Florida Just Released Its First Condo Safety Scorecard. Here's What It Means If You're Buying in Broward

Five years after the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside killed 98 people, Florida's legislative watchdog office released its first real report card on how the state's condo inspection law is actually working. The findings came out on August 1, and they are worth slowing down for if you own, or are shopping for, a condo anywhere in Broward County.

The report comes from OPPAGA, the Florida Legislature's Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability. Across 2024 and 2025, building officials statewide reported that 2,535 condo and co-op buildings needed a deeper Phase 2 structural inspection after an initial visual check turned up deterioration. Fifty-four of those buildings were declared unsafe or uninhabitable. Only five were evacuated in 2024. None were evacuated in 2025.

That gap, between how many buildings got labeled unsafe and how few were actually cleared out, is the detail that stopped me. It doesn't necessarily mean nothing is being done. Often it means repairs are underway while people stay put, or a building is still working through the process. But "unsafe" on paper and "evacuated" in practice are clearly two different things right now, and that distinction matters if you own a unit in one of these buildings.

Here is where it gets local. Broward's numbers in this report are incomplete. OPPAGA said it received 2025 inspection data from only 64 percent of local jurisdictions statewide, and in Broward specifically, 23 percent of building officials never reported their numbers at all. Whatever total shows up for Broward in this report, the real count is very likely higher. That's not a knock on our building departments, reporting into a new state system is its own administrative lift, but it does mean buyers shouldn't treat this report as the complete picture for our county.

Quick refresher on the rule itself, since I get asked about this constantly. Condo and co-op buildings three stories or taller have to pass a milestone inspection once they hit a certain age: 25 years if the building sits within three miles of the coast, 30 years everywhere else, then again every 10 years after that. A Phase 1 visual check comes first. If that finds real deterioration, a Phase 2 engineering inspection follows, and buildings now have to keep their structural reserves fully funded, no more voting to waive them. For a lot of Broward buildings, the milestone deadline lands December 31, 2026. Miss it, and a building can face $500-a-day fines, a code referral, or worse.

In 23 years of doing this, I've seen the same mistake happen more than once. A buyer falls for a condo, the price looks great for the location, and nobody on the buying side asks for the milestone inspection report or the reserve study before closing. Then the special assessment notice shows up months later, sometimes $30,000, sometimes well over $100,000, and there's no undoing the purchase. Florida law gives buyers real leverage here: you can request the association's inspection records, budget, and reserve documentation before you're locked in. The exact cancellation rights depend on your contract and timeline, so it's worth having an attorney review them, but the leverage itself is real.

If you're looking at a condo built before 2000 anywhere in Broward, do that homework before you write the offer, not after. I'm happy to walk you through exactly which documents to request and what the answers should look like. It takes one phone call, and it can save you from a bill nobody warned you about.

Roger Averbuj, Broker | Prestige Heritage Realty | (954) 663-8461

Source: Newsweek, "Florida Condo Crisis Deepens as 2,500 Buildings Show Signs of Deterioration," Aug 1, 2026