Highland Beach Condo Special Assessments: What the Highest Disclosure Rate in South Florida Actually Measures

In Highland Beach, roughly one out of every six condos on the market right now is carrying an unresolved special assessment, structural reserve finding, or milestone inspection question somewhere in its listing remarks. That is the highest share of any city tracked in a new monthly index of South Florida MLS condo listings, dated September 14, 2026, which pulled data across Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, Martin, and St. Lucie counties. Highland Beach came in at 16.5 percent of its 103 active condo listings. Palm Beach County as a whole sat at 3.0 percent. Broward, the second-highest county, was at 6.2 percent.

The easy conclusion is that Highland Beach's buildings are in worse shape than the rest of the coast. That is not what the number measures, and treating it that way would cause a buyer to misread the market and a seller to underprice a perfectly sound unit. What the number actually tracks is how old the town's buildings are, and how that age lines up with a set of state deadlines that only started biting in 2026.

What the number is counting

The index looks at public remarks fields on active condo listings and flags language tied to Florida's post-Surfside condo safety laws: mentions of a special assessment, a Structural Integrity Reserve Study (SIRS), a milestone or 40/50-year recertification, concrete restoration, or reserve funding, where the remarks do not also say the item is resolved. A listing that says "assessment paid through 2027" gets marked resolved. A listing that just says "assessment in place" does not.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Across the five-county index, 9.4 percent of listings mentioned one of these items at all, but only 5.1 percent left it open. In other words, close to half the agents who bring up an assessment or inspection do it specifically to say it is handled. The other half leave the reader to guess, which is exactly the gap that produces surprises during due diligence rather than before an offer is written.

The real variable is the year on the certificate of occupancy

The index breaks its numbers out by construction era, and the pattern is stark. Condos built before 1980 show an 8.0 percent unresolved disclosure rate. Condos built in 2000 or later show 1.1 percent.

Highland Beach's condo stock skews old for a reason that has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with timing. The town's tallest oceanfront and Intracoastal towers went up during two building booms: one in the 1970s, when the barrier island first filled in with beachfront high-rises, and another in the 1980s, when a second wave of towers followed. Ambassadors East, a three-tower complex with ten floors in each building, dates to the 1970s. So does 45 Ocean, originally built as Ambassador South, a pair of ten-story oceanfront buildings from the mid-1970s. Seagate of Highland Beach, a four-building Intracoastal community, went up in stages from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s. Villa Magna, one of the town's best-known oceanfront addresses, was completed in 1982.

Florida's milestone inspection law sets its trigger at 30 years for most buildings, but drops to 25 years for buildings within three miles of the coast, a category that covers essentially every tower in Highland Beach. A building from 1982 crossed that line more than fifteen years ago. A building from the 1970s crossed it decades ago. Even Toscana, the newest large full-service tower in town at three buildings completed in 2000, turned 26 this year, old enough to have entered milestone territory itself. There is no meaningful pocket of Highland Beach condo inventory that gets to sit outside this framework much longer.

Layer the state's Structural Integrity Reserve Study rules on top of that age profile and the mechanism becomes clear. Every unit-owner-controlled association in a building three stories or taller had to complete a SIRS by December 31, 2025, with a narrow extension to December 31, 2026 for buildings pairing the study with a milestone inspection already due that year. Starting with budgets adopted after December 31, 2024, boards can no longer vote to waive or underfund the eight structural components a SIRS covers. Full funding became mandatory with 2026 budgets, and the state's inflation-adjusted reserve threshold for the year sits at $25,675. A wave of buildings hitting that combination of age and deadline at the same time, in the same calendar year, is exactly what produces a spike in listings that mention an assessment before the paperwork catches up.

Highland Beach was already ahead of the state on this

One detail worth knowing if you are weighing an older Highland Beach tower against a newer one: the town did not wait for Tallahassee. On November 16, 2021, seven months before Florida's SB 4-D became law, the Highland Beach Town Commission passed its own recertification ordinance requiring aging buildings to go through a structural and electrical review process. The town's Building Department has since layered on additional requirements, including a program encouraging qualified structural engineers to register directly with the town before doing inspection work locally.

That head start means many Highland Beach associations had already started the recertification conversation, and in some cases already commissioned engineering work, before the statewide SIRS clock started running. It does not mean every building is caught up. It does mean a buyer comparing two similarly aged towers, one in Highland Beach and one elsewhere on the coast, may find the Highland Beach building further along in the process simply because the town pushed the paperwork earlier.

What to actually check before writing an offer

The listing remarks field is not a due diligence document. It is written by an agent, under time pressure, and the index shows plainly that agents who do disclose something often stop short of saying whether it is resolved. Before you get attached to a unit, ask the seller's agent or the association directly for:

1. The building's most recent milestone inspection report, including whether it triggered a Phase 2 review
2. The completed SIRS, or documentation of where the association stands if the study is still in progress
3. The current reserve funding schedule, including how the eight SIRS-covered components are funded relative to the study's recommendations
4. Board meeting minutes from the last twelve months, which often surface a pending assessment before it becomes official
5. Whether the association has secured a loan or line of credit to fund reserves, since that changes monthly dues even when there is no lump-sum assessment

If a pending assessment does exist, how it affects your offer depends on the building's payment letter, whether the amount is a lump sum or a payment plan, and what comparable units in that same building have closed for since the assessment became public. That last comparison only comes from someone who tracks closed sales inside specific Highland Beach buildings, not from a generic market report.

What this means depending on which side of 2000 your building falls on

If you own or are selling in a pre-1980 building, the honest move is to get ahead of the paperwork rather than let a buyer find a gap in the listing remarks. A completed milestone report and a funded reserve schedule, stated plainly in the listing, is the detail the index shows most buyers' agents are already screening for. If you are buying into a newer tower like Toscana, do not assume the 2000 completion date means the milestone conversation does not apply to you. It already does, and it will again in a few years when that 25-year clock finishes ticking for the whole building.

None of this is a reason to avoid Highland Beach's older inventory. Many of these buildings have already done the concrete restoration, the impact glass upgrades, and the balcony work the state is now asking every coastal tower to plan for. The disclosure rate tells you where to look. It does not tell you what you will find until someone actually pulls the documents.

A few questions worth asking directly

Does a high disclosure rate mean Highland Beach condos are a bad investment? No. The rate reflects the age of the building stock relative to Florida's inspection and reserve deadlines, not the underlying quality of construction or location. Many of the town's most established buildings have already completed the required structural work.

Is a pending special assessment always a reason to walk away? Not necessarily. A properly noticed, well-documented assessment tied to a completed SIRS can be a sign the association is handling its obligations correctly. The concern is an assessment with no supporting documentation, no clear scope, or no payment schedule.

Should I only consider buildings built after 2000? That would eliminate most of what Highland Beach offers. The better approach is asking for the specific documents above regardless of the building's age, since a well-funded 1982 building and an underfunded 2010 building are both possible.

This is exactly the kind of question that benefits from a second set of eyes before you write an offer or set a list price. Adam Levitt works this stretch of coast regularly and can walk through a specific building's inspection and reserve history with you before you commit. Reach out to request a market valuation and a straight read on where a particular Highland Beach building actually stands.