Michigan appeals court: an Airbnb guest is your association's invitee
Michigan appeals court: an Airbnb guest is your association's invitee
2026-09-12 · Michigan · Courts
What happened. The Michigan Court of Appeals held, for publication and as a matter of first impression, that “a short-term rental guest of a condominium unit owner is an invitee, not a licensee, of the condominium association on the common elements that the association maintains.” Letvin v The Village at Grand Traverse Commons Condominium Association, No. 376558, decided 13 July 2026.1
The panel was M.J. Kelly, P.J., Patel and Korobkin, with Judge Korobkin writing. Summary disposition for the association was reversed; fact questions on breach remain for trial.
Why this needed deciding
Michigan had two incompatible answers on the books. In Gabrielson v The Woods Condominium Association, 349 Mich App 496 (2024), a published decision from January 2024, a person renting a room in a unit was held to be a licensee of the association — no direct business relationship, no pecuniary gain. Six months later the Supreme Court decided Janini and dismantled the framework Gabrielson had reasoned from.
Letvin resolves it directly: Janini abrogated Gabrielson. With Francescutti gone, the panel followed the landlord-tenant analogy of Stanley v Town Square Cooperative, 203 Mich App 143 (1993), using the first-out rule to prefer Stanley over Gabrielson, and distinguished DeBoard v Fairwood Villas, 193 Mich App 240 (1992).
The fact that decided the breach question
The guest slipped on ice in the car park while leaving for an Uber and broke his arm. What kept the case alive was testimony, not law: the board president testified that the board took no responsibility for monitoring its snow contractor, and the contractor, A.M.O. Inc., was unaware of anyone from the association who inspected its work.
What this actually costs a Michigan association
The doctrinal holding is the headline; the operational holding is the board president's testimony. An association that hires a competent contractor and then never looks at the work has, on this record, generated a jury question about its own reasonable care.
Concretely, the practices that separate a defensible file from this one:
- A named person responsible for inspecting vendor performance, identified in the minutes. “The contractor handles it” is the answer that lost here.
- Dated inspection records during weather events, however brief. A one-line log entry is evidence; a recollection is not.
- Contract terms that require the contractor to report conditions and document service visits, so the association has something to inspect.
- Indemnity and additional-insured status that survives the association's own negligence claim, because after Fowlkes both the association and the contractor are in the case.
The awkward interaction with rental restrictions
Michigan associations spend a great deal of energy trying to stop short-term rentals. Letvin adds a consideration that cuts against the usual framing.
An association that permits short-term rentals now owes those guests the full invitee duty. An association that prohibits them but does not enforce the prohibition is in a worse position again: it has guests on the property whose presence it has neither authorised nor priced into its risk management, and its own documents record that it knew the use was happening.
The practical inference is not a rental ban. It is that the rental policy and the liability posture are the same decision, and most Michigan boards have been making them separately — the rental question at one meeting with counsel, the insurance renewal at another with a broker.
How far the rule reaches
Letvin answers the short-term rental guest. It does not answer the long-term tenant, the owner's houseguest, the delivery driver, or the contractor's employee. Stanley's landlord-tenant analogy points toward invitee status for a tenant, and the reasoning in Janini — possession and control rather than title — does not obviously stop at anyone the association has invited onto ground it maintains.
The conservative planning assumption for a Michigan board is that everyone lawfully on the common elements is owed reasonable care, and that arguing about categories is a litigation posture rather than a risk-management one.
What to watch next
Whether the association applies for leave to the Michigan Supreme Court. No application had been located as of 12 September 2026, and defence-side commentary was openly waiting to see. Because Letvin is published, it binds Michigan trial courts unless and until that happens.
Related Michigan HOA Topics
- Letvin v The Village at Grand Traverse Commons Condominium Ass'n, Mich Ct App No. 376558 (13 July 2026, published) ↩
- Janini v London Townhouses Condominium Ass'n, Mich Sup Ct No. 164158 (11 July 2024) ↩
- Gabrielson v The Woods Condominium Ass'n, 349 Mich App 496 (2024) — the decision Letvin holds abrogated ↩
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