Served & Found

Serving papers on Scottsdale winter residents and rental owners

Closed-up Scottsdale home in summer with a lockbox, a vacation rental where papers are hard to serve

Scottsdale has two kinds of part-time residents that make process service harder than it looks. There is the winter resident who owns a place here and spends the hot months in Minnesota or Alberta. And there is the vacation rental owner who may never have lived here at all. Both come up all the time in Scottsdale cases: a contractor suing a seasonal homeowner, a neighbor fed up with a party house, a landlord chasing a guest who did damage.

The problem in each case is the same. You have a Scottsdale address, but the person is not there.

The "usual place of abode" question

Arizona Rule of Civil Procedure 4.1(d) lets a server leave the papers at the person's dwelling with someone of suitable age and discretion who lives there. Two parts of that rule matter here.

First, the house has to be the person's dwelling or usual place of abode. A second home that someone visits for three months a year may or may not qualify, and courts look at the facts. If the person is plainly living somewhere else at the time, leaving papers at the Scottsdale house is a risk.

Second, the person who takes the papers has to reside there. A housekeeper, a pool technician, a property manager or a vacation rental guest does not reside there. Handing the papers to any of them is not abode service, no matter how helpful they are.

So the safest approach with a seasonal resident is to serve them personally, or to serve them where they are actually living.

Timing it for the season

If you know the person winters in Scottsdale, the simplest fix can be patience. Many seasonal residents come back after the heat breaks and stay through spring. If your deadline allows it, a server can attempt personal service once they are back. Neighbors, an HOA newsletter or a visible car in the driveway often tell you when that is.

Patience only works if your deadline allows it. Rule 4(i) gives you 90 days after filing a Superior Court complaint to serve each defendant. If the person is not due back until after that, you need another plan or a request for more time.

Serving them where they are

If the defendant is spending the summer in another state, Arizona law still lets you reach them. Rule 4.2 covers service outside Arizona. The Superior Court's service packet lists the usual routes: a process server or sheriff in the other state, or mail that requires a signed return receipt, followed by an affidavit filed with the court. Your lawyer or the Arizona server you hire can usually arrange it. Expect a separate fee from the out-of-state server.

When the defendant is a vacation rental owner

Scottsdale requires an annual city license for each short-term rental, meaning rentals of fewer than 30 days. As part of that, owners must give neighboring properties the name, address and 24-hour phone number of an emergency point of contact for the rental, and keep that information current with the city and the neighborhood.

That contact is not an agent for service of process. Do not hand papers to a property manager and assume you are done. But the notice can tell you who manages the property, and sometimes that leads you to the owner.

Many rentals are owned through an LLC rather than in a person's name. If the property is held by a company, the company can be served through an officer or its agent for service, which in Arizona is usually the statutory agent on file with the Arizona Corporation Commission. That is often far easier than chasing an individual owner across state lines. Just make sure you are suing the right party; whether the LLC, the person behind it, or both, is a question for your lawyer.

What to tell your process server

When you hire someone for a seasonal or vacation rental address, give them everything you have:

A good server will tell you up front if the Scottsdale address looks like a dead end, rather than billing you for attempts at an empty house in August.

Every process server on Served & Found is on the Arizona Supreme Court's certified list, which you can check yourself in the court's process server directory. Browse process servers working in Scottsdale, or read how to hire a process server before you call. If the address is also behind a gate, our piece on guard-gated communities in north Scottsdale picks up from here. The rest of our coverage is on the Scottsdale page.

This is general information, not legal advice. If the only address you have is a rental the defendant never lived in, call your lawyer before you file proof of service on it.

See the board: everyone in Scottsdale · process servers only.

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