Florida's new condo laws recognize the total price of living on the beach | Hacker News Reader

Florida's new condo laws recognize the total price of living on the beach

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31 pointsrntn11 comments

I can’t speak for FL, but in NYC I spent three years trying to get my condo board to fix basic structural issues. I couldn’t ever win the votes needed and ultimately sold the spot and moved. The level of negligence by owners (even ones who own investment properties) is wild to me.

And when the remaining owners are finally made to pay the true cost of upkeep by disaster or government they will complain bitterly about how the system failed them.

If anything I expect people owning investment properties to be the most negligent.

It’s really a bigger conversation about all condo units and boards. Sometimes the reserves are chronically underfunded and purchasers of resale older units don’t know the condition. Assessments and full transparency of previous board actions would be very helpful to have as required disclosure to future purchasers.

Honestly having that sort of info available pre-escrow would be even better. Why do I have to put an offer on a condo before reviewing their reserve study? Shouldn't the study affect my offer amount?

My condo building used to have underfunded reserves because of the incompetence of accounting of older condo boards. After some significantt raising of fees by a more competent condo board, appears to be fixed now...

Shouldn't brand new ones and old ones get more inspections (assuming bathtub curve applies to buildings), rather than uniform?

Not a bad idea, but the purpose of the legislation is to prevent Surfside from happening again. Newer buildings were built with different regulations and brand new buildings likely have fees commiserate with their age, as they were more recently inspected.

Brand new ones are periodically inspected by the local government throughout the inspection process, and then a final time before anyone is allowed to live there. Potential buyers can also commission their own independent inspection.

The bathtub curve does not apply to buildings. Aside from outliers like the Hard Rock Hotel in NOLA, new buildings very rarely fail catastrophically.

‘Greenfield’ buildings have dozens of inspections during construction. Buildings are designed to remain standing indefinitely with maintenance unlike a battery power tool or washing machine.

Older buildings will typically have more issues since the building codes have improved over time, a focus on inspecting older buildings would be the best strategy.

Depends how old... Highrises> 100 years old (like my condo building, which spent it's first 90-some years as an office building) were often way overbuilt.

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