Nearly every Illinois condominium declaration drafted by a developer reserves a right to amend unilaterally, without an owner vote, for a defined period. The stated purposes are always narrow and always sound reasonable: correcting clerical and typographical errors, conforming the declaration to the recorded plat, satisfying requirements imposed by a lender or a title company, and completing the legal descriptions of units not yet built.

Those powers exist because a large conversion generates genuine drafting errors, and fixing them by membership vote would be impractical.

River North confirms the boundary: the power is what it says it is. A clause permitting correction of errors does not permit the declarant to enlarge its own property rights, whatever it is labelled.

The part that affects boards

Audit any developer-recorded special amendment in your chain of title. Most associations have never read theirs. The question is simple and worth an hour of counsel's time: does the amendment do what the reserved power authorises, or does it change substantive rights — ownership, percentage of ownership, allocation of limited common elements, or the boundaries of a unit?

Where a special amendment allocated something valuable to the declarant — roof rights, air rights, parking, storage, signage, the right to add units — that is the one to look at.

Why the downstream holding is the harsh part

The purchasers took nothing. They bought units and air rights in reliance on a recorded instrument, and the instrument was void.

That is orthodox — a void amendment conveys nothing and no subsequent purchaser can take more than the grantor had — but it is worth stating plainly, because it is the reason a title problem of this kind does not go away with time or with a change of ownership. It sits in the chain until someone litigates it.

For an association, that cuts favourably: an over-reaching special amendment recorded fifteen years ago by a developer long since dissolved is still void, and the association's claim to the common element is intact.

Where this sits in the Illinois pattern

This is the developer-side instance of the year's recurring holding. A design committee cannot ban what the declaration permits; a declaration cannot disclaim a statutory status the Act imposes; an association cannot amend its way backward over charges already incurred. And a declarant cannot use a correction clause to take the sky.

A note on the record

It is a Rule 23 order and cannot be cited as precedent except under Rule 23(e)(1). The Supreme Court's denial of leave leaves it standing, and its reasoning is conventional enough that an Illinois court facing the same facts would likely reach the same result.

What to watch next

Nothing further in this case. The broader question — how long a reserved special-amendment power survives after the declarant has sold out — recurs in Illinois conversions and was not reached here.