Florida’s Condo Crisis Isn’t Concrete. It’s Information.

By Jeff Brandes

Picture a 60-year-old widow. Her children are grown. The house that once felt full now feels too large and too quiet. She wants something simpler, safer, more manageable. So, she does what thousands of Floridians do every month in the largest condominium housing market in the United States. She starts touring condos.

She walks into a spotless lobby. The landscaping is immaculate. A board member smiles and says, “We’re in great shape.”

But she cannot see the structural reports. She cannot see the reserve studies. She cannot see whether maintenance has been deferred for years or whether special assessments are looming. She cannot see the governance decisions that will shape her financial future.

And here is the uncomfortable truth: in Florida, almost no one can.

Not buyers. Not lenders. Not insurers. Not even many of the associations themselves.

Florida has more than 27,000 condominium associations and over 1.5 million condo units, yet there is no consistent, reliable way to understand a building’s true financial or structural health. Condo risk in Florida is not hidden. It is simply disorganized.

This is the “aha” moment. Florida is trying to manage the most complex housing ecosystem in America with the informational equivalent of a flashlight and a stack of PDFs. Every building reports differently. Every reserve study is formatted differently. Every risk factor is buried somewhere new. Boards describe their condition in words, not data. Buyers are asked to trust, not verify.

And then Surfside happened.

Surfside was not just a structural failure. It was an information failure. Years of warning signs accumulated quietly behind walls that appeared perfectly ordinary. The tragedy revealed something profound. Buildings do not fail all at once. They fail slowly and invisibly, until suddenly they do not hold.

The danger is not always the concrete. Sometimes the danger is what we do not know.

That realization led to the creation of the Florida Communities Certification Association.

The FCCA exists for one reason: currently we cannot manage what we cannot see.

The FCCA is Florida’s first independent, third-party rating and certification system for condominium associations. It is not a mandate. It is not a regulatory hammer. It is a voluntary, market-driven tool that associations can choose to earn, much like a credit rating or a safety certification.

The simplest way to think about it is this: the FCCA is Florida’s first true Carfax for condo associations. It provides a standardized, objective assessment of what matters most: financial stability, structural readiness, governance quality, reserve adequacy, insurance posture, and real risk exposure.

Here is a truth this room understands better than most: today, insurers often know more about a building’s risk than the association that governs it.

That is because the entire system operates with massive information asymmetry. And information asymmetry is the single biggest driver of insurance volatility.

When data is incomplete, pricing is wrong. When pricing is wrong, incentives fail. When incentives fail, maintenance is deferred, reserves shrink, and risk compounds. Better information leads to better pricing. Better pricing creates better incentives. Better incentives produce safer, more stable communities.

For owners, this means fewer surprise assessments, fewer emergency repairs, and fewer life savings wiped out by problems that were predictable but invisible.

This is not theoretical. The FCCA already has multiple pilot projects underway, beginning in the Tampa Bay region, where associations volunteered to lead. These pilots help refine the scoring system, standardize data inputs, and build a framework that can scale statewide.

Now, a word to the commercial insurance leaders watching this closely.

You live with the consequences of this broken information system every day. You underwrite risks you cannot inspect. You price without standardized data. You absorb losses that arrive suddenly and without warning.

The FCCA gives the insurance market something it has never had in Florida’s condo space: a shared language of risk.

This is why Demotech and Lozano Insurance Adjusters have stepped forward as founding supporters. They understand that transparency prevents crises and that stability follows clarity.

Florida stands at a crossroad. We can continue reacting to failures after they happen, or we can build systems that surface risk early, consistently, and honestly.

Our 60-year-old widow deserves to know what she is buying, not just what she is being shown. Condo boards deserve tools that help them govern responsibly. Insurers deserve data that reflects reality. And communities deserve stability instead of surprise.

Florida will either build a future defined by transparency or one defined by tragedy. The FCCA is our chance to choose transparency. Choosing transparency means choosing safety, stability, and trust for every Floridian who calls a condominium home.

That choice should not wait for the next disaster.

Jeff Brandes is a former Florida state senator and the founder and president of the Florida Policy Project, a nonpartisan research organization focused on insurance, housing, transportation, and public safety policy. He is also the chairman of the Florida Communities Certification Association, which is working to improve transparency, stability, and trust in Florida’s condominium market, and is chairman of Patriot Select and Lozano Insurance Adjusters.