Florida Doesn't Know If Its Post-Surfside Condo Law Works

Florida's post-Surfside safety law requires every local government responsible for a condominium or cooperative building to send Tallahassee an annual count: how many buildings needed a milestone inspection, how many got one, and which ones inspectors found unsafe.▸ A July 2026 review by OPPAGA⧉ -- the Florida Legislature's own nonpartisan research and accountability office -- found that more than a third of the state's 389 local building jurisdictions, 139 of them, filed nothing for 2025, the second year the reporting requirement was in effect. Where officials did report, the count included 54 buildings across two years that milestone inspections found unsafe or uninhabitable -- and OPPAGA's own summary says most were never vacated.

Florida Statute 553.899⧉, passed as Senate Bill 4-D, requires condominium and cooperative buildings three or more stories tall to undergo a "milestone inspection" -- a licensed architect or engineer's structural check -- by the time a building turns 30, or 25 in coastal jurisdictions the local building department designates.▸ The bill passed with unanimous support and became law in less than a week⧉, signed May 26, 2022, after being introduced in a special legislative session called for unrelated business -- eleven months after Champlain Towers South partially collapsed in Surfside⧉ on June 24, 2021, in a disaster that killed 98 people.

The same statute requires local building officials to report a specific data set to the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) every December 31: inspection counts, extensions granted, repair-permit values, and a list of any building deemed unsafe or uninhabitable -- which DBPR must then pass on to OPPAGA.▸ OPPAGA counted 389 jurisdictions statewide⧉ responsible for that report. DBPR received 2024 data from 277 of them, 71%; for 2025, the number fell to 250, or 64% -- meaning 139 jurisdictions, more than a third of the state, submitted nothing on the second year of a mandate meant to prevent another Surfside.

Where jurisdictions did report, inspectors flagged 30 buildings as unsafe or uninhabitable in 2024 and 24 more in 2025⧉ -- 54 total, spread across eight counties.▸ OPPAGA's own summary states plainly that "building officials reported that most buildings determined unsafe or uninhabitable were not vacated." The office asked nine local officials about the 2024 buildings; everyone who answered confirmed only 5 of the 30 had actually been emptied. For 2025, just three of four officials OPPAGA contacted responded at all, covering five buildings -- and reported that none of those five had been vacated.

Miami-Dade County accounted for 23 of the 24 buildings flagged in 2025, and the City of Aventura alone reported 19⧉ condominium and cooperative buildings determined unsafe or uninhabitable -- but never told OPPAGA whether any residents were moved out.▸ Orange County reported the remaining building. In 2024, the largest counts were in Osceola County (10 buildings) and Pinellas County (8, one confirmed vacated).

The inspections that did happen turned up real structural bills.▸ Local officials logged 903 repair-permit applications⧉ tied to phase-two milestone findings over the two years, ranging from under $1,000 to $30 million for a single building. The average permit value rose from $337,229 in 2024 (671 permits) to $496,236 in 2025 (232 permits) -- multiplying those averages by their permit counts puts the two years' identified repair costs at roughly $341.4 million, an estimate this outlet computed from OPPAGA's own reported figures, not a total OPPAGA states directly.

Local officials also granted 1,587 extensions on initial inspection deadlines across the two years -- 818 in 2024, 769 in 2025, nearly all of them (90% and 98%, respectively) in coastal jurisdictions where the volume of aging towers is highest.▸ OPPAGA's building-official interviews cite "difficulty finding engineers to complete inspections and delays in completing inspections due to engineer workloads" as a recurring reason -- the same licensed-professional bottleneck the entire law depends on to certify buildings safe in the first place.

DBPR's own written response to OPPAGA⧉, filed June 30, 2026, does not dispute the gap: the department says it is "developing additional guidance, including virtual training" for the 2026 reporting cycle, and updating its licensing forms so it can verify which building code administrators actually serve as a jurisdiction's official milestone-inspection reporter -- a fix for the exact loophole OPPAGA found had let unauthorized submissions through.▸ No date is attached to either fix. The statute's next reporting deadline, December 31, 2026, is the first real test of whether it worked.