The numbers behind the warning

A survey filed into the legislative working group's own record puts the scale of the problem. The HOA Leadership Network's 2024 HOA Insurance Survey, conducted 13–31 August 2024 with 74 responses, tracked master-policy costs across 2022, 2023 and 2024.⁵

• Average total annual master premium: $40,397 in 2022 → $53,846 in 2023 → $76,909 in 2024. An increase of $36,512, or 90.4 percent, in two years.
• Per unit: $837 → $1,095 → $1,436, up 71.5 percent.
• Insurance as a share of the association's operating budget: 26.9 percent → 31.2 percent → 34.4 percent.
• Denials and non-renewals doubled; associations pushed onto the secondary market rose from one in 2022 to eight in 2024.
• 23 of 62 respondents (37.1 percent) reported new limitations or exclusions. The most common: grills on decks (16), matching of siding and roofing materials (13), and number of units (6).

The respondent profile explains why this is a Minnesota townhome story above all: 74 percent townhome, 13 percent condominium, and 80 percent estimated that more than half their owners are aged 65 or over.

The matching exclusion is the quiet mechanism

Of the exclusions in that list, siding and roofing matching is the one that converts weather into a special assessment.

A partial hail loss on a townhome fleet damages some elevations and not others. Where the policy covers replacement of the damaged materials but excludes the cost of making undamaged portions match, the association is left holding the difference — and the difference is frequently larger than the covered loss. Combined with percentage-based wind and hail deductibles, that is the machinery that produces five-figure per-home assessments after a single storm.

What this means for a board's next annual report

The deductible figure has to be the right one. Many Minnesota master policies carry a flat all-peril deductible and a separate, much larger percentage-based wind and hail deductible. The statute says “the amount of the association's deductible.” An annual report disclosing only the flat figure tells owners almost nothing about their real exposure, because the wind and hail number is the one that becomes a loss assessment in Minnesota.

A percentage needs to be translated into dollars. “Five percent of total insurable values” is not a number an owner can insure against. The dollar amount it produces at current values is.

The warning is verbatim. Reproduce the sentence as the statute writes it, in capitals. This is the kind of requirement that gets softened in drafting because it looks shouty on the page, and softening it is non-compliance.

Owners need to be told their HO-6 may not respond. The point of the warning is that personal liability for a loss assessment does not depend on having coverage for it. Loss-assessment coverage under a Minnesota HO-6 is commonly written at $1,000 or $2,000 by default — against deductibles that now routinely run into six figures at the association level.

The quoted deductible is not always the issued deductible

One Minnesota fact pattern is worth knowing because it is invisible until a claim. In litigation arising from a May 2022 storm, an Eden Prairie planned community's broker had relayed a quote with a wind and hail deductible of “$50,000 per location per occurrence.” The policy the carrier actually issued read “FIVE PER CENT (5%) of the total insurable values, subject to a minimum of $50,000 per location per occurrence.”

The adjusted replacement cost was $1,446,736.43. Under the quoted deductible the association would have borne $600,000. Under the issued policy it bore the entire repair cost, because the loss did not exceed a deductible of roughly $1,546,766.⁶

The court ruling in that case decided only a motion to amend — leave granted on an unjust-enrichment theory against the carrier, denied as futile on negligence for want of a duty running from carrier to association. Nothing was decided about reformation or about the broker. The fact pattern is the lesson, not the holding: the binder-to-policy comparison is the control that catches a one-line difference worth $1.4 million, and a claim against the carrier rather than the broker faces a duty problem.

What to watch next

The state's insurance task force recommended going further. Its final report of 13 February 2026 asks the Legislature to amend § 515B.3-113 to require owners to carry an HO-6 policy and to name the association as an additional insured, to add language to the § 515B.4-107 resale disclosure, and to carve insurance-driven increases out of assessment-increase limits.⁷

None of that is law. The task force expired on submitting the report, no bill has been introduced, and the 95th Legislature does not convene until 12 January 2027. Chapter 82's answer, for now, is disclosure: tell owners the number and tell them they are personally liable.

This sets out what the statute requires. It is not advice about any particular policy or claim.