Florida's SB 4-D: What It Requires of a Co-op and What a Conversion Changes

Does the inspection law reach a co-op, or only condominiums?

Both, on the same terms. Florida's mandatory structural inspection statute is section 553.899, enacted as SB 4-D in 2022, amended in 2023 and amended again by a bill effective July 1, 2025. It covers buildings three habitable stories or more that are subject, in whole or in part, to condominium ownership under Chapter 718 or cooperative ownership under Chapter 719, and leaves out one to four-family dwellings of three or fewer stories. Your cooperative is named in the same clause as the condominium down the street, with no separate threshold and no carve-out for the cooperative form.

When is your first milestone inspection due, and what does it involve?

By December 31 of the year the building turns thirty, measured from its certificate of occupancy, and every ten years after that; a local enforcement agency can move that trigger to twenty-five years where the building sits close to salt water. Older buildings are already past it: anything that reached thirty before July 1, 2022 was due by December 31, 2024, and anything reaching thirty between then and December 31, 2024 is due by December 31, 2025. Phase One is a visual examination by a licensed architect or engineer, completed within 180 days of your receipt of the agency's written notice, and where it finds no substantial structural deterioration there is no Phase Two. Where it does, Phase Two follows at the inspector's direction, with a progress report back to the agency within 180 days.

What does the reserve study oblige your board to fund?

Section 719.106(1)(k) requires your cooperative association to complete a structural integrity reserve study at least every ten years for each building three habitable stories or higher, the same trigger condominiums face. A licensed engineer, a licensed architect or a certified reserve specialist has to perform or verify it, and it covers roof replacement, building painting and pavement resurfacing regardless of amount, plus any item carrying a deferred maintenance or replacement cost over $25,000. The inspection tells your board what is wrong. The study tells your board what it must now set aside, and that is the harder conversation.

Which chapter does a conversion run through?

Chapter 718, and not the cooperative chapter your building lives under. The machinery sits at Part VI of Chapter 718, sections 718.604 through 718.622, and Chapter 719 carries no conversion part of its own; its single touchpoint is section 719.104(12), which requires your board to notify the Division before taking any action to dissolve or merge the association. Both forms are regulated by the Department of Business and Professional Regulation's Division of Florida Condominiums, Timeshares, and Mobile Homes.

Is a co-op that converts itself treated as a developer?

Section 718.103(17)(b) excludes from the definition of developer a cooperative association that creates a condominium by converting an existing residential cooperative after control has passed to the unit owners, where the owners after the conversion are the same people who were owners before it and no units are offered to the public as part of the plan. Much of Part VI is written for a sponsor converting occupied rentals and selling them, and carries tenant notice periods and a right of first refusal to match. Whether that apparatus reaches a cooperative converting itself, where the people in occupancy are the shareholders who already hold their own units, is a question the statute does not answer and one for your counsel early. Those conditions are doing real work, and we would want your board to know where it stands against each before it assumes which obligations apply.

What does a conversion change about the bill itself?

It does not pay it, and we would tell a Florida board that hears otherwise to ask for the arithmetic. What a conversion changes is your financing position. A condominium owner holds real property with a deed and hundreds of financing options; a cooperative shareholder holds stock in a corporation, so mortgage opportunities are limited. One of the primary reasons cooperatives convert is to improve the financial health of the community, by improving the market value and the financing options of the units, so that owners become more willing to invest in the repairs the building needs. That is the honest version of why Florida boards are asking us about this now.

Your engineer produces the first number and we can tell your board what the building can do about it. A feasibility study of your cooperative costs your board and your members nothing: it reviews your financial condition including the underlying loan obligation, reads your governing documents for the approval a conversion here would need, and sets an independent appraisal of your units as condominiums beside them. Bring the inspection report and reserve study to it. A Florida board holding both numbers is choosing between real options; a board holding only the first is choosing between prices it has never seen.