenance history and what earlier guests had already complained about, none of which depends on what anybody had at dinner.
What a claim can include
Getting home, and being cared for once there
Changed flights, extra accommodation, medical transport, and the help hired because somebody could no longer drive, work or carry a child.
Income and earning capacity
Time lost while you could not work, and where the injury is lasting, what the rest of a working life is now worth against what it was.
Pain, suffering and loss of the ordinary use of your life
The head of loss with no invoice behind it, and the one an early offer prices at close to nothing.
Why Wolf & Pravato in Miami
A Miami-Dade claim is filed in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit at the Miami-Dade County Courthouse, and the firm has an office on Brickell Avenue rather than a mailing address here. In a market where the host, the unit owner, the association and a management company are four different parties, establishing which of them controlled the space you were hurt in is the whole first phase of the case.
The firm is led by a Board Certified Civil Trial lawyer, a certification held by 861 attorneys in Florida against a membership over 109,000. Insurance companies keep their own records of which firms in a county actually try cases, and that record moves an offer further than anything a firm can say about itself.
There is no charge to ask. Our fee comes out of what we recover and nowhere else, and if the answer is that you do not have a case, that is the answer you will get.
Miami airbnb injury questions
The host has closed their account and I cannot reach them.
It happens and it does not end the claim. The county property appraiser names the record owner of the unit from the address, and the association knows who owns it and who has been letting it. The platform also holds the listing, the booking and the message thread. A host disappearing removes a contact rather than a defendant.
The building says short-term rentals are not allowed there.
That helps rather than hurts. It does not make you a trespasser, and it puts the host in a much weaker position on every other question, including what authority they had to put you there and whether their insurance was ever going to respond. It also raises what the building knew and how long it had been happening.
Can I claim against the booking platform?
Usually the claim runs against the host, the unit owner, the association and whoever managed the property, because those parties controlled the space. A platform argues it published a listing somebody else wrote. That question turns on what the platform itself did, so it is assessed rather than assumed, and either way the platform holds records worth preserving.
Does this cover VRBO, Booking.com and a rental arranged privately?
Yes. Florida law looks at how the property is used rather than at which website you found it on. A place rented to guests more than three times a year for stays under thirty days is treated the same way whether the booking came through Airbnb, VRBO, another site or a handshake. The platform changes the paperwork, not the duty.
The host says I agreed to the house rules and accepted the risk.
House rules are not a release, and even a signed waiver has limits under Florida law. What matters far more is what the property was actually like and what the host knew about it. Your own share of the fault does reduce what you recover, so getting the condition documented early is the practical answer to this argument rather than a debate about the rules.
The questions that come up on every kind of claim, deadlines, fees, recorded statements and fault, are answered on our Florida injury claim FAQ.
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Tell us what happened
A lawyer will listen, tell you what Florida law does with those facts, and be straight with you about whether it is worth bringing. We are at 1111 Brickell Avenue, 11th Floor, Miami, FL 33131.