How we investigated evictions and code complaints in the Las Vegas Valley
The Las Vegas Review-Journal sought to evaluate eviction and code complaint rates among rental companies that owned more than 100 single-family homes bought in the Las Vegas Valley during and after the 2008 financial crisis.
The analysis was conducted in partnership with Eric Seymour, an assistant professor of urban planning at Rutgers University who has studied the effect of post-recession investment on rental housing stability in Detroit.
Local homeownership and sales data were obtained from Clark County’s property assessor database. A historic copy of the database from each calendar year since 2008 was analyzed. The database records property ownership as of Aug. 1 of each year.
Because the largest landlords’ portfolios were often spread across multiple LLCs, Review-Journal reporters researched state business filings to verify which LLCs belonged to each parent company.
The Review-Journal also used public records requests to obtain reports containing all eviction orders that constable offices received payment to carry out in the valley. The more than 26,000 pages of records contained tenants’ names, rental addresses and the dates constable offices received payment. When a single tenant had more than one eviction from the same address, only the most recent case was included in the analysis.
Code complaint data were obtained from Clark County and the cities of Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Henderson.
Companies’ rates of code complaints and court-ordered evictions were calculated based on the single-family homes the assessor’s database showed they owned as of Aug. 1, 2018.
Several criteria were established to narrow the analysis to single-family detached homes being used as rentals.
The analysis included only one-unit properties that had a Clark County land use code of “110” and were built before 2012 to nullify any homes that were currently being developed or still waiting to be sold after development. Properties that were bought and sold within a year’s time to owner-occupants were excluded to address home flipping.
The homes must not have been flagged as their owner’s primary residence and had a mailing address different than the property address. Key words were used to remove from the analysis properties owned by family trusts, developers, government entities, nonprofits, churches and home sale platforms.
NOTE: This story has been updated to more accurately describe the constable offices’ eviction records .