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Miami Beach · Condominium disputes
Help for Miami Beach condo owners in disputes with their association over damage, repairs and assessments.
Most people in Miami Beach live in condo and apartment buildings, and many of those buildings are decades old. When the association will not fix a leak, denies responsibility for damage to your unit or hands out a large special assessment, Tomas Robirosa is a condo attorney Miami Beach owners can call, in English or Spanish.
Miami Beach's Art Deco district alone holds hundreds of buildings from 1923 to 1943, and Collins Avenue and North Beach have large groups of mid-century buildings. Miami-Dade County requires buildings, other than single-family homes and duplexes, to be recertified 30 years after their original certificate of occupancy and every 10 years after that, with structural and electrical reports.
State law adds milestone inspections for condo buildings three habitable stories or taller, generally by the end of the year the building turns 30 and every 10 years after. A first-phase inspection that finds substantial structural deterioration leads to a more detailed second phase. Those reports often lead to major repairs, and the repairs often lead to assessments owners did not expect.
The Florida Condominium Act, Chapter 718, sets a starting point. The association's property insurance generally covers the building as originally installed. The unit owner generally insures items inside the unit that serve only that unit, such as floor, wall and ceiling coverings, cabinets, countertops, appliances and water heaters. Repairs after an insured event are generally a common expense, and owners can generally be charged for uninsured damage caused by their own negligence or that of their tenants or guests. After a casualty, the association generally handles reconstruction.
These rules can be changed by a vote of the owners and by the declaration, so the documents for your building matter as much as the statute.
Some disputes, such as certain election and board-authority issues, generally must go to nonbinding arbitration or mediation before a lawsuit. Others, including a claim for damage to your unit from the association's failure to maintain common elements, are generally not part of that process. Lawsuits in Miami-Dade generally go to the Eleventh Judicial Circuit.
Call early, before you pay an assessment under protest or sign anything from the association or an insurer. Bring the declaration, bylaws, any board letters and photos of the damage. Read more about condominium disputes in Florida, see our Miami Beach page, or call (305) 600-0529.
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Your Attorney
Tomas Robirosa is the founding attorney of Robirosa Accident & Injury Law. He built his practice around careful preparation and personal attention: when you hire the firm, you talk to your lawyer, in English or Spanish, and you always know where your case stands.
He graduated cum laude from Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad College of Law, is a Florida Supreme Court Certified Circuit Civil Mediator, and is admitted to practice in Florida state courts and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
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