Who pays when water hits a Florida condo

A leak in a single family house is one conversation. The same leak in a condominium is three: yours, your association's, and usually the owner above or beside you. Hialeah and the towns around it are dense multi-family housing, so this is the ordinary case here rather than the unusual one.

The good news is that the split is not a mystery. Part of it is written into Florida's Condominium Act as a list, and the list is short enough to read while you wait for somebody to call you back.

Who is responsible for water damage in a Florida condo?

Start with the association's property insurance, because the statute defines it by what it must leave out.

Every policy protecting the condominium has to provide primary coverage for the condominium property as originally installed, or its replacement in like kind and quality. Then section 718.111(11)(f) carves out an exception, and the exception is the part that matters to you:

The coverage must exclude all personal property within the unit or limited common elements, and floor, wall, and ceiling coverings, electrical fixtures, appliances, water heaters, water filters, built-in cabinets and countertops, and window treatments, including curtains, drapes, blinds, hardware, and similar window treatment components, or replacements of any of the foregoing which are located within the boundaries of the unit and serve only such unit. Such property and any insurance thereupon is the responsibility of the unit owner.

Read the list against a room that has just taken water. The tile or the wood on the floor, the paint and the drywall surface on the wall, the ceiling finish, the kitchen cabinets, the countertop, the water heater, the blinds. Almost everything water ruins first is named there, and named as yours.

What stays with the association is the structure behind those surfaces and the common elements. In practice that is the slab, the structural walls, the pipes and conduits that serve more than one unit, the roof, and the corridors.

What the association's policy is required to exclude

Two consequences follow from that list, and both surprise people.

The first is that the boundary is not the same as the damage. Water can escape from a common element, which is the association's, and destroy a floor covering, which is yours. Nothing about the source moves the finish onto the association's policy. The two questions are separate and they are answered separately.

The second is that the statute only settles the insurance question. Where an insurable event has happened, section 718.111(11)(j) requires the association to reconstruct, repair or replace what it had to insure, as a common expense. Where no insurable event has happened, the same paragraph hands the question back to your building's own paperwork:

In the absence of an insurable event, the association or the unit owners shall be responsible for the reconstruction, repair, or replacement as determined by the maintenance provisions of the declaration or bylaws.

So a sudden pipe failure and a slow drip that nobody claimed can land in completely different places, with the same water and the same ruined ceiling.

There is one more exception worth knowing before you read anything else. An owner picks up the cost of repairing parts of the condominium property that insurance did not pay for, where the damage was caused by that owner's intentional conduct, by negligence, or by a failure to comply with the declaration or the association's rules. That applies to the owner's family, occupants, tenants, guests and invitees too.

What should I do if I get water damage from the condo above me in Florida?

This is the case that brings most people to a page like this one, and the useful answer is about sequence rather than about blame.

The water is coming through a shared assembly. That means at least two units and the association all have an interest in what the ceiling looked like before anybody touched it, and only one of them is standing in the room.

Do these in this order.

Stop the water if you can reach the source safely, and if you cannot, ask the association to shut the riser. Photograph the ceiling, the walls and the floor before you move anything, with something in frame for scale. Photograph the contents where they are sitting. Then tell the association in writing, and tell your own insurer, on the same day.

Only then start pulling material out.

Report it before you dry it

The reason for that order is not caution. It is a specific rule with a specific consequence.

The same paragraph of the Act removes the association's obligation to pay as a common expense where the loss was known to the owner and reported too late. Its own words are that the association is not obligated to pay for reconstruction or repairs where:

the property losses were known or should have been known to a unit owner and were not reported to the association until after the insurance claim of the association for that property was settled or resolved with finality, or denied because it was untimely filed.

Nothing in that sentence is about who caused the leak. An owner who did everything right, waited a week to see whether the stain spread, and reported it after the association had closed its claim, is inside it.

The photographs matter for the same reason and a second one. Drying works by removing the evidence: within two days a wet ceiling looks like a stained ceiling, and the extent of what was wet is no longer visible to anyone who was not there. Every later conversation about this loss will be conducted from those photographs.

When you own a condo, are you responsible for repairs?

For the property the statute lists as yours, and for reconstruction the association is not carrying, yes. Owners are responsible for the cost of reconstructing any portion of the condominium property they are required to insure, and the association may charge back work it does on the owner's behalf and collect it as an assessment.

That last clause is worth reading twice. Work done on your behalf, without a separate agreement, can arrive as an assessment rather than as an invoice you could have questioned first.

Can you bring in your own contractor?

Often not, or not without asking. This is the single most useful thing on this page and it is the thing owners most often discover after they have already booked somebody.

Section 718.111(11)(g) puts reconstruction with the association by default:

All reconstruction work after a property loss must be undertaken by the association except as otherwise authorized in this section. A unit owner may undertake reconstruction work on portions of the unit with the prior written consent of the board of administration.

The consent is not a formality either. The statute allows the board to condition it on approval of the repair methods, on the qualifications of the proposed contractor, or on the contract itself, and it requires the owner to hold every government permit and approval before work starts.

Two practical notes follow. The word the statute uses is reconstruction, which is the rebuilding, and emergency work to stop water spreading is a different thing from putting a room back. And because a board is being asked to approve a method, a firm and a contract, an owner who arrives with a written scope naming all three gets an answer faster than one who arrives with a phone number.

Should you use your insurer's preferred vendor?

This heading recurs across this market's search results, always asked and rarely answered, so here is what the arrangement actually is.

A preferred vendor is a contractor an insurer has a standing relationship with. The practical attractions are real: the vendor knows what that insurer documents and pays for, the paperwork moves faster, and the insurer will usually stand behind the work.

The practical cost is that the scope is written by somebody in a commercial relationship with the party paying for it. That is not an accusation, it is the structure. It matters most in the places where scope is genuinely a judgment call, and in water losses that is nearly always the same question: how far past the visible damage does the wet material go.

You are not required to use one. The sensible middle is to let the preferred vendor quote and to get one independent scope beside it, then to compare the two on what each proposes to open up rather than on the total at the bottom. Where the two disagree about extent, that disagreement is the useful part.

What water damage is not covered by a Florida policy?

The reliable answer is that gradual damage is where claims fail. Policies are built around sudden and accidental events, and a failure that leaked slowly for months tends to be read as maintenance rather than as an event.

Two named limits on a real Florida policy are worth seeing rather than paraphrasing. Citizens Property Insurance is the state-created insurer of last resort, and its published HO-6 coverage worksheet for condominium unit owners at revision 08/26 prints two lines that answer questions people usually have to guess at.

Water backup of sewers and drains, or sump overflow, is listed as not covered, in a column that also says the coverage cannot be added. And the limited fungi, wet or dry rot, or bacteria coverage is capped at $10,000 on the property side, in the same column, marked as a limit that cannot be increased.

Your own policy may be written by somebody else and may say something different. The point of reading a published form is that it shows you which lines to look for in yours.

The loss assessment, and the clock that starts at the vote

When damage exceeds the association's coverage, or its deductible has to be paid, those costs are a common expense. Spread across the owners, that is a loss assessment, and there is coverage for it.

Section 627.714 requires a unit owner's residential policy to include:

at least $2,000 in property loss assessment coverage for all assessments made as a result of the same direct loss to the property

with a deductible of no more than $250 applied to it, and no deductible at all where one has already been applied to the owner's own loss from the same event.

Then read that beside the Citizens worksheet again. Its loss assessment line is $2,000, in the column marked as a limit that cannot be increased. On that policy the statutory floor is also the ceiling.

The deadline is the part almost nobody hears about, because an assessment usually arrives long after the water did. Section 627.70132(4) puts an outside limit of three years from the date of loss on a loss assessment claim, and requires notice by the later of one year from the loss or:

Within 90 days after the date on which the condominium association or its governing board votes to levy an assessment resulting from a covered loss.

So the useful habit is to treat the board's vote as the start of a ninety day clock, and to call your own insurer that week rather than when the bill arrives.

Your building may have voted the default away

A condominium is allowed to step out of part of the rule quoted above, and a majority vote is all it takes.

A majority of the total voting interests can vote to opt out of the allocation rules in paragraph (j) and allocate repair and reconstruction expenses as the declaration provides instead. In a multicondominium association a single condominium can opt out on its own. Either way the decision takes effect when a notice is recorded in the public records, and it can be reversed by the same vote.

That gives you one more thing to ask for, and it is a question almost nobody thinks to ask: has this condominium recorded an opt out. If it has, the rules that govern your loss are in the declaration rather than in the paragraph quoted on this page.

The first day, in order

Everything above is the document. This is the hour.

1. Make it safe and stop the water, or get the association to stop it. Electricity near standing water is the one thing that cannot wait for a decision about who pays.
2. Photograph everything before you move it. Wide shots of each room, then close shots of every wet edge, with a tape measure or a phone in frame for scale. Photograph the ceiling from directly underneath the wettest point.
3. Write down the time you found it and what you saw. A note made that day is worth more later than a recollection made in month four.
4. Tell the association in writing, that day, even if the damage looks entirely internal to your unit.
5. Tell your own insurer the same day, and ask specifically whether your policy carries loss assessment coverage and what its limit is.
6. Get the wet material dried or removed only after the first four are done, and ask the contractor for a moisture map rather than an opinion.
7. Keep every piece of material somebody takes out of your home, or at least a photograph of it, until both claims are closed.

If the water sat for more than a day or two, growth is the next question rather than a separate one, and our mold remediation page covers what Florida licenses and how to check it. If the water came up rather than down, sewage cleanup is a different category of job with different rules about what can be kept.