Florida regulates cooperatives and condominiums as two separate forms.

The condominium statute came in 1963 and the cooperative statute in 1976.

Florida enabled condominium ownership by statute in 1963, in a chapter first numbered 711. The form spread fast, and builders across the state put up roughly 235,000 units in 1972 and about 420,000 the year after. That pace is what brought the disclosure requirements, rescission periods and deposit escrow rules that still shape a Florida closing. Before any of it, the resort counties of the south already held cooperative apartments alongside the low rise rentals of the 1950s.

In 1976 the Legislature recodified the condominium law as chapter 718 and, in the same session law, created chapter 719 for cooperatives. A dedicated path for converting an existing building to condominium form followed in 1980, and it sits in part six of chapter 718. Chapter 719 carries no equivalent conversion part of its own, so a cooperative converting here uses the statute a rental building would use.

The large retirement developments most associated with that era were built as condominiums. Century Village in West Palm Beach, begun in 1968, was developed as a condominium of 7,854 units and sold out by 1974, and a second opened in Boca Raton in 1979 with 5,712 units. Those developments set the pattern for the high rise stock that replaced the low rise apartments and cooperatives preceding them.

Florida's cooperative stock is concentrated away from Miami-Dade.

Among Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Pinellas, Miami-Dade holds the largest condominium stock and the smallest cooperative one, at 67 associations and 2,404 units. Broward carries 280 cooperative associations holding 11,713 units, and Palm Beach carries 86 associations holding 4,126 units. Pinellas carries fewer cooperative associations than Broward, at 91, and more cooperative units, at 14,987, so its cooperatives run larger on average.

Fannie Mae buys cooperative share loans only in the states for which it has published its own documentation requirements. It also requires at least half of the corporation's shares to be held by owners living in their own units before the project is eligible at all. Freddie Mac's appraisal rules tell an appraiser pricing a cooperative unit to adjust condominium comparables for the market's preference for condominium ownership where one exists.

Since 2022, Florida law has required cooperatives and condominiums of three habitable stories or higher to complete a milestone structural inspection and a structural integrity reserve study. Nothing in that law treats a cooperative differently from a condominium of the same height and age. Average individual unit owner insurance premiums including wind stood at $2,848 in Miami-Dade and $1,381 in Pinellas as of September 30, 2025. Those are policies an individual owner buys, and they are separate from the association's own master policy.

Conversion runs through chapter 718 and the state's division of condominiums.

A Florida cooperative converting to condominium form follows the conversion part of chapter 718, which is the route a rental building takes as well. The Division of Florida Condominiums, Timeshares and Mobile Homes, inside the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, is the regulator for both forms. Chapter 719 asks a cooperative to notify that division, and the conversion machinery itself sits elsewhere. What an owner vote must carry is set by your association's documents and by Florida's statutes, which your counsel reads together. The Florida law page sets out what SB 4-D requires of a cooperative, and the tax page covers the tax questions.

Florida buildings in Hutton's case studies.

Among the cooperatives Hutton has converted are buildings in Florida. They are shown, with the years they span, in the case studies filtered to Florida.