2026-09-10 · Florida · Courts

What happened. Florida's Third District Court of Appeal reversed a summary final judgment of lien foreclosure because the trial court entered it while the unit owner's affirmative defences and counterclaims were still unresolved.

Kwartin v. Miami Beach Townhomes, A Condominium Association, Inc., No. 3D25-0288, was filed on 29 April 2026 (Miller, J., with Logue and Lindsey, JJ.), on appeal from the Miami-Dade Circuit Court.¹

What was left undecided below

The owner had pleaded affirmative defences of tender of payment, unclean hands, fraud and illegality, and counterclaims for breach of the declaration and bylaws and breach of fiduciary duty. He swore that he had tendered all assessments and that the association refused to negotiate the cheques.

None of that was adjudicated. The trial court granted summary final judgment of foreclosure anyway.

The rule the court applied

The panel followed the Fourth District's decision in Dieuvil v. Falcon Trace Homeowners Association, 367 So. 3d 543 (Fla. 4th DCA 2023), which required a trial court “to resolve the defendants' legally interrelated amended counterclaims before considering whether to enter a final summary judgment [of foreclosure] against the defendants on the association's foreclosure action.”

“Consistent with this line of authority, we reverse the judgment under review and remand for resolution of the affirmative defenses and counterclaims.”

The operative word is interrelated. A counterclaim that is legally bound up with the association's entitlement to the assessments — a tender, a claim that the assessment itself breached the declaration — has to be decided first, because deciding it could dispose of the foreclosure.

Why this is a real change in collection economics

Assessment foreclosure in Florida has often run on a fast summary-judgment track, on the premise that the amount owed is arithmetic. This decision confirms that an owner who pleads a genuine, interrelated dispute takes the case off that track.

It cuts both ways. It raises the cost of collection where the owner has a real defence — and it rewards owners who plead specifically rather than generically, because a boilerplate defence is unlikely to be interrelated with anything.

1. Kwartin v. Miami Beach Townhomes, A Condominium Association, Inc., No. 3D25-0288 (Fla. 3d DCA 29 April 2026) ↩
2. Guerin v. Countryside Imperial Ridge Homeowners Association, Inc., No. 2D2025-2414 (Fla. 2d DCA 15 July 2026) ↩
3. WFTS I-Team, reporting on Hillsborough County association collection actions and court records ↩