Compliance tracker for Florida's condo reserve crisis

What to build

A Florida condo compliance dashboard for HOA/condo boards that tracks structural reserve study deadlines under the post-Surfside law, flags underfunded reserves, and auto-generates owner special-assessment disclosures. A buyer-facing lookup lets prospective purchasers check a building's reserve health and assessment risk before closing.

Florida's post-Surfside reserve mandates are triggering surprise special assessments, and neither boards nor buyers have an easy way to track compliance or risk — creating an opening for a focused compliance and transparency tool.

Demand

Florida condo boards facing 2025-2026 reserve funding deadlines need a simple way to stay compliant and document disclosures, while prospective buyers want to de-risk purchases amid widespread fear of surprise assessments; a 167-point, 306-comment HN thread shows this framing already resonates broadly.

• Hacker NewsNews

  Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse — 167 points, 306 comments on HN, indicating high engagement and widespread concern about assessment risk.

• Post-Surfside Florida condo safety legislationRegulation

  Florida law requires structural integrity reserve studies and adequate reserve funding, prompting associations to levy special assessments to meet compliance deadlines — the regulatory driver creating demand for compliance tooling.

Stack

• Next.js
• Supabase
• Stripe
• Florida DBPR public records API/scrapers
• Twilio or SendGrid for disclosure notices
• Vercel

Solo + AI difficulty

The dashboard CRUD, reserve-study tracking, and disclosure-generation logic are straightforward for one person with AI help; the hard part is sourcing reliable per-building reserve and assessment data since many associations don't digitize this, which will limit buyer-facing coverage early on. A board-facing MVP (manual data entry, deadline tracking, PDF disclosure generation) is realistic in 3-5 weeks; a reliable buyer-facing lookup with real data coverage takes much longer.

Entry threshold

Low capital and no licence needed, but it requires aggregating condo financial disclosures and county records plus building real trust with boards and property managers, so expect a few weeks of focused solo build plus manual outreach for the first customers.

Window

12-24 months

Where to find first users

• Florida community association manager (CAM) Facebook groups and forums
• r/floridahomeowners and r/RealEstate
• Direct outreach to property management companies managing multiple HOAs
• Florida real estate agent networks who field buyer questions about assessments

Counter-signals & risks

• Special assessments and reserve requirements may be a necessary short-term correction for decades of underfunded maintenance rather than a root cause of the housing crisis, limiting the framing's accuracy.

• A compliance dashboard product depends on associations and boards voluntarily adopting third-party tools, which may face slow adoption given limited board resources and technical capacity.

• Data access barriers (associations not digitizing reserve studies or financials) could limit the buyer-facing tool's coverage and accuracy.