2026-09-10 · Massachusetts · Courts

What happened. The Massachusetts Appeals Court told a set of condominium trustees that they may not use the assessment power to bill a single unit owner for the cost of litigation the owner won — and then made the trustees pay the owner's appellate fees for arguing otherwise.

Trustees of the 549-551 Boylston Street Condominium Trust v. Chamberlain, docket 24-P-1000, was decided 6 April 2026 as a Rule 23.0 memorandum and order.¹

What the trustees tried to do

The unit owners had previously sued the trustees and won; in that earlier case the trustees were found to have misappropriated trust funds. The trustees then sought to charge those same owners the full cost of defending that suit — rather than the owners' percentage share of it.

The owners' undivided interest in the condominium was 8 percent. The trustees billed them 100 percent.

What the statute says

The court applied M.G.L. c. 183A §6 as written. Under §6(a)(i), all common expenses shall be assessed against all units

“in accordance with their respective percentages of undivided interest”

The exception in §6(a)(ii) is narrow: expenses caused by an owner's failure to abide by requirements, or by an owner's misconduct. There was no such failure or misconduct here — the misconduct found in the earlier case was the trustees'.

The waiver argument failed too

The trustees argued that because the owners had accepted and paid their 8 percent share, they had waived any objection to being billed 100 percent. The court rejected that.

The sanction

Judgment affirmed, motion to alter or amend denied, and — the part that gives the decision its weight — appellate attorney's fees and double costs awarded to the unit owners, the appeal having been deemed frivolous under Mass. R. App. P. 25.

1. Trustees of the 549-551 Boylston Street Condominium Trust v. Chamberlain, Mass. App. Ct. 24-P-1000 (6 April 2026), full opinion text ↩
2. M.G.L. c. 183A §6, common expenses and liens (codified text) ↩