Florida's Condo Safety Law in Vero Beach — Vero Beach, Florida

After the 2021 Surfside collapse, Florida layered two requirements onto condominium buildings, and both reached the oceanfront towers of Vero Beach. The first is a milestone inspection by a licensed engineer or architect. Under section 553.899 of the 2025 Florida Statutes, a condo or co-op building three habitable stories or more in height must be inspected by December 31 of the year it reaches 30 years of age and every 10 years after that, and buildings that turned 30 before July 1, 2022 had to finish the first round before December 31, 2024. The statute also lets the local enforcement agency set a 25 year trigger where proximity to salt water warrants it. When Vero Beach 32963 described the law in December 2024, it put the coastal trigger at buildings 25 years or older within 3 miles of a saltwater shoreline, which takes in the Orchid Island oceanfront.

The second requirement is money. Section 718.112 requires a structural integrity reserve study, known as a SIRS, at least every 10 years for each condo building three habitable stories or higher. The study covers the roof, the structure, fireproofing and fire protection, plumbing, electrical systems, waterproofing and exterior painting, and windows and exterior doors, and it sets a funding plan that associations in Vero Beach and the rest of Indian River County must then carry in their budgets.

The rules came in three steps. SB 4-D, passed in the May 2022 special session on building safety, required condominium and cooperative associations to have milestone inspections performed; the Florida Senate lists its effective date as 5/26/2022 and its chapter number as 2022-269. CS/CS/SB 154 followed in 2023, revising who must have milestone inspections and requiring engineers to file phase two progress reports with the local enforcement agency, which for Vero Beach condos is the Indian River County Building Division; it took effect 6/9/2023 as Chapter 2023-203.

The third step, CS/CS/HB 913, was approved by the Governor on 6/24/2025 as Chapter 2025-175 and took effect July 1, 2025. The 2025 text of section 718.112 now gives associations that existed on or before July 1, 2022 until December 31, 2025 to complete the SIRS, and for budgets adopted through December 31, 2028 it allows a board that finished a milestone inspection in the prior two years to pause reserve contributions for up to two annual budgets, with majority owner approval, in order to pay for the milestone repairs. That pause option answered one of the complaints condo boards on the Vero Beach barrier island had raised since 2024.

The City of Vero Beach did not build its own program. Vero Beach 32963 reported in the week of December 26, 2024 that the city had deferred to the Indian River County Building Division for administering milestone inspections. At that point the county had received 49 milestone inspection reports for 67 buildings inside Vero Beach city limits or outside them that fall under the law, and none of the reports filed so far called for a Phase 2 inspection to address serious structural deficiencies.

The same report gave the scale of the exemptions: across both jurisdictions, 97 newer condo buildings did not need milestone inspections, chiefly because they were built after 2000, according to the county. The Town of Indian River Shores, which runs its own Building Division, counted 29 condominium or co-op buildings under the law, and 19 had filed reports the week before Christmas 2024. A few Indian River Shores buildings were referred for Phase 2, though the newspaper reported no finding of imminent collapse requiring evacuation.

The December 2024 report also flagged a gap. A deputy head of the county Building Services division noted that the state registry of buildings was not complete and that some associations in Indian River County had not registered with the state as the law requires, and it was unclear what mechanism existed to make them comply.

One building on the Vero Beach barrier island failed. Vero Beach 32963 reported in the week of April 17, 2025 that the Seaquay condominium complex on Highway A1A was the only building on the 32963 barrier island that flunked the state inspection. Built in 1984, Seaquay sits less than 70 feet from the water line at high tide, and the newspaper described it as being in the worst shape of all Indian River County condo buildings inspected by licensed engineers.

According to public records cited in that report, the Seaquay milestone inspection found dangerous conditions requiring emergency concrete restoration at the northeast balcony column. Crews from a West Palm Beach contractor began removing and replacing crumbling concrete and rebar along the balcony stack, with scaffolding along most of the five-tower complex. The repair project was put at $2 million and scheduled to take between 18 and 24 months. In April 2025, seven of the 71 Seaquay units were listed for sale, a count the paper did not consider extraordinarily high for a complex that size.

Elsewhere in the county the results were milder. A garage at one complex in Indian River Shores also failed, while its residences passed. Every other Indian River County structure of three stories or higher within 3 miles of the coast that was old enough to fall under the law passed its first milestone inspection and needed only minor repairs, the April 2025 report said. Indian River County fared better than its neighbors: 11 buildings failed in St. Lucie County and six in Martin County.

The inspections mostly came back clean in Vero Beach; the reserve rules were the larger cost. As explained in the December 2024 Vero Beach 32963 report, fully funded reserves mean that if a new roof costs $700,000 and will be needed in 7 years, the building must set aside $100,000 in each of those years, and boards must impose fully funded reserve budgets even if owners vote against them. In September 2024, Vero Beach 32963 reported that the new requirements were expected to bring special assessments as high as $50,000 per unit in some buildings, arriving on top of insurance increases of sometimes more than 100 percent.

Associations on the 32963 barrier island responded by organizing. The Treasure Coast Condominium Alliance, reported in September 2024 with 14 member associations including buildings in Indian River Shores and Vero Beach, hired a Tallahassee lobbyist, Travis Moore. Its members met in Stuart with state Sen. Jason Pizzo, the author of the legislation, and in December 2024 met in Boca Raton with state Rep. Vicki Lopez and state Sen. Jennifer Bradley. The alliance asked for an appeals process for inspection findings, a right to a second opinion, more time to fund repairs, and, as a last resort, interest-free state loans.

By April 2025 the alliance had grown to about 20 associations from Vero Beach to Martin County and favored a state senate version of the relief bill that would let associations fund reserves partly with a bank letter of credit. Gov. Ron DeSantis had said in September 2024 that he would be amenable to a special session on the problem, but legislative leaders declined, and relief arrived instead through the regular 2025 session.