An owner living with a chronic building defect experiences it as continuing. The law treats it as a single injury with a single start date.

Every reason an owner has for not suing sooner — the board said it would be fixed, the next backup was worse, we were negotiating, a new manager was going to look at it — is legally irrelevant. The five years ran from the first time the owner knew, or should have known, that the unit was being damaged.

The same rule caught a different Illinois owner this year on different facts: in Chellappa v. Summerdale Court, disability-accommodation claims over noise transmission were dismissed as filed one day after the period expired, with the court holding that continuing negative health effects from discrete acts do not extend it.

The Section 13-207 point is subtle and worth understanding

Owners frequently assume that when the association eventually sues them — for assessments, or for possession — they can raise everything the association did to them as a counterclaim, whenever it happened. Section 13-207 does allow revival of some otherwise stale claims in that posture.

But it only revives claims that were still alive when the plaintiff filed. A claim already dead on the day the association filed its complaint stays dead. So an owner who waits for the association to sue is not preserving anything — they are letting the clock run on a claim the counterclaim mechanism cannot resurrect.

What owners can do

Two things, and neither requires filing suit immediately.

Date the first incident in writing. A contemporaneous written complaint to the board establishes when the owner knew, which is the fact the whole analysis turns on. Verbal complaints at meetings are the reason these cases turn into arguments about accrual.

Get advice before year five, not after year seven. An owner three years into a recurring problem still has options. One seven years in generally does not, however strong the underlying grievance.

What it does not mean for boards

That ignoring a recurring failure is a strategy. It works here as a defence and it is a poor way to run a building.

The same association's exposure on the other side of the same facts is real. Where board negligence renders a unit uninhabitable, the owner's remedy is a claim against the association — and the legislature declined this year to create a reserve-funded alternative. Where a water or waste failure damages a unit, the association's insurance position is shaped by the Section 12(e) waiver of subrogation and the collateral-source analysis, not by the limitations period.

And deferred maintenance of exactly this kind is what the failed reserve-study bills were aimed at. A board that outlasts one owner's claim still has the pipe.

What to watch next

Nothing further — the Supreme Court denied leave on September 24, 2025. The rule is settled and it is unforgiving.