What this could mean for two common situations

Read at face value, the new sections reach two fact patterns that arise constantly in Florida association disputes.

The owner who sells. A unit owner who discovers apparent misspending, sues on the association's behalf, and then closes on the sale of their unit no longer “holds that position at the time the action is commenced” — or, if they sell mid-litigation, arguably ceases to satisfy the section. Association derivative litigation is slow and unit sales are not, so this is not a hypothetical.

The owner who sues first and asks later. An owner who files without a documented demand on the board, or who files before 90 days have run and without pleading irreparable injury or waste, faces a pleading defect that has nothing to do with the merits of the underlying complaint.

Both cut in the same direction: they raise the procedural cost of an owner-initiated action against a board.

The honest limits of this reading

We are describing what the enrolled statute says and what its structure implies. Three cautions belong with it, and anyone acting on this should hold all three.

First, the House Final Bill Analysis does not address community associations in connection with these sections at all. The absence of a carve-out may be deliberate, or it may be an omission — the legislative record does not say.

Second, Florida's community-association statutes contain their own dispute-resolution architecture. Chapter 720 requires pre-suit mediation for defined categories of dispute under s. 720.311; Chapter 718 routes election and recall disputes to DBPR arbitration. How a general nonprofit derivative-demand statute interacts with those specific regimes is exactly the sort of question that gets resolved by an appellate court rather than by reading the text.

Third, and most simply: no Florida appellate court has construed either section. They have been in force for ten weeks.

So the correct posture is not “owners have lost standing.” It is that a new, unlitigated procedural bar exists, and that assuming it does not apply to associations requires an argument the statute does not supply.

Practical consequences on both sides

For an owner considering a derivative claim. Make the written demand on the board, date it, and keep the proof of delivery. Diarise the 90 days. If the unit is going to be sold, understand that the sale may be the defendant's best argument. If the situation genuinely involves ongoing waste, that is what the irreparable-injury exception is for — but it has to be pleaded with particularity, not asserted.

For a board receiving a demand. A demand letter now starts a statutory clock rather than merely arriving. Ignoring it for 90 days is one of the three outcomes the statute expressly contemplates, and it perfects the claimant's pleading rather than defeating it. The considered response — investigate, minute the deliberation, respond in writing — is now also the better litigation posture.

The wider point about where association law is now made

There is a pattern in the 2026 session worth naming. The marquee community-association bills all died: HB 657 in Senate Rules, SB 1498 in appropriations, SB 722 and SB 906 without a hearing. The changes that actually reached Florida association boards this year arrived through a general nonprofit corporations rewrite that almost no association coverage treated as association legislation.

The director standard of care, the immunity shield, the interested-director transaction test and now derivative standing all moved in Chapter 2026-168. None of them appears in a bill with “community associations” in the title.

What to watch next

The first appellate decision construing s. 617.0741 or s. 617.0742 against a condominium or homeowners' association will settle the carve-out question, and it is the single most useful thing to watch in this area. Until then, treat the demand-and-wait sequence as the safe course regardless of which way the question resolves — it costs 90 days and it forecloses the argument entirely.