---
title: "A Hermosa Beach Airbnb guest overstayed, and California law made it hard to remove him"
description: "A homeowner says her Airbnb guest, booked for a month, stopped paying after 48 days and would not leave. Because California grants tenancy rights after 30 days of occupancy, police called it a civil matter and formal eviction could have taken months. A water emergency let her back in; the guest then loaded a U-Haul and left."
category: "Los Angeles"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/los-angeles
author: "Simone Bishop"
published: 2026-07-24T04:58:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-24T04:58:00.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/a-hermosa-beach-airbnb-guest-overstayed-and-california-law-made-it-hard-to-remov
tags: ["airbnb", "hermosa-beach", "housing", "tenant-law", "california"]
---
# A Hermosa Beach Airbnb guest overstayed, and California law made it hard to remove him

A homeowner says her Airbnb guest, booked for a month, stopped paying after 48 days and would not leave. Because California grants tenancy rights after 30 days of occupancy, police called it a civil matter and formal eviction could have taken months. A water emergency let her back in; the guest then loaded a U-Haul and left.

A Hermosa Beach homeowner's short-term rental turned into a months-long headache, [ABC7 reports](https://abc7.com/post/airbnb-squatter-hermosa-beach-homeowner-says-guest-refused-leave-reservation-ended/19566135/), and the reason it did is a quirk of California law worth understanding before you hand a stranger the keys.

## What happened

Wendy Weissman rented her townhome through Airbnb to a guest, Evhan Lemarck, identified as being from France. He had originally booked for a month. By her account, he paid for 48 days, then stopped paying and refused to leave.

The standoff ended almost by accident. A water emergency at the property gave Weissman a reason to access it, and once she was back inside, Lemarck loaded a U-Haul and moved out that same night. On entering, she found damage, including what she described as an attempted break-in to a private closet.

## The 30-day trap

The part of this that matters beyond one bad rental is the legal mechanism that left Weissman stuck. Under California law, a guest who occupies a property for 30 days can establish tenancy rights, at which point removing them is no longer a matter of ending a reservation but of going through the courts.

Real estate attorney Daniel Bornstein laid out the stakes. "Once you allow someone to remain in occupancy for 30 days, they establish tenancy rights, and then you need to use the civil litigation process to remove the person," he said. That process, a formal eviction, can take six months or longer, and Bornstein estimated the delay could have cost Weissman more than $70,000 in lost rental income.

That is the trap: a booking that runs past a month can quietly convert a hotel-like guest into a tenant with legal protections, and the protections that exist to keep real renters from being thrown out on short notice apply just the same to an Airbnb guest who overstays.

## Where the platform and police stood

Neither of the parties a homeowner might expect to help did much. Police declined to get involved, calling it a civil matter, which, given the tenancy issue, it legally was. Airbnb described the situation as "very rare" and said it removed the guest from its platform, a response Weissman criticized as minimal.

## The practical lesson

This resolved better than it might have; Weissman got her home back within the same night she regained access, not after a half-year court fight. But the useful takeaway for anyone renting out a property in California is the 30-day line. A reservation that crosses it changes the legal relationship entirely, and the time to think about that is before the booking, not after the guest decides to stay. The Herald notes the case less as a crime story, it may never be one, than as a caution about a rule many hosts do not know until it is working against them.

## Sources

- [Airbnb squatter? Hermosa Beach homeowner says guest refused to leave after reservation ended](https://abc7.com/post/airbnb-squatter-hermosa-beach-homeowner-says-guest-refused-leave-reservation-ended/19566135/)