Reenacted without a word changed, and no longer saying the same thing

Section 718.3027 of the Florida Statutes is the conflict of interest rule for a Florida condominium board. In the 2026 compilation it reads word for word as it read in the 2025 compilation. Six subsections, nothing added, nothing struck.

The only new thing on the page is one entry in the amendment history at the foot of it: section 186, chapter 2026-168.

That entry is the story.

Chapter 2026-168 is an act relating to nonprofit corporations. It runs to 190 sections, was approved by the Governor on 25 June 2026, was filed with the Secretary of State the same day, and took effect on 1 July. Section 51 of it replaced section 617.0832 under the note the Legislature uses where a section is substantially reworded rather than amended in place. Section 186 then reenacted subsections (2) and (5) of section 718.3027 and stated why in its opening line, which is that it was incorporating the amendment made by the act to section 617.0832 in a reference thereto.

So the condominium chapter was not overlooked. It was reached into, left alone, and confirmed.

What changed for Florida condo boards on 1 July 2026?

A board reading chapter 718 will not find it. Subsection (2) of section 718.3027 tells an association whose director or officer proposes an interested transaction to list the activity on the meeting agenda, attach the contracts and transactional documents to it, comply with the requirements of section 617.0832, enter the disclosures required by section 617.0832 into the written minutes, and approve the contract by an affirmative vote of two-thirds of all other directors present. That instruction has not moved. What it points at has been replaced.

The old section offered three separate ways to keep an interested transaction from being void or voidable, and any one of them sufficed: disclosure to the board and approval without counting the interested votes, disclosure to the members and approval by them, or the transaction being fair and reasonable to the corporation. The section as it now reads has one route to safety, and that route is fairness. It also defines the word for the first time. A transaction is fair to the corporation where, as a whole, it is beneficial to the corporation and its members, taking appropriate account of whether it is fair in terms of the director's dealings with the corporation and comparable to what might have been obtainable in an arm's length transaction.

Disclosure did not disappear. It changed jobs. Where the material facts of the transaction and the director's interest in it were disclosed or known to the board and the transaction was approved by a majority of the qualified directors, the person challenging the transaction carries the burden of proving that it was not fair. Where neither that condition nor its member equivalent is met, the burden runs the other way, and the person defending the transaction must prove that it was. This desk read the same rewrite from the homeowners' association side on 11 August, because section 720.3033(2) sends a homeowners' association board to the same place in almost the same words, and was reenacted by the next section of the same act.

The condominium chapter is now wider than the section it cites

Section 718.3027(1) has no materiality threshold in it. A rebuttable presumption of a conflict of interest arises where a director or an officer, or a relative of a director or an officer, enters into a contract for goods or services with the association, or holds an interest in a business entity that conducts business with the association or proposes to. Any interest. The subsection does not ask how large it is.

The rewritten section 617.0832 asks. It applies to a director's conflict of interest transaction, defined as one to which a director is directly or indirectly a party and in which the director has a direct or indirect material financial interest or other material interest. Material, in that section, means an interest that would reasonably be expected to impair the objectivity of a director's judgment when participating in the action on the authorization of the transaction. The definition also carves out an interest a director holds only as a member of the corporation, which in a condominium means only as the owner of a unit.

A condominium board can therefore be sitting on a presumed conflict under one statute and outside the operative definition of the other in the same meeting. The condominium statute still requires the agenda listing, the two-thirds vote and the disclosure to the members at their next meeting. What the section it cites does with that disclosure now depends on a threshold the condominium statute never mentions.

Two definitions of family in the same room

The condominium statute sets its own reach in subsection (6): a relative means a relative within the third degree of consanguinity by blood or marriage. It is a degrees test, and it captures a niece, a nephew, an aunt, an uncle and a grandchild.

The rewritten section 617.0832 does not use degrees. It supplies a list. A family member includes the director's spouse, and a child, stepchild, parent, stepparent, grandparent, sibling, step sibling or half sibling of the director or of the director's spouse. Those two sets overlap heavily and they are not the same set, and a grandchild is the plainest example of somebody inside the condominium test and off the chapter 617 list.

That matters because the two tests do different work. The condominium relative test drives the presumption, the agenda listing, the two-thirds vote and the members' right to cancel the contract at their next meeting. The chapter 617 family member test feeds the definition of an indirect material financial interest, which is what decides whether the transaction sits inside the section at all, and therefore which way the burden of proof runs if an owner sues.

Officers are in one statute and out of the other

Section 718.3027 covers directors and officers throughout. Every subsection names both.

Section 617.0832 is titled conflict of interest standards for directors and is drafted for directors alone. Its transaction definition, its fairness rule and its burden allocation all speak of a director, and none of them mentions an officer. The act created a separate section for officers, section 617.0844, which sets a good faith duty, a care standard, reliance provisions and an obligation to report a material violation of law or a material breach of duty upward. It contains no interested transaction provision at all.

So where the conflicted party is an officer who does not sit on the board, the condominium machinery still runs in full, and the sentence telling the association to comply with the requirements of section 617.0832 has nothing on the other end of it to comply with.

Two counts of the same vote

Subsection (2) of the condominium statute fixes the approval at an affirmative vote of two-thirds of all other directors present.

Section 617.0832(3)(a) shifts the burden of proof only where the transaction was approved by a vote of a majority of the qualified directors, and adds that the qualified directors may constitute less than a quorum but may never be a single director. Qualified director is new. Section 11 of the same act created section 617.0143 to define it, and that section is where the Legislature addressed community associations directly: for a corporation regulated by chapter 718, 719, 720, 721 or 723, or one in which membership is required by a document recorded in the county property records, it limits a material interest to familial, financial, professional or employment interests.

Read the definition itself and one thing is visible on its face. A qualified director, for the purposes of section 617.0832, is a director who is not a director as to whom the transaction is a director's conflict of interest transaction, or who has a material relationship with another director as to whom the transaction is a director's conflict of interest transaction. The subparagraph immediately below it, covering a different section, is drafted the other way round: it lists three things such a director is not, or does not have, and joins them with and. No court has construed either. The point here is only that two subparagraphs of one definition, adopted on the same day, are built differently.

The narrowed definition of a material interest has a smaller footprint than it first appears. The phrase material interest occurs three times in chapter 617 as compiled: once in that definition, and twice inside the definitions of section 617.0832, which are expressly limited to that section. The qualified director test itself turns on a material relationship, defined in the paragraph above with no community association carve-out.

The remedy that did not move

Subsection (5) is the part of the condominium statute an owner can actually use, and nothing in June touched its substance.

A contract between the association and a director, an officer, or a relative of either, which has not been properly disclosed as a conflict or a potential conflict as required by that section or by section 617.0832, is voidable, and it terminates on the filing of a written notice with the board carrying the consent of at least 20 percent of the voting interests of the association. That is a condominium remedy. It does not require proof of unfairness, it does not require a court, and it survived the rewrite intact, because section 186 reenacted it in the same breath as subsection (2).

What it hangs on is thinner than it looks. Neither the old section 617.0832 nor the new one states a freestanding duty to disclose. Both treat disclosure as a condition attached to a consequence, and the consequence is the thing that changed: under the old text, disclosure to the board plus a clean vote made the transaction proof against being voided, and under the new one it moves a burden of proof. The condominium statute is still telling owners that a failure to disclose as required by section 617.0832 makes a contract voidable on a petition of one fifth of the voting interests.

Cooperatives are not in any of this

A Florida cooperative under chapter 719 sits inside most of the framework built after Surfside. Milestone inspections under section 553.899 reach a cooperative building three habitable stories or taller on the same terms as a condominium.

The conflict machinery is a different matter. Section 617.0832 appears in chapter 719 zero times. So do the words kickback, relative of a director, financially interested and self-dealing. The chapter's single reference to this part of the nonprofit act is one occurrence of section 617.0830, the general standard for directors. Chapter 718 has an interested transaction procedure and chapter 720 has one. Chapter 719 has none, and the June act changed that in neither direction.

One loose end in the printed law

The catchline the Legislature enacted for the rewritten section is not the catchline the statute now carries. In the enrolled act, section 50 amends section 617.0830 under the heading general standards for directors, and section 51 rewrites section 617.0832 under the same heading. The compilation published at leg.state.fl.us gives 617.0832 the heading conflict of interest standards for directors. Whether that difference carries any consequence is not something the act decides, and nothing above turns on it.

What an owner can check

None of this is in a declaration or a set of bylaws. A declaration recorded in 1997 states the law of 1997, and no association document is going to cite a section of the nonprofit corporation act.

Two things are short enough to read directly. Section 718.3027 runs to one page, and it is the whole of what the condominium act says about a board doing business with its own members. Section 617.0832 is the page it sends you to, and since 1 July 2026 it says something different from nearly everything written about it before that date.

For a specific transaction, the minutes are the record that matters. Subsection (2) requires the proposed activity to be on the agenda with the contracts attached, and the disclosures to be entered in the written minutes. Those are official records of the association, and an owner is entitled to inspect them.

Frequently asked questions

What is a conflict of interest on a Florida HOA or condo board? Section 718.3027(1) raises a rebuttable presumption of a conflict where a director or an officer of a condominium association, or a relative of one, contracts with the association for goods or services, or holds an interest in a business that deals with the association, without the prior notice subsection (5) requires. Section 720.3033(2) applies to a homeowners' association where it contracts with one of its own directors, or with an entity in which a director is also a director or an officer or is financially interested.

Can a Florida association contract with a board member's company? Both statutes contemplate it and both attach a procedure. For a condominium, the activity goes on the meeting agenda with the contracts attached, the association complies with section 617.0832 and enters the disclosures in the minutes, and approval requires two-thirds of all other directors present. The members must be told at their next meeting, and on a motion by any member they may cancel the contract by a majority of those present.

What did chapter 2026-168 change for association boards? It substantially reworded section 617.0832, the section both the condominium and the homeowners' association statutes point at for interested transactions, and it took effect on 1 July 2026. Disclosure to the board and approval by a majority of qualified directors now shifts the burden of proving unfairness to a challenger instead of putting the transaction beyond challenge, and the section reaches only a director who has a material interest.

Was chapter 718 amended in 2026? Section 718.3027 was reenacted, not amended. Its text in the 2026 Florida Statutes is identical to its text in the 2025 Florida Statutes, and the only change to the page is the addition of section 186, chapter 2026-168 to the amendment history. Section 187 of the same act did the same thing to section 720.3033(2)(a) and (b) and (3).

What can owners do about an undisclosed board contract? Section 718.3027(5) provides that a contract between the association and a director, an officer or a relative of either, which was not properly disclosed as required by that section or by section 617.0832, is voidable and terminates on the filing of a written notice with the board carrying the consent of at least 20 percent of the voting interests.