Imagine buying a condo in Boca Raton or Aventura for $280,000. You have owned it for several years. You are current on your mortgage. You have paid your HOA fees every month without fail.
Then the letter arrives. Your condo association has voted a special assessment. Your share: $134,000. Due within 90 days.
That happened at the Cricket Club in North Miami. At Mediterranean Village in Aventura, assessments reached up to $400,000 per unit. These are not outliers in Florida’s condo market in 2026. They are increasingly common consequences of a collision between insurance costs, post-Surfside building requirements, and decades of deferred maintenance — all arriving at the same time.
How Florida Got Here
The Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside in 2021 killed 98 people. It also changed how Florida regulates condo buildings forever. Senate Bill 4-D, passed in 2022, requires condo associations to conduct structural inspections and maintain fully-funded reserves for future repairs. That sounds reasonable. The problem is that many Florida condo buildings had been operating for decades with no reserve funds at all — their boards had voted to waive reserve requirements year after year to keep monthly fees low…