Five years after Surfside, Georgia still has no condo safety or reserve law
Five years after Surfside, Georgia still has no condo safety or reserve law
2026-09-10 · Georgia · Legislation · Did not pass
What happened. Nothing — and the nothing is documented rather than assumed.
We searched the full text of the Georgia House's Session Final composite status report, which lists every bill and resolution of the 2025-2026 biennium, for the terms reserve study, structural inspection, milestone inspection, building safety, community association manager, association manager, statute of repose, short-term rental and vacation rental.1
Zero matches.
What Georgia did not introduce
No condominium building-safety or milestone-inspection bill. Five years after the Champlain Towers South collapse, and after Florida built an entire inspection regime, Georgia's legislature did not file one. CAI's national condo-safety round-up lists Georgia among states that have “addressed” reserve and inspection legislation — but names no Georgia bill number, dates the activity to 2022, and was last updated in June 2023.2
No reserve-study or reserve-funding mandate. Georgia has no statutory requirement that an association commission a reserve study or fund reserves at any level. SB 406 mentions reserves exactly once, inside the definition of “regular assessments” at § 43-17A-1(8), as a permissible use of operating-budget money. It requires nothing.
No community-association-manager licensing change. Georgia does license community association managers, through the Georgia Real Estate Commission under O.C.G.A. Chapter 43-40. Nobody proposed to change it, and Act 715 regulates the association rather than the manager.
No change to the construction-defect statute of repose. Georgia's eight-year absolute bar under O.C.G.A. § 9-3-51 stands untouched — the deadline that most often defeats a Georgia condominium association's defect claim.
No short-term-rental preemption. Georgia has no statewide STR licensing or preemption statute, local governments retain full authority, and the legislature did not revisit it.
The one adjacent enactment
For completeness: SB 570, enacted as Act 519, requires human-trafficking-awareness training and applies to third-party property managers of short-term rental properties, enacting O.C.G.A. § 43-21-16 effective 1 July 2026.3 That is a hospitality measure, not community-association licensing.
Why the reserve gap is closing anyway — from outside Georgia
This is the part that matters most to a Georgia condominium board, because the mandate Georgia declined to write is arriving from the secondary mortgage market on a fixed date.
Fannie Mae's Lender Letter LL-2026-03 and Freddie Mac's Bulletin 2026-C, both issued 18 March 2026 and expressly developed in alignment with each other, change condominium project standards on a published schedule:4
- 3 August 2026 — the Limited Review / Streamlined Review path for established condominium projects is retired. Projects that used to clear without scrutiny now face Full Review, in which a lender examines budget, reserves, insurance, litigation and critical repairs.
- 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 reserve study requirement. The budget must reflect the study's highest recommended reserve allocation.
- 4 January 2027 — minimum replacement reserves rise from 10% to 15% of annual budgeted assessment income, unless a current reserve study supports less and the association funds at the study's highest recommended level.
Freddie Mac's stated rationale names the pressure directly: “in certain areas, premiums and limited insurance availability are creating challenges for Borrowers and homeowners associations.”
The consequence for a Georgia condominium that falls short is not a fine. It is ineligibility — conventional financing dries up for every unit in the building, which shows up as failed sales and collapsing values long before anyone reads a statute.
The date to circle
4 January 2027 is three days after Georgia's Chapter 43-17A takes effect and roughly a week before the General Assembly convenes. A Georgia condominium board's 2027 budget has to satisfy a 15% reserve allocation that no Georgia law requires, in the same month it must file a state registration that no Georgia law required a year earlier.
What a Georgia board can do about the statute of repose
Since the legislature did not touch it, the eight-year bar in § 9-3-51 remains the single most important date in a Georgia condominium's structural life, and it is frequently discovered too late.
The practical points:
- It is a repose period, not a limitations period. It runs from substantial completion regardless of when the defect is discovered. An association that finds a latent structural problem in year nine has no claim, however diligent it was.
- Developer-controlled years count. A Georgia condominium where the declarant controlled the board for the first several years spends a substantial share of its repose period unable to sue the declarant, because the declarant is the board.
- The remedy is calendar discipline. Boards that take over at turnover should establish the substantial-completion date, calculate the repose expiry, and commission an independent inspection well before it.
What Georgia condominiums have instead of a safety statute
Building codes, applied prospectively. The Georgia DCA Board adopted the 2024 editions of the International Building, Residential, Fire, Mechanical, Plumbing, Fuel Gas and Swimming Pool and Spa Codes, with Georgia amendments, effective 1 January 2026. The 2024 International Fire Code is adopted by the Safety Fire Commissioner and reaches multi-family residential buildings.5
Georgia codes apply at permit, so no association is forced to retrofit. But every capital project a board approves in the 2026-2027 cycle — re-roofing, balcony and deck replacement, pool resurfacing, electrical upgrades — is priced against the 2024 family. Reserve studies built on pre-2026 cost assumptions are understating those lines, at exactly the moment the GSEs are requiring the study's highest recommended figure.
What to watch next
Whether a Georgia condo-safety or reserve bill appears in 2027. The argument for one has strengthened considerably: an association that must now fund reserves at 15% to keep its units financeable has a direct interest in a statutory framework that makes the study and the funding routine rather than a lender-driven emergency. Nobody has filed one, and no interim committee is studying it.
Related Georgia HOA Topics
- 2026 Composite Status Report, Session Final, Georgia House of Representatives (14 May 2026) ↩
- Condo Safety Related State Legislation Round-Up — CAI Advocacy ↩
- Summary of General Statutes Enacted at the 2026 Session, Office of Legislative Counsel ↩
- Freddie Mac Single-Family Seller/Servicer Guide Bulletin 2026-C (18 March 2026) ↩
- “New Codes Jan 2026” — Georgia Department of Community Affairs, 9 December 2025 ↩
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