National Comparison May 16, 2026

Florida fixed condo transparency after Surfside. New York hasn't.

Ninety-eight people died at Champlain Towers South in 2021. Four years later, Florida passed HB 913 — a state-hosted cloud database every condo association must register and file into. New York has nothing equivalent. The same gaps that triggered Florida's reform exist here, today, untouched.

In July 2025, Florida's Department of Business and Professional Regulation switched on a searchable public database. Every condominium association in the state must publish its board roster, bylaws, budget, and Structural Integrity Reserve Study to it. That database exists because 98 people died in a building whose reserve fund was empty, whose engineer's warnings were ignored, and whose unit owners had no way to know either fact. New York's condo and co-op buildings operate under the exact regulatory regime Florida just abandoned.

What Florida did.

Florida House Bill 913, signed in July 2025, is the most ambitious condo governance reform any U.S. state has enacted in a decade. It mandates five things: a public cloud database every association must register with; a Structural Integrity Reserve Study (SIRS) for buildings three stories and up that cannot be waived for major structural components; a statutory fee cap on the estoppel certificate buyers need at closing; mandatory Surfside-related continuing education for Community Association Managers; and administrative penalties for associations that fail to file. The database is live at condos.myfloridalicense.com and the bill text is at flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2025/913.

Before HB 913, Florida's regime was structurally similar to New York's: the state licensed managers (a meaningful difference, since Florida has had CAM licensure since 1987) but did not require associations themselves to publish anything public. The Surfside report found that the building's reserves had been chronically underfunded, that owners had not been told the structural condition was urgent, and that the board's decision-making lacked the documentation trail required to enforce accountability. The state's response was to make that documentation public, by statute, for every building.

What New York has not done.

Every structural element Florida just put in place is absent in New York. There is no statewide registry of condo or co-op associations. There is no mandatory reserve fund floor. There is no required reserve study. There is no statutory disclosure of board composition or budget to the public. Managing agents need no license. There is no NY equivalent of Florida's CAM credential, no exam, no continuing education, no public disciplinary record. The Attorney General's Real Estate Finance Bureau, the closest thing to a state regulator, has approximately five lawyers and receives hundreds of complaints a year.

The Albany legislative record over the last decade is the proof. Ten reform bills have moved through committee since 2017: managing-agent licensure, reserve fund floors, special-assessment vote rights, financial disclosure mandates, engineer conflict-of-interest bans, sponsor liability extensions. None enacted. Almost none received a floor vote. The full list lives in our legislative graveyard. The pattern is consistent: a bill enters committee, sits for a session, and quietly dies. No vote, no record, no accountability.

The shadow DBPR for New York.

Until New York enacts its own equivalent of HB 913, this site fills the gap voluntarily. Every page in our building catalog, every managing-agent profile, every regulatory-gap entry is data that Florida now publishes by statute. We do it because the state will not. We assemble it from NYC Open Data, ACRIS, NYSCEF, PLUTO, and the Attorney General's offering-plan filings. Every source is public, every claim is one URL from its primary record, and every page can be reproduced from scratch with no API keys.

We frame this as the shadow DBPR for New York. The state should not need 98 dead constituents to build what Florida built. The data exists. The frameworks exist. The bills have been introduced. What is missing is the political will to enact what credible analysis has been recommending for a decade.

What still needs to be different.

Even Florida's reform is incomplete. The bill assumes accurate self-reporting; the database is only as good as the filings associations submit. Enforcement against non-filing requires DBPR to staff an investigation team. The estoppel fee cap addresses the closing friction but not the underlying disclosure deficit at sale. And the CAM continuing-education requirement, while welcome, does not solve the structural problem that the CAM works for the board, not the unit owners.

What New York could do better than Florida: license managing agents through a real disciplinary body with public complaint records (Nevada's Common-Interest Communities Ombudsman is the model). Require pre-purchase disclosure of audited financials and reserve studies directly to buyer's counsel (California's Davis-Stirling Act Civ. Code § 5550 is the model). Ban Local Law 11 engineers from collecting referral fees from the contractors performing the work they specified. Each of these would close a documented gap that has cost NYC unit owners millions in opaque assessments and unaddressed safety findings.

What you can do.

Three concrete steps. First, write your state legislator. The letter-to-rep generator is pre-filled with the licensure ask (Senate Bill S.71 by Senator Kavanagh + Assembly companion A.4954). It takes ninety seconds. Second, if your building has been hit with an opaque assessment or undisclosed conflict, the AG complaint generator produces a structured filing to the Real Estate Finance Bureau. Third, share this page with your board, your council member, and your state senator. Pattern documentation only converts to policy change when enough people see it.

Florida required 98 deaths to act. New York should not require one.