Condos
What to read in the condo documents before your deposit goes hard
By the Wholesale Mortgage Lending editorial team · Last reviewed August 18, 2026
The short answer
Florida resale condo buyers are entitled to the association's core documents — declaration, bylaws, rules, the question-and-answer sheet, financial information, and where applicable inspection reports and reserve studies — with a statutory window to cancel after receiving them. The four highest-value reads are the budget, the reserve funding, a year of board minutes, and the use restrictions, because together they predict fees, assessments, and whether lenders will finance the building.
Your statutory review window
Florida does not leave condo document review to negotiation. Section 718.503 of the Condominium Act requires a resale seller to furnish the buyer, at the seller's expense, the declaration of condominium, articles of incorporation, bylaws and rules, the association's question-and-answer sheet, and financial information — and the current version of the statute reaches structural documents such as inspection reports and reserve studies where they exist.
The same section gives a resale buyer a cancellation right: the contract is voidable by the buyer for a statutory period after signing and receiving the documents — measured in days and excluding weekends and legal holidays under the statute's terms — and that right cannot be waived, though it ends at closing. Developer sales of new units have their own, longer disclosure regime.
Treat the window as a working deadline, not a formality. It exists so that you can read before you are bound. What follows is where the signal actually lives — and because document review shades quickly into legal interpretation, have a Florida real estate attorney on call for anything ambiguous. This is education, not legal advice.
The budget: what the building costs to be honest about
Start with the current adopted budget and, if you can get it, the prior year's actuals. You are reading for three things: whether insurance is fully funded at real market premiums, whether maintenance lines look like a building being cared for or starved, and how much of total income flows to reserves rather than being consumed by operations.
Compare the dues to comparable buildings with open eyes. Suspiciously low dues in an older building are rarely a bargain; they usually mean underinsurance, underfunded reserves, or deferred maintenance — each of which converts into special assessments later. Lenders read the same budget during project review, so a budget that worries you will likely worry an underwriter.
Then look at delinquencies. A meaningful share of owners not paying their assessments starves the budget and is itself a project-eligibility problem under agency guidelines. The association's financial statements or the questionnaire will show it.
Reserves and the structural paper trail
For buildings three habitable stories and taller, Florida's structural integrity reserve study requirement under section 718.112 converts the building's structural future into a funding schedule, and restricts the old practice of waiving those reserves. Read the most recent study alongside the budget: are the components' remaining lives realistic, and is the budget actually funding the schedule?
Ask for the milestone inspection report where the building's age and height make one due. A clean report is comfort; an open finding is a negotiation and a financing question at once. A building that completed repairs after a finding — with the paper to prove it — is often the strongest posture of all.
If the reserve study is old, missing, or the budget quietly ignores it, price that in. You are not just predicting assessments; you are predicting whether agency lenders will finance resale buyers when you eventually sell.
Minutes: where the truth arrives early
Board and membership meeting minutes are the association's diary, and they run ahead of the budget by a year or more. Request the last twelve months and read them for recurring characters: the elevator that keeps failing, the insurance renewal the board is dreading, the engineer's presentation about the garage, the assessment that was discussed and tabled.
Minutes also reveal governance. A board that meets regularly, documents decisions, and communicates plainly is an asset that never appears on a balance sheet. A board at war with itself, or with its property manager, produces the kind of chaos that eventually shows up in deferred repairs and litigation — both of which are financing problems.
Nothing in the minutes is automatically disqualifying. The point is sequencing: problems discussed in minutes become assessments and questionnaire answers later. Reading them during your review window means you negotiate with tomorrow's information at today's prices.
Rules and restrictions: can you use the unit the way you plan to?
The declaration, bylaws, and rules control leasing, pets, renovations, parking, and occupancy. If your plan involves renting the unit — seasonally, annually, or ever — read the leasing provisions first: minimum lease terms, approval requirements, caps on the number of rented units, and waiting periods for new owners all appear routinely in Florida documents.
Restrictions cut both ways for financing and value. Heavy short-term rental activity can push a building toward condotel territory that agency lenders avoid, while strict leasing limits protect owner-occupancy ratios but constrain your exit options. Neither is wrong; they are different buildings, and your financing should match the one you are actually buying.
Finally, connect what you read to your loan early. Wholesale Mortgage Lending arranges condo financing through wholesale lenders, and the documents you receive under the disclosure statute answer much of what a lender's project review will ask. Sharing them with your broker during the review window — not after — is how condo contracts keep their dates.
Questions people ask
How long do I have to review condo documents in Florida?
For resale units, section 718.503 makes the contract voidable by the buyer for a statutory number of days — excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays — after signing and receiving the required documents, with the right ending at closing. Developer sales carry a longer statutory period. Check the statute's current text and confirm the mechanics with a Florida real estate attorney.
Which documents am I entitled to receive as a resale buyer?
The statute's list includes the declaration, articles of incorporation, bylaws and rules, the association's question-and-answer sheet, and financial information, with the current statute also reaching documents like inspection reports and structural integrity reserve studies where applicable. You can separately ask the seller or association for board minutes and the budget detail, which are association records.
What is the single biggest red flag in a condo document package?
A mismatch between the building's age and its money: an older building with low dues, thin reserves, no recent reserve study, and minutes full of deferred repair discussions. Any one of those items alone is a question; the pattern together usually means a special assessment is coming and agency financing may tighten.
Do lenders read the same documents I receive?
Substantially, yes. The project review draws on the budget, insurance, reserve information, and association answers to the condo questionnaire, which overlap heavily with your disclosure package. A problem you spot during your review window is one an underwriter is likely to spot later — which is exactly why the window is valuable.
Sources
This guide is written against the primary sources below, which is where the current figures live when a figure has deliberately not been quoted here.
Put this to work on your own numbers
Reading is the easy half. Run your own scenario through the planner, or ask a licensed mortgage professional the question this page could not answer for your exact situation.