Florida condo & HOA news
Plain-English Florida condo and HOA law updates for owners, volunteer board members, managers, and everyone navigating community-association life.
Read the latest articles ↓From the front lines
Written by Eric M. Glazer · Florida attorney
Election season is beginning in all of our condos and HOAs. Now is the time that most of your associations are sending out their first notices of the annual meeting and people are returning a notice that says they want to run for a seat on the Board of Directors. Each year, without fail, I get a complaint…
Read more → Yves Takenenuf is a Board member at Black and Blue Condo, a 100 unit condo located in Central Florida that borders on a lake, a forest and is clearly a little slice of heaven. It’s even a 55 and over community. So what can go wrong? Yves is a dedicated Board member who works tirelessly for his condominium.…
Read more → Board members I’m telling you now……..be careful. I’m seeing it already. Unit owners are starting to freak out over the passage of huge assessments to cover the costs of mandatory inspections, mandatory repairs and massive increases in insurance rates. As we know, we’re not talking about pesky increases to…
Read more → Last week was a primer on how foreclosures generally work and how banks get off the hook when they get back a unit when they foreclose on an owner’s unit or home. We learned that the banks are protected by the law because they only owe a few bucks to the association when they get title to the unit or home…
Read more → Let’s start with what some of you already know……..foreclosures are on the rise. Incredibly, this is happening before huge special assessments are kicking in for many of you and before mandatory reserves go into effect. If foreclosures are already on the rise, what’s going to happen when special assessments…
Read more → Florida Statute 720.31 states the following: An association may enter into agreements to acquire leaseholds, memberships, and other possessory or use interests in lands or facilities, including, but not limited to, country clubs, golf courses, marinas, submerged land, parking areas, conservation areas, and…
Read more → Again, in a budget adopted by an association that is required to obtain a structural integrity reserve study, reserves must be maintained for these items: Roof. Structure, includingload-bearing walls and or other primary structural members and primary structural systems as those terms are defined in s.…
Read more → Now that condominiums are going to have to pass huge special assessments in order to make repairs and maintain new accounts with potentially millions of dollars in the bank, let me tell you one of the reasons I heard as to why these new laws should not go into effect. “Because we don’t trust our Board having…
Read more → This is going to be a very interesting election year for condos. I perceive that there is definitely going to be two types of candidates. The first will run a campaign that basically says: CANDIDATE ONE: I have lived here for twenty years. In light of the tragedy in Surfside, the dramatic rise in property…
Read more → I’m not going to tell you that you should have a bunch of new year resolutions that you must follow. We all know how long they last. So, I’ll only suggest one at the end of this article. However, I am going to tell you that if your budget still does not contain reserve funding, your new year is already off…
Read more → It has always been difficult to get volunteers to be on the Board of Directors. Even when times are good and the building has made repairs and has some money in the bank, you can never count on owners to volunteer their time for a position where on their best day they will be second guessed and criticized.…
Read more → Ihave heard lots of excuses over the years about so many different things. Here’s a few that simply don’t work: My assessments should be less — I don’t use the elevator I have heard this from lots of people who live on the first floor. It doesn’t work. Regardless of whether you use the common elements, you…
Read more → So this week, my mom asks me to attend her Board meeting because the agenda says they will speak about the budget for 2023. She knows I have been babbling a lot lately about how assessments are going to soar and she wants to know if her community is set for the troubles I’m predicting. So I went. I won’t…
Read more → Afew weeks ago on the Condo Craze and HOAs radio show, I was sent a chart by a listener that showed that just under 50% of condominiums were funding a reserve account in full each month. As I was broadcasting this information, I felt that it sounded a little high. It turned out that I was referring to a…
Read more → It seems that for week after week we have been blogging about condominiums for the obvious reason that condo laws have undergone an absolutely dramatic change this year. Not only is the change dramatic, but it will no doubt lead to foreclosures of countless units when unit owners cannot pay the special…
Read more → Today, we finally conclude all off the new condominium laws that were passed in 2022 by The Florida Legislature. There is a lot to know. ALL CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATIONS MUST: Although the DBPR has yet to produce the required form: On or before January 1, 2023, condominium associations existing on or before July…
Read more → In a word — YES. Are all these new laws really necessary? In a word –YES. This is all happening due to a complete lack of foresight and planning by The Florida Legislature. Mandatory Reserves and Mandatory Inspections should always have been the law. I urged The Florida Legislature in May of 2018 to make…
Read more → Ireally hate to be a Debbie Downer, but I have never been more afraid of an economic collapse in Florida, especially South Florida, as I do now. I couldn’t care less about the statistics that get reported about whether foreclosures are going up or not. I’m telling you that they are. I know because process…
Read more →Read it. Then watch it.
