The knock on my condo door in 2003 wasn't subtle. A sheriff's deputy stood there with a stern warning: "Evacuate now." A storm surge was coming on the heels of a hurricane, and the neighborhood would soon be flooded. "By 2 a.m., the only way out of here is going to be by rowboat," he cautioned.
At the time, I lived in a large condominium complex adjacent to the Potomac River in Alexandria, Va. I heeded the deputy's warning, grabbed my dog and a duffel, and assumed what many condo owners assume — that the big risks were covered. After all, I'd paid my monthly dues and entrusted my condo association to maintain a comprehensive master insurance policy that would protect my building if disaster struck.
But after the storm passed, my neighbors and I learned that the association had dropped the ball. The complex was underinsured, and the association's $1.25-million flood insurance policy was no match for the $4 million-plus in damages. The real disaster, it turned out, wasn't an extraordinary storm; it was ordinary mismanagement.
That was my introduction to the fine print of condo ownership — and it's a lesson that thousands of Floridians have learned in the aftermath of the Champlain Towers South condo collapse in Surfside.
The 2021 tragedy that killed 98 people wasn't simply a structural fluke. It was decades of bad management catching up — deferred maintenance, skimpy reserves and lax oversight that allowed an aging building to slide toward disaster.
Five years later, the Surfside disaster has ballooned into a statewide crisis. With new regulations in place, many of the state's 1.1 million condos that have crossed the 30-year mark are aging, underfunded and desperate for repairs, creating a perfect storm for Florida's condo market.
As condo boards slap owners with massive special assessments — in some cases, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit — many are rushing for the exits. But those assessments, combined with insurance hikes and tighter lending, have sidelined many buyers, slowed condo sales and weakened one of the state's key sources of affordable housing.
A "big challenge" in it all, says former state Sen. Jeff Brandes, is price discovery. "Nobody knows what they're buying." He says many buyers naively approach a condo purchase as if they're buying one Lego in a tower. "They're really buying a jumbled bunch of Legos, because these associations could be in great shape, or they could be in really terrible shape, and they don't know."
Brandes wants to change that. Since leaving the state Legislature, he's worked on finding data-driven solutions to the state's affordable housing crisis (among other problems) through his Florida Policy Project (FPP). His latest brainchild — the newly launched Florida Communities Certification Association (FCCA) — aims to shine a light on the health of condo associations by digging into the data, assessing it and issuing gold, silver, bronze or "no rating" designations.
Condo associations that want to participate in the FCCA's voluntary rating system will submit three years of audited financials, their Structural Integrity Reserve Studies and other key documents. The FCCA will analyze cash on hand, operating expenses and reserves, and the association's governance. "Ultimately, we take all of that, and then we spit out a recommended rating," says FCCA COO Fraser Hudson.
Right now, human analysts are doing the work, but Hudson says the organization is building an AI engine to crunch the data and generate ratings. While the project is still in a pilot phase in the Tampa Bay area, Brandes believes it will scale quickly and go statewide within two to three years.
Brandes dubs the effort as a "Carfax for condos," offering a "streamlined way" to look at the overall health of a condo building — and he believes that's good for sellers and buyers: "If they have a condo rating there's some confidence that goes along with it, right?" Insurers will benefit too, Brandes says, because they'll be able to see which buildings are well run, and he predicts they'll one day provide discounts to highly rated condos.
There's already industry buy-in, with some of Florida's larger insurance companies helping to fund the not-for-profit organization's work. Down the road, the FCCA plans to offer a membership model, whereby condo associations would pay to participate and, beyond their rating, will have various tools — security assessments, for example — at their disposal.
Had such a system existed in Virginia 23 years ago, I might have seen the red flags before the flood waters cascaded into my building. I might have known whether our insurance coverage was a fortress or a facade — and perhaps my condo board would have felt the pressure to shore up its coverage before Mother Nature forced an unexpected audit.
Nothing, of course, will make condo living risk-free, but an independent grading system makes sense. Because if we've learned anything about condo living over the past several years, it's that shared walls require shared transparency — and that's a foundation stronger than concrete alone.
— Amy Keller, Executive Editor, akeller@floridatrend.comAmy Keller
Amy Keller is executive editor of Florida Trend and oversees the magazine’s editorial department. Keller’s writings have also appeared in Salon, The New Republic, Broadcasting & Cable magazine, REALTOR Magazine, the Atlanta Jewish Times, the Detroit Jewish News and other publications. Keller graduated from The Ohio State University with a degree in journalism.
