What the Condo Law Did to the Market, and How I Read a Building Before My Clients Buy

Every few weeks, a client sends me a listing for a beautiful older condominium on the beach with a monthly maintenance fee that looks almost too good to be true. My answer is always the same: a low fee on a Florida oceanfront building from the 1980s is not a bargain. It is a question that has not been answered yet.

That instinct comes from the single most important shift in our market since the pandemic, and it has nothing to do with interest rates. It is the wave of condominium legislation that followed the 2021 Surfside collapse, and it has quietly divided the Fort Lauderdale condo market into two very different places to buy.

What actually changed

The reforms began with Senate Bill 4-D and were refined by later legislation, including House Bill 913, which took effect in the summer of 2025. Strip away the legal language and three obligations matter to anyone buying a condominium three stories or taller.

The first is the milestone inspection — a structural review that a building must complete when it reaches thirty years of age, or twenty-five years if it sits within three miles of the coast, and every ten years after that. In Fort Lauderdale, where so much of the desirable inventory is on or near the water, that coastal threshold captures a great deal of the beachfront stock.

The second is the structural integrity reserve study, or SIRS — an engineer's assessment of the major structural components and the money required to maintain them over the coming decades. Buildings were required to complete their first study by the end of 2025.

The third is the change that reshaped the market. For decades, condominium associations in Florida could hold a vote to waive or reduce the reserves set aside for structural components. Owners, understandably wanting to keep their monthly fees low, often did exactly that. It is precisely how a building accumulates deferred maintenance: the money to fix the roof or the seawall is never set aside, because a majority voted not to fund it. As of the start of 2025, for the structural items identified in the reserve study, that vote is no longer allowed. Associations must fund the reserves the study requires.

The later reforms added some breathing room. An association that has finished its milestone inspection and is actively making repairs can pause reserve contributions for up to two years, so that owners are not hit with two large bills at once. But the core principle held: the money has to be set aside, and it has to be disclosed.

The two-tier market this created

Here is what all of that means when you are actually shopping. The market has separated into buildings that have confronted their numbers and buildings that have not.

On one side are the compliant and newly built towers. A new construction building has the reserve study baked into its budget from the first day, so its fees are higher than a comparable building would have charged in 2021, but there is no catch-up shock waiting in the future. On the other side are older buildings — particularly the beachfront towers from the 1980s and earlier — where the inspection may reveal concrete spalling, roof replacement, or seawall work that translates directly into a special assessment.

Those assessments are not hypothetical, and they are not small. Across South Florida, monthly dues at many buildings have risen twenty to forty percent to meet the new reserve requirements. Older beachfront towers have seen increases well beyond that, or one-time special assessments in their place. In the most severe cases that made headlines, individual owners at certain buildings faced assessments reaching into six figures.

You can see the split in the sales data. Well-funded, compliant buildings continue to attract buyers. Older buildings with unresolved structural questions sit longer and frequently sell below asking. Financing follows the same line: the major loan guidelines have tightened for buildings with significant deferred maintenance or inadequate reserves, which pushes some older units into cash-only territory and narrows the buyer pool further.

How I read a building before a client writes an offer

This is where representation earns its keep, because the law also gave buyers something valuable: time. On a resale condominium, you now have seven business days after you receive the association's documents to review everything and cancel with no penalty. Weekends and holidays do not count against you. Most buyers do not use that window well. My clients do, because I know exactly what we are looking for.

None of this is meant to scare anyone away from condominium ownership. A well-run, well-funded building in Fort Lauderdale is one of the most enjoyable ways to live on the water, and the new transparency is genuinely good for buyers. For the first time, the health of a building is written down and handed to you before you close.

The point is that the number on the listing — the monthly fee — no longer tells you what it used to. Two units in two buildings a block apart can carry nearly identical fees, and one is a sound purchase while the other is a decade of deferred bills about to come due. The paperwork is where the difference lives. Reading it correctly, in the seven days you are given, is the whole game.