The reserve study already exists. Boards should publish it.

This page is the view of Money & World. It argues a position. The facts in it are verified the same way we verify news; the conclusion is ours.

Florida made a decision after Surfside that is easy to state. Every condominium building three habitable stories or higher must have a structural integrity reserve study, the study must be redone at least every 10 years, and for budgets adopted on or after December 31, 2024, a unit-owner-controlled association may no longer vote to fund the structural items below what the study requires. All of that sits in section 718.112 of the Florida Statutes. The number that tells a building what its concrete, roof, plumbing and waterproofing will cost over time is no longer optional, and neither is paying for the structural share of it.

What the law does not decide is when the people who will write the checks get to read it.

The study is not the threat. The drawer is.

Nothing in the ordinary rhythm of association life guarantees that an owner sits with the reserve study before the night its consequences arrive as a budget line. An owner can be current on every assessment, present at every annual meeting, and still meet the real cost of the building for the first time as a finished number on a proposed budget, with the vote already scheduled. The 115 percent substitute-budget protection that many owners believe caps their exposure excludes reserves, structural repair items and insurance from its calculation, which means the increases most likely to shock are exactly the ones the protection was written not to touch. We reported that in detail last week. The reporting changed no statute. It changed who knew.

That is the argument for publication in one sentence: the number exists, the obligation to fund it exists, and the only variable a board still controls is whether owners learn it early, calmly and from the board, or late, angrily and from a budget notice.

What publishing means

Publishing is not a press release. It is three documents on the association website where an owner or a serious buyer can read them without asking anyone for permission: the current structural integrity reserve study, the funding schedule the board intends to follow, and the last two adopted budgets. A building that posts those three things has told the truth about itself in the only format that cannot be softened in a hallway conversation.

Boards hesitate for a reason that deserves to be said plainly: the number is large, and a large number feels like a confession. But the choice is no longer between a large number and no number. The study exists, and its structural items must be funded. The choice is between a building that states its own number and a building whose number circulates anyway, secondhand, in listing remarks, in inspection contingencies, in the guesses of buyers who assume the silence is hiding something worse. Markets price uncertainty more harshly than they price bad news. A published study is bad news with a boundary around it. An unpublished one is a rumor with interest accruing.

The market will sort buildings either way

Southwest Florida has an unusual concentration of the buildings this law reaches, and buyers here are learning to ask the same three questions in every transaction: is there a current study, is it funded, and may I see it. Buildings that answer in one email will trade like buildings with nothing to hide, because that is what they are. Buildings that answer slowly will pay for the delay in price, in days on market, and in the quality of the buyers who remain once the careful ones walk.

The legislature already did the hard part. It ended the era in which a building could vote itself poor and call the result a budget. What remains is a smaller decision, the kind that does not require a statute: hand the number to the people who own the building before they have to ask for it. The boards that do will spend next budget season explaining a plan. The boards that do not will spend it explaining themselves.