Two separate rulings, and the second is the one that will decide future cases.

The Real Estate License Act private right of action at Section 15-5(c) runs to “sellers, buyers, landlords, tenants, managing brokers, and brokers” — not to associations.

And Section 9.1(b) of the Condominium Property Act, 765 ILCS 605/9.1(b), does not give the board standing to represent former unit owners who have already sold. In the court's words: “The Association has no more a right to 'represent' a former unit owner under section 9.1(b) than it does to represent someone who never owned a unit in the first place.”

What this means operationally

The practical consequence is sharp, and it is easier seen before a bulk buyer appears than after.

The association is the wrong plaintiff. In a deconversion the injury — a below-market price — is suffered by owners as sellers, individually. The association has no claim of its own, and it cannot borrow theirs.

And the claim expires on closing. Section 9.1(b) representative standing has a hard boundary at current ownership. Once owners sell, the association can no longer represent them. So a board that waits until the sale closes and then sues on the membership's behalf has waited too long, by operation of the standing rule rather than any limitations period.

If individual owners are going to pursue anything, they must do it as sellers, and they must start before they sell.

How this fits with the rest of Illinois deconversion law

Illinois deconversion runs on the 75% threshold at 765 ILCS 605/15 — except in Chicago, where Municipal Code § 13-72-085 has required 85% since October 16, 2019, and in Skokie, which adopted its own 85% rule. The last serious attempt to raise the statewide bar, HB 2401 in the 100th General Assembly, passed the House and the Senate as amended and then died on House concurrence.

We found no 2025-2026 Illinois bill that would raise the statewide threshold. CAI's session reports, which between them track more than 59 association bills, list none. The only deconversion vehicle in the 104th General Assembly was SB 2125, a procedural bill on voting and legislator notification, whose status we could not verify and therefore do not characterise.

The other side of the transaction produced a decision too: in Kai v. Spring Hill Building 6, objecting owners who believed board members were self-interested lost on causation because they had not perfected their Section 15 objection and appraisal rights.

What a board facing a bulk offer should actually do

Recognise that the association's role is procedural, not adversarial. It runs the vote correctly, gives the notice the declaration and statute require, and documents what it did. The protection for owners is the Section 15 objection and appraisal machinery — and, in Chicago, the 85% threshold plus § 13-72-085's entitlement to the greater of fair-appraisal value or the outstanding acquisition or refinancing debt, plus relocation costs determined as under the federal Uniform Relocation Assistance Act.

Telling owners about those rights early is worth more than any suit the association could bring afterward, because the association cannot bring one.

What to watch next

No petition for leave to appeal appears in the Supreme Court's dispositions through September 9, 2026. Whether a suburb outside Chicago adopts its own 85% ordinance is the live question — Skokie has shown the home-rule route works, and Springfield has now failed to move the threshold across at least three General Assemblies.