How to verify vacation rental ownership

One of the issues that comes up when folks are considering renting a vacation rental (either a house or a condo unit) directly from the owner (say through a site such as VRBO (Vacation Rental By Owner) or similar) is that very basic question: ';How do I know that the person I%26#39;m renting from actually owns the place I%26#39;m renting?'; In todays world where fraudsters are becoming increasingly clever, such things do happen - you send in your check (such places are unlikely to accept credit card payment, but unfortunately many legit vacation rentals don%26#39;t either) and then hope that the person you%26#39;ve been dealing with is indeed the REAL owner. Afterall, it would be a total nightmare to pay your money, and fly to the island, only to find you have NO accomodations and NO money with which to pay for new accomodations. admittedly, I%26#39;d rather be homeless in Hawaii than homeless say in Minot North Dakota - but it%26#39;s still homeless.

So, one thing you may want to do is to actually verify that the person who claims to own the property actually DOES own the property. You can easily do this by checking the Kauai County tax records using this website:

www.kauaipropertytax.com/Home.asp?mnu=Home

Simply click on the ';Property Search'; tab, type in the address (take note that you may want to leave off suffuxes such as ';Street'; and just go with the street name) and viola! up pops the name of the person who actually owns the property. This way you can be sure the person you are dealing with really can rent the place to you.

Hope this helps folks that are considering going the vacation rental route but are a bit nervous.

Ken

How to verify vacation rental ownership

PS - Updated the Inside Page ';Inside Kauai: Accomodation Tips'; to include this info and a bit of additional information regarding vacation rentals. You may want to take a look. It was good page to begin with and now is hopefully even a bit better:

tripadvisor.com/Travel-g29218-s1/鈥nside.html

Ken

How to verify vacation rental ownership

LordBalfor

That%26#39;s pretty slick !!.......Just verified the owner of our rental and you%26#39;re right.......it is reassuring to know that our deposit had been mailed to the actual owner of the property.......

Yeah it is reassuring.

FYI - There are similar sites for

Honolulu (Oahu): http://www.honolulupropertytax.com/

Maui: http://www.mauipropertytax.com/

Big Island: http://www.hawaiipropertytax.com/

You may want to save these links for future trips to those islands

Ken

Does this search work for individuals who own condos in a resort? I did a search using the address for the Waipouli Beach Resort and didn%26#39;t get any results. I%26#39;ve also worried that the situation described above could happen to us.

jrchapma -

Not quite sure. I guess it MAY depend on how ownership is structured. I don%26#39;t know enough about your situation (and Hawaiian property tax laws) to say. I do know that before our trip to Maui a couple of years back I used the Maui site to verify ownership of one of the units at the Kamaole Sands condo complex and it worked just fine.

Sorry I can%26#39;t answer better,

Ken

Thanks for trying, Ken. I ended up just calling the front desk at WBR and they verified the owner%26#39;s name. Whew! That%26#39;s a relief!

Now if we owners could just verify that our guests are who they say they are before they arrive and that if they claim to be a party of two they are not six and don%26#39;t plan to party hearty in our condos. (Will never forget the college boys who removed a BR door, thinking (?) to use it as a surfboard. Not our condo; another one.)

In six years we%26#39;ve been fortunate to have only nice guests -- except for the ones who set a fire ON our kitchen countertop and the ones who stole an expensive print in a koa frame. Well, there was the man who said he and his wife would be staying, then called to complain that his 3-year-old had bug bites ';all over her';. We discovered he%26#39;d let her bring a feral cat into the condo and the bites were from fleas -- which of course our management company had to take care of by bombing the condo!.

I%26#39;m trying to illustrate that this ';trust'; thing goes two ways.

ChiSue -

True enough, I%26#39;m sure.

Ken

Thanks Jrchapma!!!- I am in the same boat with wanting to go thru vrbo at WBR so now I will just call the front desk- excellent!

Excellent suggestion, but don%26#39;t have a heart attack if some other name comes up as ';owner'; of your vacation rental...

Until recently achieved via better programming efforts, reliable sharing of data between agencies was not the best in Hawaii, and the State Bureau of Conveyances (which held the ownership data) and the County Tax Assessor%26#39;s Offices (which had the real property tax data) were not always on the same page.

Sooo, the County data would give the name of a property ';owner'; as whoever got the tax bill, and not necessarily the person who held the deed.

The matter was further muddled by leasehold tenure, persons whose names changed, extended family ownerships, and trusts and LLCs.

Most of the glitches seem to have been (or are being) dealt with, and the County Tax Offices now provides pretty good results. Sometimes the data can be more confounding than clarifying, but at least it appears correct in most cases.

Just to see how they would show ownership of one of the more complicated properties on Oahu, I tested the Hyatt Regency Waikiki (2424 Kalakaua). The info is correct and complete; if somewhat confusing to most.

The researchers at our firm still prefer to use Hawaiiinformation.com, a fee service for the real estate industry.

When accessing the County sites just remember the data can be slow being posted, and sometimes is several months (up to six) behind in regards to changes. So if there has been a recent ownership change of the property you are renting it may not be reflected in the County Real Property Tax database.

transfer file