Both eligibility prongs, not either

The threshold is conjunctive: fewer than twenty units and a building or buildings of no more than two stories. A sixteen-unit four-storey walk-up does not qualify. A twenty-unit two-storey garden project does not qualify either — “fewer than twenty” stops at nineteen.

That drafting is deliberate. The Legislature’s findings describe the target as associations “with simple infrastructure, limited shared components, and active owner oversight,” for which “the expense of a mandatory third-party reserve study review may exceed other essential annual operating costs and reduce funds available for actual maintenance and repair of common elements.”¹ The two-storey cap is what keeps elevators, structural envelopes and large mechanical plant out of the waiver.

The cycle-tracking problem

Condition four is the one that will trip associations up, because nothing in the Act tells anyone how to count. A waiver runs for a single three-year period and the next one may not be waived — which means a board has to know, in year six, what the board of year three did. The minute-and-produce-on-request condition is the only record the statute requires, so in practice the minutes of the waiver vote are the compliance file. A small self-managed association that changes secretaries every year is exactly the body least equipped to hold that thread, and exactly the body the Act is aimed at.

What survives in § 514B-148 untouched

Everything else in the subsection is unchanged, and it is worth listing because a waiver vote does not reach any of it:

• the fire-and-life-safety cost estimate required in counties over 500,000 population — which in Hawaii means the City and County of Honolulu;
• the thirty-year plan disclosure;
• the prior-year shortfall disclosure; and
• the closing rule that “The budget summary shall contain all required information without referring the reader to other portions of the budget.”

The conflict-of-interest safe harbour is renumbered but preserved word for word: “A managing agent with industry reserve study designations shall not be considered as having a conflict of interest for purposes of this paragraph.”

A gap between the findings and the Act

The findings section speaks of “condominium and homeowners’ association reserve requirements.” The Act amends only § 514B-148. Planned community associations under ch. 421J get nothing from Act 100 — which is unsurprising, since ch. 421J carries no reserve-study mandate for the waiver to bite on in the first place.

The lender question the Act does not answer

A waiver is a question of state law. It is not a question of whether a secondary-market lender will accept the association’s reserve documentation on a resale or refinance, and Act 100 says nothing about that. A board weighing the saving against the cost of a stale reserve picture in a financing review is weighing two different regimes, and only one of them is in the statute.

What to watch

Two things. First, whether the Real Estate Commission or the Condominium Education Trust Fund issues guidance on how the consecutive-period bar is to be tracked — there is none as of this writing. Second, whether the 2027 session extends the waiver, narrows it, or is asked to fix the ch. 421J omission.