Condo Board Minutes: What to Look For Before You Buy

Florida gives a unit owner access to association records within ten working days of a written request. The word doing the work in that sentence is owner: before closing, the person with that right is the seller, not you. Two years of minutes, read for four specific things, will tell you more about what the building costs to own than any listing will.

Updated 24 August 2026Published 19 August 2026

The four documents, and what each one is for

Declaration

What counts as a common expense, how it is allocated between units, and what a unit may and may not be used for.

Budget and financial statements

What the association spends in a year, and what it puts into reserves.

Milestone report and SIRS

What the building physically needs, and roughly when.

Board minutes

What the board decided, and — read across two years — what it was arguing about first.

Minutes are the only one of the four that carries a date-stamped sequence of decisions. That is their whole value. A budget tells you the number; minutes tell you when the board started talking about the number, which is usually months earlier.

What the seller owes you, and what they do not

Section 718.503(2) obliges a non-developer seller to hand over a specific list: the declaration, articles, bylaws, rules, the most recent annual financial statement, the current budget, the milestone inspection summary where one applies, and the most recent structural integrity reserve study or a statement that none exists.

Minutes are not on that list. They come under a different statute, s. 718.111(12), on a different timetable, and they have to be asked for separately. This is the single most common gap in a Miami condominium diligence file.

Your cancellation window on the s. 718.503(2) package is seven days, excluding Saturdays, Sundays and legal holidays, running from execution of the contract or from receipt of the documents, whichever is later. It is short, and it is the only leverage the statute gives you.

If the records are not produced, s. 718.111(12) creates a rebuttable presumption of wilful failure to comply, with minimum damages of $50 per calendar day for up to ten days, beginning on the eleventh working day after the request.

The four things to search for

1. The reserve vote

Search: reserve, waive, fully funded, pooling, pause.

For budgets adopted on or after 31 December 2024, an association required to have a structural integrity reserve study may no longer vote to provide no reserves for the items that study covers. If the minutes from 2023 and 2024 show a waiver discussion and the minutes since then show nothing, that silence is the thing to ask about — the obligation did not disappear, so either the fee absorbed it or something else did.

Pause is the word that matters most. An association that has completed its milestone inspection may pause or reduce reserve contributions for no more than two consecutive annual budgets in order to fund the repairs that inspection recommended, a provision running through 31 December 2028. It is legitimate, and it lets a building show a flat monthly fee while legally deferring reserve funding. A fee that looks low for the building's age is a question, not a bargain.

2. The milestone and SIRS discussion

Search: milestone, SIRS, engineer, phase two, concrete restoration, spalling, post-tension.

Buildings three storeys or more require a structural integrity reserve study. What you are reading for is sequence: when the inspection was commissioned, whether it moved to phase two, and what numbers the engineer actually put in front of the board. A phase two is not by itself alarming — it means the visual inspection found something warranting further investigation — but the board's reaction to it, over two or three meetings, tells you how the building handles money.

In Edgewater the timing question is narrow. Only three towers in 33137 are past the thirty-year threshold: Bay Park (1961), Biscayne 21 (1964) and The Charter Club (1973). Most of the bayfront stock dates from 2004 or later, which puts the earliest milestone inspections for those buildings around 2034.

3. The fourteen-day special assessment notice

Search: special assessment, levy, loan, line of credit, bank financing.

Board meeting notices generally require 48 hours' posting. A meeting at which a special assessment will be considered requires written notice of at least fourteen days beforehand, stating the estimated cost and description of the purpose.

That fourteen-day rule is what makes minutes useful: a special assessment appears twice in the record, first as the notice and then as the vote, and both are dated. If the notices show an assessment being discussed and the estoppel certificate comes back clean, that gap is a specific question with a specific answer, rather than a vague worry.

4. The insurance renewal

Search: insurance, renewal, premium, deductible, wind, carrier.

Insurance is usually the largest single year-over-year movement in a Miami condominium budget. When a fee rises and the minutes point at a carrier non-renewal or a wind deductible change, that is a market event rather than a building event — the distinction matters, because one of them is about this tower's concrete and the other is not.

What minutes will not tell you

Minutes record actions, not conversations. Well-drafted minutes are deliberately thin, which means absence is weak evidence: a subject missing from the minutes was not necessarily a subject missing from the room.

Triangulation is stronger than searching. Read the minutes against the adopted budget, the reserve schedule and the milestone report, and look for the places where they disagree. A reserve line that does not match what the study says is needed, an assessment that appears in the financials but not in the notices — contradictions between documents are more informative than anything one document says on its own.

Retention rules set the outer limit of what can be asked for. The primary official records are kept permanently; most other records must be maintained for seven years within the state; structural inspection reports are kept for fifteen years.

Questions people actually ask

Am I entitled to see the board minutes before I buy?

Not directly. The statutory right belongs to a unit owner, and before closing that is the seller. The fix is contractual: write in a provision requiring the seller to make the request and deliver the documents inside the statutory window.

How far back should I read?

Twenty-four months covers a full budget cycle and the one before it, which is what you need to see a trend rather than a snapshot. In a building past the thirty-year mark, go back further — to the first mention of the milestone inspection.

Are minutes part of the required seller documents?

No. Section 718.503(2) lists nine items and minutes are not among them. They are requested separately under s. 718.111(12), which runs on its own ten-working-day clock.

What does special assessment activity look like in the record?

Twice: the fourteen-day notice, then the vote. Both dated. That trail is the reason minutes are worth the request.

Can a board leave things out of the minutes?

Minutes record actions taken. Thin minutes are normal and are not evidence of concealment. Cross-referencing the minutes against the budget and the reserve study is a far more reliable way to find disagreement than hunting for a missing topic.

Does the owner portal substitute for a records request?

Not for a buyer. Associations above 25 units must post budgets, financial reports, contracts, inspection reports and reserve studies to a website or application — but behind an owners-only login. You cannot get in. The seller can.

Stefania Riverin, Licensed Real Estate Sales Associate, FL SL3620067, brokered by NB Elite Realty. General information about how the diligence works, not legal advice.