The condo industry's own trade organization now backs mandatory reserve studies. New York's bill did not advance.

The Community Associations Institute (CAI) is not a consumer organization. It represents the attorneys, managing agent firms, insurance brokers, engineers, and lender representatives who earn fees from the 74 million Americans living in community associations. When that organization publishes a report calling for mandatory reserve studies and funding in all 50 states, the argument that New York is "waiting for industry consensus" no longer holds.

What the CAI Condominium Safety Public Policy Report recommends.

CAI's Condominium Safety Public Policy Report (updated June 2026) calls on every state legislature to require that condominium and homeowner associations conduct regular reserve studies and maintain adequately funded reserve accounts. The report identifies reserve study and funding mandates as a first-order legislative priority for building safety, above disclosure reforms and above governance amendments.

A reserve study is an engineering analysis that estimates the remaining useful life and replacement cost of a building's major shared components: roofs, elevators, facades, mechanical systems, and structural elements. A funded reserve is the accumulated capital account meant to pay for those replacements when they come due. Without a mandate, boards in New York can hold a reserve study at zero and report a reserve fund balance of $0, and no state law requires them to do anything about it.

CAI's position is not new in principle. The organization has long published voluntary best-practice guidance on reserves. What changed in the June 2026 report is the explicit recommendation that state legislatures make the requirement mandatory and enforceable, not advisory. That shift matters in Albany because the standard objection to reserve study mandates has been that the industry itself opposes the burden. The industry has now removed that objection.

Eighteen states have reserve study or funding mandates. New York is not among them.

As of August 2026, at least 18 states have enacted either a reserve study requirement, a reserve funding requirement, or both. Florida's mandate, accelerated by the 2021 Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, requires that residential condominiums over three stories conduct a structural integrity reserve study and begin funding reserves. Hawaii has required reserve studies since at least 2004 under HRS § 514B-148. California mandates reserve disclosures and study updates every three years.

Six states require both the study and funded reserves: Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Nevada, and Oregon. Twelve require one or the other. New York requires neither, and the state has no provision that would allow the Attorney General or any state agency to compel a board to conduct a reserve study or maintain a funded reserve account absent express language in a building's own governing documents.

What A8945 and S7600 would have done.

Assembly bill A8945 and its Senate companion S7600 were introduced on January 7, 2026. A8945 was referred to the Assembly Housing committee and S7600 to the Senate Judiciary committee on introduction. The 2025-2026 legislative session adjourned on June 5, 2026, without either bill receiving a committee vote or a floor vote.

The bills would have required condominium and cooperative boards to conduct a reserve study at least once every five years, prepared by a licensed engineer, and to disclose the results to all unit owners within 60 days of completion. They would not have mandated a minimum funding level. That is a narrower requirement than Florida's post-Surfside statute and more modest than what CAI's June 2026 report now recommends for all states.

For comparison: Florida's Condominium Act, Section 718.112(2)(f), as amended by SB 4D in 2022 and SB 154 in 2023, requires structural integrity reserve studies for residential condominiums three stories or higher, mandates that boards begin fully funding reserves by December 31, 2024, and prohibits boards from voting to waive reserve contributions. The New York bills asked for an engineering study and a disclosure. Florida went further and prohibited the waiver mechanism that allows New York boards to hold the reserve fund at zero indefinitely.

A bill held in the Housing committee without a hearing or a recorded vote leaves no public record of who objected or on what grounds. There is no floor amendment, no committee report, and no official opposition statement. The bills carry over to the 2027-2028 session automatically under New York's two-year legislative cycle. But neither advanced in the current session, and the track record of reserve study legislation in Albany stretches back at least a decade without a bill reaching the floor in either chamber.

What an underfunded reserve means for owners who don't know to ask.

In a building without a reserve study, a buyer's attorney has no engineer's analysis to review. The offering plan may contain a projected reserve schedule, but post-offering updates are not required to reflect current replacement cost estimates or actual accumulated shortfalls. A board can vote to waive the annual reserve contribution entirely if the governing documents permit it, and many do.

When a major system fails in a building with no reserve fund, the board has two options: a special assessment or a building loan. Special assessments in New York condominiums are not capped by statute. A $40,000 per-unit assessment to replace an elevator bank is not a hypothetical outcome. It is the documented result in buildings where reserve funds were depleted or never accumulated, as affordability analyses from CNYC's 2024 and 2025 surveys have shown.

The buyer who paid $800,000 for a unit with $30,000 remaining in the building's reserve fund has no recourse against the board that allowed the balance to erode, absent evidence of fraud or a specific governing-document provision requiring minimum balances. The Attorney General's Real Estate Finance Bureau is authorized to review reserve schedules in initial condo offering plans, but the Martin Act and Real Property Law Article 9-B do not authorize the Bureau to require that actual reserve balances track the projections years later. That gap, authorization to review a plan without authority to enforce the outcome, is the same structural pattern the REFB faces across condo governance enforcement. (Companion reading: Why the AG can't help with condo governance.)

Owners can request the most recent audited financial statements and reserve fund balance under Business Corporation Law §727, which applies to co-ops, or under the building's own condominium governing documents, which typically require annual financial disclosure. The request should ask specifically for the current reserve fund balance, the most recent reserve study if one exists, and any board resolution to waive or reduce reserve contributions in the prior three years. If the board has never commissioned a reserve study, there is nothing in New York law that compels them to say so in writing. Absent a mandatory study requirement, a buyer or owner has no statutory right to an engineer's analysis of what the building's systems will cost to replace.

Bottom line.

The argument against mandatory reserve studies has never been that the engineering is too complex or that the requirement would be technically difficult to administer. The argument has been that the industry doesn't want the requirement. CAI's June 2026 report removes that objection. Eighteen states have already passed some version of the requirement, and the post-Surfside legislative wave has accelerated adoption across states that previously had nothing. New York's A8945 sits in the Assembly Housing committee and S7600 in the Senate Judiciary committee. The session ended June 5. The bills will return in January 2027. The question the next session will have to answer is who benefits from the gap between what 18 states already require and what Albany has declined to pass.

Companion resources: Ten condo reform bills that didn't advance · Florida HB 913 vs. New York's transparency gap · Why the AG can't help with condo governance · National reserve study comparison · NY condo reform legislative graveyard