Why the timing is genuinely awkward

Because a second, unrelated change is landing on Georgia condominiums in the same budget cycle, and it demands that the reserve number be higher at precisely the moment the code has made the underlying work more expensive.

Fannie Mae's Lender Letter LL-2026-03 and Freddie Mac's Bulletin 2026-C, both issued 18 March 2026 in alignment with one another, provide that from 4 January 2027 the minimum replacement-reserve allocation rises from 10% to 15% of annual budgeted assessment income — unless a current reserve study supports less and the budget reflects the study's highest recommended reserve allocation. From 3 August 2026, the baseline funding method, where the reserve balance approaches but never falls below zero, may no longer be used to satisfy the study requirement.³

Put the two together and a Georgia condominium board's position is:

• the reserve study must be current and must be funded at its highest recommended level;
• the study's cost assumptions must reflect the 2024 code family, or it is understating what the work will cost; and
• failing either makes the project ineligible for conventional financing — which dries up sales for every unit in the building.

Georgia itself requires none of this. The state has no statutory reserve-study or reserve-funding mandate, and the 2025-2026 legislature introduced no bill to create one. The mandate is arriving from the secondary mortgage market.

What a board can do

• Re-price the reserve study against the 2024 codes. If your study predates January 2026, its unit costs for electrical, pool and life-safety work are on a superseded code basis. This is a conversation with the reserve analyst, not a full re-study.
• Ask the pool contractor about the ISPSC before you budget. Pool resurfacing frequently triggers other requirements once a permit is pulled — barriers, entrapment protection, circulation. The 2024 edition is what applies now.
• Get the fire-system position in writing. For a Georgia condominium high-rise, the 2024 IFC as adopted under Chapter 120-3-3 is what a fire marshal will inspect to on any new work. Establish what your building is currently compliant with, and what any planned work would trigger.
• Do not panic-retrofit. Prospective means prospective. A vendor telling a Georgia board that the new code requires immediate upgrades to existing installations should be asked to identify the provision.

The records point that connects to January

There is a documentation angle here that reaches Georgia boards, because the courts have already made it expensive.

In Ovation Condominium Association, Inc. v. Cox, No. A24A1374 (Ga. Ct. App. 10 Mar. 2025), a Buckhead condominium association escaped the personal-injury half of a diesel-generator case on specific causation — and lost summary judgment on breach of its declaration, because it could produce maintenance records only for 2018 to 2022 for equipment installed in 2005.⁴

From 1 January 2027, § 43-17A-2(g) of Georgia's new Chapter 17A requires ten years of retained records — but read the list: assessments, fines, fees, liens and foreclosures. It is a money retention duty. Permits, inspection certificates, engineering reports and vendor maintenance records are not covered.

Which means the code-compliance file that would answer a future claim is exactly the file no Georgia statute requires an association to keep. Kept anyway for the life of the asset, it does that job.

What to watch next

The next Georgia code cycle, and the Safety Fire Commissioner's amendments to Chapter 120-3-3 in particular, since those are adopted separately from the DCA package and are the ones that reach multifamily buildings most directly. Georgia's Office of Construction Codes and Industrialized Buildings takes questions at [email protected].