What it changes for boards and developers

For a board taking control of a new community, the study is now an item on a checklist you can enforce. The sixty-day clock in C.R.S. 38-33.3-303(9) starts when non-declarant owners elect a majority of the executive board. A written turnover demand that itemizes paragraphs (a) through (n) and names paragraph (n) expressly is the cheapest way to establish that the study was or was not delivered.

For every association, the annual disclosure list has grown. An association that has a 209.2 study and omits it from the ninety-day post-fiscal-year-end disclosure is out of compliance with 209.4(2), independent of whether anyone asks for it. This is a records and disclosure housekeeping change, and it belongs in the association's responsible governance policies rather than in someone's memory.

For declarants, the independence test is the expensive part. Builders that have historically had a preferred vendor prepare turnover budgets need to check whether that vendor is an affiliate, and whether it has a business relationship with the declarant beyond being retained to write reserve studies. The statute allows the retainer and nothing else.

What the statute deliberately does not do

Three absences matter as much as the requirements, and a reading that fills them in goes beyond the statute.

It sets no funding level. There is no percentage, no minimum balance, no required contribution. A community can receive a compliant thirty-year study showing a severe shortfall and be entirely within the statute.

It sets no update interval. The declarant commissions one study, once, before turnover. Nothing in 209.2 requires the association to refresh it, though the annual disclosure duty attaches to “the most recent” study, which presupposes there could be a later one.

It carries no penalty against a declarant who skips it. Unlike the management-company provisions in the same act, which set a per-day amount and a treble-damages remedy, 209.2 has no enforcement clause and names no agency. The Colorado Division of Real Estate's HOA Information and Resource Center has no jurisdiction to enforce registration requirements, let alone this one. Enforcement runs through the association in civil court.

Note also the form: the section speaks to “a planned community or condominium.” Cooperatives — the third form of common interest community under C.R.S. 38-33.3-103 — are not named.

What to watch next

The gap between a study that exists and a study that is funded is where the next fight sits, and it is not a Colorado fight. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac raise the minimum replacement-reserve allocation for condominium project eligibility from 10% to 15% of annual budgeted assessment income for loan applications dated on or after January 4, 2027, and both now require that where a lender relies on a reserve study instead of the percentage, the budget fund at the highest recommended allocation in that study. Colorado's new law produces the document. The funding standard that will actually bind a Colorado condominium is arriving from the secondary mortgage market four and a half months after the state's study requirement took effect.

Watch also for a 2027 clean-up bill on declarant non-compliance. A duty with no stated consequence is the kind of drafting that comes back.