There are, at last count, 1,438 condominium buildings in Florida where a buyer cannot get a conforming mortgage. The list is Fannie Mae's — unpublished, tallied by the lawyers and reporters who have obtained copies. Nationally it runs past five thousand projects; Florida carries more of them than any other state, and nearly half of Florida's sit in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. The count has more than doubled in South Florida in two years. A unit in a building on the list sells for cash or not at all. A unit in the building next door sells normally. Same street, same vintage, same salt air. The difference is in the file.
What the Law Did
The list is one instrument reading a change in Florida law. On June 24, 2021, Champlain Towers South collapsed in Surfside and ninety-eight people died. Eleven months later the legislature passed Senate Bill 4-D (SB 4-D). Condominium buildings three stories and higher now undergo a milestone structural inspection by a licensed architect or engineer at thirty years of age, with the findings filed and disclosed (Fla. Stat. §553.899). Associations must commission a structural integrity reserve study — an engineering assessment of the roof, the load-bearing walls, the waterproofing, the plumbing, the electrical — and, for budgets adopted on or after December 31, 2024, fund the reserves it prescribes (Fla. Stat. §718.112). The practice of waiving structural reserves by owner vote, standard for decades, ended.
Senate Bill 154 (SB 154) refined the scope in 2023. House Bill 913 (HB 913), signed in June 2025, added flexibility — extended study deadlines, loans and lines of credit as funding methods — and left the architecture standing. The 2026 session adjourned with the framework intact.
For fifty years, a Florida condominium's structural condition and reserve position were private facts — known, when they were known at all, to the board that voted the budget. The statute did not make any building weaker or stronger. It made them legible.
What the Market Did Next
By spring 2025, nearly 80,000 Florida condo units were listed for sale — up 35 percent in a year — more than ten months of supply, against about five and a half for single-family homes. Sales ran more than 25 percent below their pre-pandemic pace. Florida condo prices fell 4.5 percent over the year to May 2025, while Florida single-family homes fell 2 percent and condos nationally rose 2 percent. By October, the twelve-month decline reached 9.9 percent by one national measure — the steepest since 2009.
Insurance hardened over the same period — Florida condo premiums run roughly double the national average — and mortgage rates weighed on every market in the country. Neither explains the gap between a Florida condo and the single-family house across the street, or between a Florida condo and a condo in Arizona.
The gap sits where the law reaches. About 60 percent of Florida's 1.5 million condo units are in buildings more than thirty years old — the milestone-inspection population. In Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, roughly 85 percent of listed condo inventory is that old. And the financing system reads the file directly: the ineligible list names structural deficiencies and inadequate reserves among its leading causes, and a building that cannot produce a clean file loses conforming financing — every buyer who needs a standard mortgage.
The Mechanism
Markets do not price what they cannot read. American credit has relearned this in the same order every time — records first, then grades, then clearing. Florida's condo market has just entered the records stage.
A deferred repair is a debt. Florida spent fifty years letting it stay off the books. The deficits in those buildings existed in 2019; the engineering reports and the funded reserve schedules did not. The state did not create the losses now being marked. It created the paperwork that makes them visible — and within a single market cycle, financeable buildings began separating from unfinanceable ones.
The Other File Cabinets
Most states still price this variable blind. A thirty-year-old tower in Georgia, Texas, or Arizona sells today with no milestone inspection on file, no engineering study behind its reserve line, and no funded-reserve requirement in law. A few states have started down the same road — New Jersey now requires structural inspections; Maryland ties reserve funding to a study. Washington, which built one of the strictest construction-phase inspection regimes in the country and never scheduled a checkup after it, is examined in Inspected at Birth. None has Florida's full file, and none has Florida's price history. A standing state-by-state tracker of structural-integrity statutes is maintained here.
The deferral arithmetic is the same everywhere. The file is not.
Florida is not the anomaly. Florida is the state where the file exists.
Sources
- Official statutory timeline (SB 4-D, SB 154, HB 1021, HB 913): Florida DBPR, Condominium Information & Resources
- Fla. Stat. §553.899 (milestone inspections)
- Fla. Stat. §718.112 (structural integrity reserve study; reserve funding)
- HB 913 / Chapter 2025-175 analysis: Johnson Pope
- Market data (prices, sales, inventory, building-age distribution, insurance): TD Economics, "Peeling Back the Layers to the Florida Condo Market Weakness," May 29, 2025
- Twelve-month price decline (9.9 percent, steepest since 2009): Newsweek, Nov. 21, 2025 (Reventure; Florida Realtors data)
- Year-end 2025 statewide condo median (−4.7 percent): Florida Realtors, Jan. 2026
- Fannie Mae ineligible-project list (counts, growth, causes, financing consequences): Mortgage Professional America, Apr. 7, 2025; Kelley, Grant & Tanis, P.A. (5,175 national / 1,438 Florida / 696 tri-county, as of Mar. 2025)
Scott Vuilleumier · Founder of CommunityPay, Inc.
Data science, investment banking, and financial systems engineering and ledger design.