Uptick in Evictions Coming to Las Vegas Following June Expiration of COVID-19 Protections
LAS VEGAS, NV – Following the expiration of a specific COVID-19 expiration this past June, landlords in Las Vegas are now allowed to proceed with evicting tenants who have not been paying their rent, even if said tenant has applied for and is awaiting approval for participation in rental assistance programs.
As a result of the expiration of these tenant protections – in addition to Nevada state Governor Joe Lombardo recently vetoing two similarly-themed bills – courtrooms across the Las Vegas Valley have encountered a surge of eviction cases recently, and are bracing for yet still more in the coming weeks.
To compensate for the increased number of cases on the docket, the courts have been forced to add additional days and hours for hearing eviction cases in order to keep up with the huge workload.
According to the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, the increase in eviction cases they are handling has jumped from 300 or so on what would normally be termed a “busy day” to now over 400 to 500 a day.
In addition to the expiration of COVID-19 protections, the main contributing factor for the rise in eviction rates in recent weeks comes from two bills that Governor Lombardo vetoed after they passed in the Nevada Legislature. The first one, AB340, would have changed the procedures governing evictions in order to give tenants an extended period of time to respond to an eviction notice; the second bill, SB355, would have placed a moratorium on evicting disabled and senior tenants who had applied for aid in paying their rent.
Both of these bills were summarily vetoed by Lombardo, who said that AB340 would have made the eviction process unnecessarily longer than needed and would prove harmful to landlords statewide.
AB340 would restructure Nevada’s summary eviction process in a manner that would impose additional and unnecessary delays and costs on those seeking to remove individuals who unlawfully remain on their property after the termination of their lease,” he said. “This bill would make our summary eviction process more time-consuming than our peer states and would create ambiguous threshold standards which could be ruled upon by a judge without any formal hearing, providing insufficient protections for Nevada property owners.”
And while Lombardo agreed that SB78 would add transparency to the rental process, he objected to the bill’s “wide-ranging changes to accounting practices, traditional fee collection, certain disclosures and various notice requirements for landlords,” adding that it would have made the current shortage of rentals in Nevada even worse.
Shelter Realty is a Real Estate and Property Management Company specializing in the areas of Henderson, Las Vegas and North Las Vegas, NV. Feel free to give us a call at 702.376.7379 so we can answer any questions you may have.