What Full Review actually asks for

The document set is not exotic, but it is a set — and an association that cannot assemble it within a purchase-and-sale timeline will lose sales regardless of the building's condition:

• The current annual budget, showing line-item reserve funding
• A reserve study where one is relied on
• Insurance certificates for the master property policy, general liability, and fidelity or crime coverage
• Litigation disclosure — pending suits involving the association, and what they concern
• A completed condominium project questionnaire, answered consistently across transactions

The failure mode in Massachusetts is not usually a bad answer. It is an inconsistent one: a self-managed association where the treasurer answers one questionnaire and a trustee answers the next, differently, and a lender notices.

The insurance requirements that were loosened

Worth naming, because the overhaul is not uniformly tighter. Removed:

• Strict replacement-cost documentation requirements
• The roof full-replacement-cost mandate
• The inflation-guard requirement

Florida-specific new-attached-condominium review requirements were also retired. And new servicer duties take effect 1 January 2027: annual insurance verification, monitoring for coverage reductions, and annual borrower reminders.

A Massachusetts board's options on the deductible

This is the item with a real decision attached, and it should be taken at renewal rather than discovered at a closing.

Find out what your per-unit deductible actually is. Master policy deductibles are sometimes stated per occurrence and sometimes per unit, and water damage frequently carries a separate, higher deductible than other perils. The financing question turns on the per-unit figure.

Price the alternatives before assuming the cap is unaffordable. Moving from a $100,000 deductible to $50,000 costs premium. Whether it costs more than the value destroyed by units becoming unfinanceable is an arithmetic question a board can actually answer, with the agent, before renewal.

Understand where the deductible lands under your documents. Massachusetts has no statute allocating a master policy deductible between the association and a unit owner. It is governed by the master deed and the trust instrument, and a high deductible is often, in practice, a cost pushed onto whichever owner's unit floods.

The market context

Massachusetts condominium insurance has been hardening, and the available numbers are thinner than the subject deserves. The Division of Insurance's annual home insurance marketplace report, issued 8 December 2025 for calendar year 2024, put the condominium loss ratio at 33.8 percent and total home written premium at roughly $3.6 billion, with the FAIR Plan at 8.7 percent of statewide home premium but 39.6 percent of policies in the Cape and Islands.²

Brokerage sources report master policy renewal increases of 15 to 40 percent for associations in Boston, Dorchester, South Boston, Somerville, Cambridge, Newton and Quincy, including buildings with little claims history. Those figures come from firms selling policies and have not been independently verified — they are the only Massachusetts-specific numbers publicly available, which is itself the story.

What to watch next

The NAIC-coordinated 2026 Homeowners Market Data Call, which Massachusetts joined, collects data broken out by policy type including condominium, covering policy years 2018 to 2025, with submissions due 15 July 2026 and a public report planned for early 2027. It will be the first coordinated dataset that isolates condominium-unit insurance experience — and the first time anyone can check the brokerage numbers against something measured.