Earlier this month, a Florida law firm that has spent decades litigating negligent security cases told Law.com they're "getting calls every single day." The Haggard Law Firm, which just announced a $16.25 million global settlement in a fatal shooting case at a Disney-area vacation rental community, now has more than a dozen pending or recently resolved suits involving Airbnb and VRBO.
That's not a firm chasing a new niche. That's a firm responding to volume.
For a long time, the STR liability conversation was fairly predictable. A guest slips on a wet deck. A hot tub injury. A fire damages a property and the income coverage falls short. A birthday gathering becomes a commercial event and the general liability policy has an exclusion no one read carefully.
These are real claims. They happen regularly. They are also claims the insurance industry has spent years learning to underwrite and price. Carriers know them. Policies are built around them.
What's emerging in the courts now looks different.
The Case Behind the Settlement
In July 2021, a man named Jeremiah Brown was fatally shot during a carjacking at ChampionsGate, a resort-style vacation rental community in Osceola County, Florida, near Disney World. He was vacationing with his girlfriend and her children, staying in a property rented through Airbnb.
The litigation produced a global settlement of $16.25 million. Defendants included the ChampionsGate Master Association, the community's sub-associations, the contracted security company, and a property management firm. Airbnb reached a separate confidential settlement in connection with the case.
The investigation turned up specific failures. Access-control gates reportedly broken at the time of the attack. Surveillance coverage throughout the community that was limited and inadequate. Security staffing below what a property of that size required. Evidence also emerged that some of the individuals involved in the attack had been connected to prior criminal incidents in the same area.
Pedro Echarte, the Haggard attorney who led the case, was direct about the implications when speaking to Fox News. The risks, he said, were not limited to ChampionsGate. The short-term rental industry is "a massive, unregulated industry that operates without any real regulations." The community, he argued, had withheld information about a documented spike in violent crime that could have changed where Brown chose to stay.
The allegation in the case was not that any of the defendants committed the crime. The allegation was that they failed to provide adequate security despite knowing the risk was there.
The Legal Standard Behind These Cases
Negligent security claims don't ask whether a property owner caused a crime. They ask whether the property owner had reason to anticipate that something like it could happen, and failed to take reasonable steps in response.
This is different from ordinary accident liability. With a slip and fall, courts look at the physical state of the property at the time of the incident. Was the surface slippery? Was the handrail intact? Was there adequate lighting at the entry?
With negligent security, courts reach further back. They ask what the responsible parties knew about the risk environment, and what they did about it.
Prior police calls to the property or community. Documented criminal incidents in the area. Patterns of complaints from neighboring properties. Security contracts that existed but weren't meaningfully enforced. Access controls that had deteriorated. All of that becomes relevant evidence. It builds a record of what people knew, or could have known, before the incident occurred.
Courts don't require property owners to prevent all criminal activity. The standard is reasonableness. But whether someone exercised reasonable care given the available information is a harder question to answer than whether a deck railing passed code.
The Platform Isn't Protected Either
In August 2024, a San Francisco Superior Court judge allowed a negligent security lawsuit against Airbnb itself to proceed past the company's motion to dismiss. The case involves the 2021 death of Elias Elhania, an 18-year-old who was shot at a party at a Sunnyvale, California home rented through the platform. The party drew between 150 and 200 people, was advertised on social media, violated local ordinances requiring owner presence during guest stays, and had prompted safety complaints from neighbors before the shooting.
Airbnb had successfully defeated similar lawsuits in prior years by arguing it was simply a platform connecting renters and property owners and that violence at parties was not foreseeable. This time, the court disagreed. The attorneys involved described it as the first ruling of its kind in the country.
If Airbnb's platform position doesn't insulate it from a foreseeability analysis under these circumstances, it raises a reasonable question for the host who actually controls the physical property, sets the occupancy limits, manages access, and communicates with guests before arrival. The host's connection to the property is more direct, not less.
What Actually Creates This Kind of Exposure
Not every STR carries this risk profile. A carefully managed two-bedroom property with consistent occupancy of two to four guests sits in a different category than a large-capacity group property in a resort community with a history of incidents.
The properties that generate this type of liability are fairly identifiable. Large-capacity homes marketed toward groups and gatherings. Resort communities where multiple STRs operate in close proximity and security infrastructure is shared or informal. Properties that have received prior police calls, noise complaints, or reports from neighbors or local code enforcement. Properties operated remotely where occupancy limits aren't meaningfully enforced, access codes aren't rotated, and the host has limited visibility between check-in and checkout.
Social media adds exposure that didn't exist a decade ago. If a guest promotes a rental as a party venue, even without the host's knowledge, that creates a discoverable record. In litigation, the history of how a property was used matters. Not knowing about it doesn't always change the analysis.
The central question in a foreseeability case is often not what happened on a specific night. It's what pattern existed in the months before, and what the people responsible for the property knew, or reasonably should have known, about it.
What Your Coverage Actually Says About This
Standard STR-specific commercial liability policies cover bodily injury and property damage arising from ordinary operations. A guest trips. A structural failure causes an injury. These are the scenarios purpose-built STR policies are designed to address.
Negligent security claims involving criminal acts are handled differently by carriers. Many standard liability policies contain assault and battery exclusions, criminal act exclusions, or limiting language around third-party security failures. Whether a specific claim falls inside or outside coverage depends on how the policy is worded and how the carrier interprets the particular facts of the case.
Some carriers cover negligent security claims as general premises liability. Others deny them under criminal act language. Some policies have assault and battery endorsements that add the coverage back in for an additional premium. The answer is not the same from carrier to carrier. It's worth asking directly rather than assuming coverage exists.
If AirCover is currently your primary protection: AirCover is a reimbursement program, not a commercial liability insurance policy. It does not provide legal defense. It does not have the settlement capacity that a multi-million dollar negligent security claim requires. It was not designed for this category of exposure.
What Reasonable Risk Management Looks Like
None of this requires turning a vacation rental into a surveillance operation. But it does require treating the property as what it is: a commercial lodging business in a community, with guests who are occasionally strangers.
Written occupancy limits that are actually enforced. Not suggested limits in a listing description. Stated limits in the house rules, reinforced in arrival communication, with a documented response process for violations. If a guest books for four people and twelve arrive, how that situation is handled, and whether it's on record, becomes part of an operational history that could matter later.
A written event policy. Not a "no parties" checkbox in platform settings. An actual written statement in the house rules defining what is and isn't permitted. Dated. Kept on file.
Noise monitoring. Devices like Minut or NoiseAware don't record conversations, but they generate a timestamped record of activity levels at the property. That record can matter if a claim follows an incident, in either direction.
If the property receives a complaint, from a neighbor, local authority, community association, or prior guest, document the complaint and document the response to it. In a foreseeability analysis, how a prior complaint was handled carries significant weight.
Why This Is Happening Now
Haggard isn't the only firm building case volume in this area. The Law.com coverage reflects a broader legal industry watching a specific case category grow. The STR market is large enough, and settlements are starting to resolve at numbers significant enough, that it's attracting sustained plaintiffs-side attention across the country.
The ChampionsGate settlement named Airbnb as a settling party. The Elhania ruling let claims against Airbnb proceed. These aren't isolated data points. They reflect a pattern of courts and plaintiffs' attorneys actively testing what STR operators, management companies, and platforms are expected to know and do when warning signs exist.
Hosts who understand this operating environment are better positioned than those who don't. Not because understanding eliminates the risk, but because intentional documentation, reasonable operational controls, and properly structured coverage change how a property looks when something goes wrong and someone starts asking questions.
The question worth asking now, before an incident happens, is whether your coverage is actually built for the risk you're carrying.
Take five minutes to get your free risk score. See where your coverage stands before that question gets asked about your property.
Threshold STR is a professional STR insurance audit and placement firm based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. We help hosts understand their coverage structure before an incident occurs. This article is for educational purposes and does not constitute legal or insurance advice. Coverage terms vary by carrier and policy.