South Carolina decides a property injury claim by asking why the injured person was there, since the state keeps four visitor classifications and each is owed a different duty, with three years to bring the claim. The second question is who owed it. Myrtle Beach is nationally recognized for its resorts and hospitality industry, drawing millions of visitors every year to its oceanfront hotels, vacation rentals, and sprawling condominium complexes.
In a Myrtle Beach resort building, an association typically controls the pool deck, walkways, and elevators, while a unit owner controls the interior, and a hotel operator may be separate from both, so establishing who controlled the exact location is usually the case. Local knowledge of how Myrtle Beach resort properties are managed is crucial for identifying the right party.
Our team at the Arndt Law Firm works on Horry County property claims from that question and has experience with the unique challenges of Myrtle Beach's resort and vacation property landscape.
South Carolina appellate courts have held that the state recognizes four general classifications of persons who come onto premises: adult trespassers, invitees, licensees, and children. A different standard of care applies depending on which fits.
An invitee is an invited business guest, express or implied. A licensee is a person not invited but whose presence is suffered, which covers most social guests. A trespasser is a person whose presence is neither invited nor suffered. Children are treated separately.
The duty owed to an invitee is reasonable care, including a duty to warn of latent or hidden dangers of which the landowner has actual or constructive knowledge. That constructive knowledge element is what makes an invitee claim workable, because it reaches hazards the owner should have discovered rather than only those it actually knew about.
The duty owed to a licensee is materially less, because a landowner has no duty to search out and discover dangers or defects in the land where the visitor is a licensee. A hotel guest, a restaurant customer, and a resort visitor are invitees. The classification decides the standard before the facts are argued.
There is a genuine trap in the case law worth flagging. A South Carolina opinion contains a sentence announcing that the distinction between licensees and invitees is abolished. In context, that sentence is the South Carolina court quoting a decision from West Virginia while surveying other states. South Carolina retained the distinction, and the same opinion applied it.
Am I an invitee if I was staying at a hotel?
Yes. A paying guest at a hotel, resort, or restaurant is an invited business guest, which is the most protective of the four classifications and carries a duty of reasonable care, including a warning about latent dangers the operator knew of or should have discovered.
This is the question that decides most claims in this market, and it has no obvious answer in a multi-owner building.
In a condominium, the association typically controls the common elements: the pool and pool deck, the walkways, the corridors, the stairwells, the elevators, the parking areas, and the exterior. The unit owner controls the interior of the unit. A rental management company may control maintenance and turnover for particular units. A hotel or resort operator running units within the same building controls whatever its management agreement says it does.
Each of those parties carries separate insurance. A condominium association carries a master policy for common elements, while a unit owner carries a separate policy for the interior.
A management company carries commercial coverage of its own. Those are different insurers with different limits and different interests.
The practical consequence is that a claim aimed at the wrong party stalls, and the right party is established from the governing documents rather than from an assumption. Master deeds, bylaws, and management agreements define the boundary between common element and unit, and that boundary is where responsibility sits. The same layering runs through short-term rental claims in the same buildings.
Property injury claims here cluster into recognizable groups, and each has a different evidence profile.
Walking surface hazards are the largest group: wet floors, spills, uneven transitions, damaged paving, loose mats, and drainage. Those are handled in the slip and fall analysis, where the controlling question is how long the hazard had been there.
Balconies and railings produce the most serious injuries in a high-rise market, because a failure produces a fall from height. Rail height, structural condition, and corrosion in a coastal environment are measurable against building standards rather than argued as impressions.
Stairs and level changes involve riser height, tread depth, handrail dimensions, and continuity, all of which are numbers rather than opinions. Elevators raise maintenance and inspection questions that usually sit with an association and a service contractor.
Pools and water hazards involve barriers, gates, depth markings, surface condition, and whether supervision was provided. Lighting cases turn on whether an area was illuminated adequately for the use it was put to, including after dark. Negligent security claims arise where a foreseeable criminal act injured someone and the operator had reason to anticipate it.
A lodging operator in Myrtle Beach occupies a distinct position because it invites the public into a building it controls and holds itself out as providing a place to stay. Myrtle Beach's tourism-driven economy means high turnover and frequent maintenance issues in hotels, resorts, and short-term vacation rentals. This creates unique safety and liability challenges for property owners, management companies, and HOAs operating along the Grand Strand.
The recurring issues are room condition, bathroom and tub surfaces, balcony safety, corridor and stairwell lighting, pool areas, and security including door locks, key control, and whether cameras and staffing matched what was represented.
Guest records matter more here than in most premises cases. Housekeeping logs, maintenance requests, prior guest complaints about the same room or the same area, and incident reports for the property are all documentary and all in the operator's possession. A recurring complaint about a specific condition establishes notice in a way that no argument can.
Where a building mixes hotel operation with individually owned units, which is common in Myrtle Beach, the operator, the association, and the unit owner may each control part of what happened, and untangling that is the first task rather than a later refinement. Resolving responsibility in Myrtle Beach resort injury claims often requires reviewing master deeds, HOA bylaws, and management agreements to identify who had control over the specific location of the incident.
Is a hotel responsible for something that happened in a shared area?
Often, though, in a building with individually owned units, the association may control shared areas instead. Which party controlled the exact location determines who is responsible, and that comes from the governing documents rather than from where the injury happened to occur.
One category of premises claim works differently from the rest, because the immediate cause of the injury is another person's deliberate act rather than a physical condition.
A negligent security claim asserts that a property owner or operator should have anticipated a criminal act and taken reasonable steps to reduce the risk. It arises in parking areas and decks, hotels and lodging, apartment and condominium properties, and any setting where members of the public are invited onto property the owner controls.
The pivot is foreseeability. Prior incidents at the same property, or in the immediate area, are the usual evidence, along with what the owner knew from its own records: police call history, prior complaints from guests or residents, prior reports to management, and any internal risk assessment. An owner who commissioned a security review and did not act on it is in a different position from one who never looked.
The reasonable steps in question are ordinary rather than exotic. Lighting, functioning locks and gates, key control, working cameras, controlled access, and whether any security presence the operator advertised actually existed are the recurring issues. Where an operator represented that a property was secure or monitored, the gap between that representation and the reality becomes part of the claim.
In a multi-owner building, the question of who was responsible for security follows control in the same way every other premises question does, and an association, an operator, and a contracted security provider may each hold part of it.
Can a property owner be responsible for a crime committed by someone else?
Where the criminal act was foreseeable, and the owner failed to take reasonable security measures, a claim may exist. Prior incidents at or near the property, complaints, and police call history are the usual evidence of foreseeability.
Property cases are won on records that exist for other reasons and are not preserved for litigation.
Incident reports are usually completed on the day and often contain admissions that never appear again. Maintenance logs, inspection schedules, and cleaning records establish what the operator's own system required and whether it was followed. Prior complaints and prior incidents at the same location establish notice, which is the element most often disputed.
Video is the most valuable and the most perishable. Retention cycles are set by the property owner rather than by law, and footage showing how long a hazard existed is routinely overwritten before anyone asks for it. A written preservation demand sent early is what interrupts that.
Physical measurements matter more than photographs alone. A step height, a slope, a rail dimension, or a light level either meets a standard or does not, and conditions get repaired quickly after an injury.
In a building where different people own the units, records sit in more than one place. The association holds common element maintenance history and the operator holds its own.
A service contractor holds a third set. Requests go to each.
A great many premises injuries happen to people on someone else's property for work, and that changes the structure of the claim.
South Carolina Workers’ Compensation Law, S.C. Code Ann. § 42-1-540 (2024), provides that the rights and remedies under the workers' compensation title exclude all other rights and remedies against the employer, at common law or otherwise. The employer is generally unavailable as a negligence defendant.
The same section carries a carve-out routinely left out of discussions of exclusivity. The limitation does not apply to injuries resulting from acts of a subcontractor of the employer, and it does not bar an action by an employee of one subcontractor against another subcontractor where a common employer hired both. On a multi-contractor site, that language is often what makes a claim viable.
A workers' compensation case can change who controls a related third-party claim. Under South Carolina Workers’ Compensation Law, S.C. Code Ann. § 42-1-560 (2024), the employee generally has one year after the carrier accepts liability or makes payment to commence the third-party action; if that does not occur, statutory assignment and notice provisions may transfer the cause of action to the carrier.
| Party | What it typically controls | Insurance it typically carries |
|---|---|---|
| Condominium association | Pool, walkways, corridors, elevators, parking, exterior | Master policy for common elements |
| Unit owner | The interior of the unit | Unit owner policy |
| Management company | Maintenance and turnover for managed units | Commercial general liability |
| Hotel or resort operator | Whatever the management agreement assigns | Commercial general liability |
| Service contractor | The specific system or service it maintained | Contractor liability |
An injured person recovers as long as their share of the fault is not greater than the defendant's, with the award reduced by that percentage and barred at 51 percent, under Nelson v. Concrete Supply Co. The rule is common law rather than statutory.
Premises defendants raise comparative fault in a predictable form. The hazard was open and obvious. The injured person was distracted, or looking at a phone, or wearing unsuitable footwear, or in an area they had no reason to be. Distraction, footwear, location, and the plaintiff's conduct may support comparative-fault arguments.
An open-and-obvious condition raises an additional premises-duty question and, depending on the circumstances, may defeat liability unless the property possessor should have anticipated the harm.
For claims governed by South Carolina's post-January 1, 2026 apportionment rules, a defendant may in qualifying circumstances seek allocation of fault to a nonparty. The statute includes disclosure requirements, exceptions, and additional conditions. In a building with an association, an operator, a unit owner, and two contractors, the possibility of nonparty fault is a practical threat rather than a technicality, and it is another reason to identify every controlling party at the outset.
Property injury claims are valued in the same categories as any injury claim, and they are undervalued for a specific reason: the incident sounds minor in the retelling even where the injury is not.
The economic component covers emergency treatment, imaging, surgery, follow-up care, therapy, prescriptions, and future care a physician projects, along with lost income and lost earning capacity. The noneconomic component covers pain, disfigurement, and loss of enjoyment, and South Carolina places no general statutory cap on it in an ordinary injury case.
Three factors move these numbers. Delayed onset is common, since soft tissue and spinal injuries frequently develop over days, and an offer made in the first week is made before anyone knows what happened. Pre-existing conditions are routinely raised, when the relevant question is whether the incident made a manageable condition symptomatic. And where an injury affects independence, particularly for an older adult, the loss reaches well beyond the medical bills.
A visitor injured while staying here faces an additional practical issue, which is continuity of treatment after going home. Documenting the injury before leaving matters, and so does establishing the link between the initial treatment here and the follow-up care elsewhere.
The general deadline is three years from the date of injury. Where the injury was not apparent at the time, the same three years runs from when the person knew or by reasonable diligence should have known that a cause of action existed.
A separate limit applies where the claim arises from how the property was built rather than how it was kept. South Carolina Limitations of Actions Law, S.C. Code Ann. § 15-3-640 (2024), provides that no action based on the defective or unsafe condition of an improvement to real property may be brought more than eight years after substantial completion. That is a repose period, and in a market with older high-rise buildings it reaches balcony, rail, and stair claims regularly.
Two shorter clocks also apply. A claim against a government property owner under the South Carolina Tort Claims Act, S.C. Code Ann. § 15-78-110 (2024), generally must be filed within two years. The limitations period may extend to three years if the claimant first uses the Act's verified-claim procedure. That verified claim must be received within one year after the loss was or should have been discovered, pursuant to S.C. Code Ann. § 15-78-80(d) (2024).
The Act imposes damage caps and does not permit punitive damages. A workers' compensation third-party claim runs for one year.
Claims by children may be tolled during minority. The calculation of this period is governed by South Carolina Limitations of Actions Law, S.C. Code Ann. § 15-3-40 (2024). It should be determined from the facts of the individual claim rather than reduced to a universal filing date.
Suit is filed in the Court of Common Pleas for Horry County, in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, at the courthouse at 1301 Second Avenue in Conway. The Clerk of Court is reachable at (843) 915-5080, with a second office at 9630 Scipio Lane in Myrtle Beach at (843) 915-5082.
Where the property owner is a government body, the Tort Claims Act fixes venue in the circuit court for the county where the act or omission occurred.
Seriously injured people are transported to Grand Strand Regional Medical Center in Myrtle Beach. Treatment in the same city produces a cleaner record than a transfer elsewhere, though a visitor's follow-up care at home still has to be reconciled with it.
An injured person has no standing to demand maintenance history from an association or an operator, which is a practical obstacle that does not arise in a single-owner property case.
What is available immediately is what the injured person can capture: photographs of the condition before it is repaired, the names of witnesses, the incident report if one was created, and the exact location relative to identifiable features. In a building where responsibility follows control, the precise spot matters more than the general area.
What has to come through a written request or through discovery is everything held by the parties: association maintenance and inspection records, the operator's incident log, prior complaints about the same condition, service contractor records, and any board minutes discussing the condition. Each sits with a different party, and each requires its own request.
Governing documents are the starting point, because master deeds and bylaws define the boundary between common element and unit and therefore identify who should be asked for what.
Can I get the association's records myself?
Not directly. Association and management records generally come through a written request or through discovery, which is a reason to photograph the condition and fix the exact location immediately.
Yes, more than almost anything else. South Carolina recognizes four visitor classifications and each is owed a different duty.
Yes. A frequently misread South Carolina opinion quotes a West Virginia decision abolishing the distinction, but South Carolina retained it.
It depends on who controlled the exact location. Associations typically control common elements while unit owners control interiors, and the governing documents define the boundary.
An open and obvious condition can defeat a premises claim in some circumstances, but it is not automatically fatal. South Carolina law recognizes potential liability when the property possessor should have anticipated that an invitee would encounter the danger despite its known or obvious character.
Nothing up front. Consultations are free, and the fee is contingent on recovery.
The Arndt Law Firm establishes control before anything else in a Myrtle Beach or Horry County property claim, because in a resort building the owner of record is often not the party responsible for the walkway, the pool deck, or the elevator. The firm has extensive experience handling claims involving Myrtle Beach hotels, resorts, and vacation rentals, including high-rise oceanfront properties, golf resorts, and large condominium complexes along the Grand Strand. Master deeds, bylaws, and management agreements answer which party is responsible, and they answer it before the hazard itself is argued.
Written demands then go to every controlling party rather than one, since an association, an operator, and a service contractor each hold a separate set of maintenance and incident records, and video retention is controlled by whichever of them owns the camera. Horry County claims are filed in the Court of Common Pleas in Conway. Attorney Jonathan S. Arndt has been licensed in South Carolina since 2018 and reviews the firm's premises matters.
An initial conversation is free, and no fee is owed without a recovery. You can reach the firm through the contact page. Hazards get repaired, and footage gets overwritten within days, which is a far shorter window than the filing deadline suggests.
Last reviewed: August 2026
This page was reviewed by Jonathan S. Arndt, licensed in South Carolina since 2018.
Content is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Consult a licensed South Carolina attorney for guidance specific to your situation.
