What Agents Should Disclose About Short-Term Rental Eligibility

If your buyer's plan for the property is short-term rental income, the property's eligibility is material to the transaction. The exposure is not theoretical: a buyer who closes on an unincorporated Clark County house believing they can license it has lost the entire investment thesis, and the first question their attorney asks is what their agent told them.

This checklist is not legal advice, and we are not attorneys. It is what we would want in the file.

Before showing

• Verify the jurisdiction from the parcel. Not the mailing address, not the ZIP code, not the MLS field. Enterprise, Spring Valley, Paradise and Sunrise Manor are unincorporated county with "Las Vegas" addresses, and some communities straddle a city line.
• Know what the answer means. Unincorporated county is closed to new licenses. City of Las Vegas requires the owner to live in the home during every stay and caps the property at three bedrooms including theirs. Henderson and North Las Vegas are open, with conditions.

Before the offer

• Run the separations. Henderson is 1,000 ft from another registered rental; the City of Las Vegas and North Las Vegas are 660 ft; the resort buffer is 2,500 ft valley-wide. North Las Vegas counts proposed applications, not only approved ones, so a pending file down the street can block your buyer.
• Read the actual CC&Rs. In Henderson the documents must expressly authorize transient lodging. Silence is a denial. Inspirada and Cadence are prohibited outright.
• Do not treat an existing operation as proof. A Henderson registration terminates on sale and the buyer must re-qualify under today's rules and today's separation map.

In the contract

• Write a contingency on licensing or permit approval where the buyer's plan depends on it. This is the provision that turns a catastrophe into a terminated contract.
• Never state or imply a licensing outcome. Only the city or county can decide it, and pending applications, in-progress ordinance changes and the Clark County appeal can all move the line.

In the file

• Save the jurisdiction determination, dated, with its source.
• Save what you sent the client and when.
• Save the licensing office contact, and the date you or the client confirmed with them.

You can run any address through the checker on this site, save the result and put it in the file. It records the jurisdiction, the boundary confidence, and the measured distances to the nearest licensed rental and resort. If the parcel sits close to a boundary it says so, because at that range a map reading is not good enough to hand a client.

The other guides

• Why Your "Las Vegas" Address Probably Is Not the City of Las Vegas
• The HOA Question That Ends Most Henderson Deals
• Buying an Existing Short-Term Rental? Read This First
• The Federal Injunction on Clark County, Explained
• Mid-Term Rentals: The 31-Day Workaround