An association can no longer keep an unflattering study out of the packet

This is the practical consequence, and it is a real change in Minnesota practice.

A board that commissions a reserve study, receives a number it does not like, and declines to act on it has until now been able to treat the document as internal. From January, if it was obtained within three years, it goes to every buyer. There is no materiality filter, no board discretion, and no exception for a draft the board never adopted — the text is “any reserve study… obtained by the association.”

The foreseeable and slightly perverse response is that some associations will simply stop commissioning studies, since the disclosure duty attaches only to studies obtained. That response runs up against § 515B.3-1141's standing requirement to reevaluate reserve adequacy at least every third year, which does not go away, and against the fiduciary exposure of budgeting reserves without an analytical basis.

The three-year window is a rolling one

“Within the past three years” is measured from the disclosure, not from a fixed date. A study obtained in March 2025 is in the packet through March 2028 and then drops out — unless a newer one has replaced it, in which case the newer one is in.

Associations that update a study periodically will therefore often hold two documents inside the window. The statute does not say only the most recent; it says any study obtained in the past three years. A conservative reading produces both.

What has to be built into the resale workflow

Minnesota's turnaround requirement is unchanged — § 515B.4-107(d) still gives the association 10 days after a request to furnish the certificate. The packet got bigger; the clock did not move.

Three of the four new items do not exist at most Minnesota associations today, which is the real problem:

The fine schedule. Chapter 82 requires a published list of common violations, fine amounts and available remedies. Drafting it is a rulemaking, and from January rulemaking needs 21 days' notice and comment.

The collection policy. Also new: three notifications before referral, at least one by certified mail, and a requirement that foreclosure counsel send the pre-foreclosure notice by ordinary and certified mail.

The plain-language warning. A drafting job, but one worth doing once and centrally rather than per transaction.

An association that starts assembling this in January will miss 10-day deadlines in January. The materials are the same ones Chapter 82 requires for other purposes, so the sensible sequence is to produce them in the fourth quarter of 2026 and let the resale packet inherit them.

What Chapter 82 did not do to resale costs

It left the fees alone. S.F. 1253 would have added a new § 515B.1-118 providing that an association or its authorised agent “may not directly or indirectly charge a fee for the preparation or delivery of an estoppel letter or certificate,” with unauthorised fees “void,” and would have struck the clause in Minn. Stat. § 513.73, subd. 3(7) that exempts association estoppel fees from Minnesota's private-transfer-fee ban.

It was introduced on 10 February 2025, referred to Senate Judiciary and Public Safety, and never heard. Two actions in total, and it died with the biennium on 18 May 2026.³

So resale and estoppel fees at a Minnesota closing remain lawful and uncapped. Sellers should expect them; Chapter 82 changed what the packet contains, not what it costs.

The disclosure also carries the new insurance warning

Section 12 adds to the resale certificate a disclosure that the association's master insurance “has deductible amounts for property damage and wind or hail claims that may be assessed to a unit as a 'loss assessment',” together with the recommendation that an owner carry loss-assessment coverage at least equal to the association's deductible.

Read with the reserve-study item, the shape of the reform is clear: a Minnesota buyer should be able to see, from the packet alone, both what the building is going to need and what the insurance will not pay for.

Who is outside it

Under Minn. Stat. § 515B.1-102(b)(3), planned communities and cooperatives created before 1 June 1994 are outside MCIOA unless they have elected in. But note one asymmetry in the applicability statute: the resale certificate provisions have historically reached planned communities and cooperatives regardless of creation date, so the analysis for § 515B.4-107 is not identical to the analysis for the governance sections. The applicability list, not one answer assumed across the act, decides which sections apply.⁴

What to watch next

Nothing is pending. The insurance task force's February 2026 report recommends amending § 515B.4-107 further, to add HO-6-related language to the resale disclosure — a recommendation with no bill behind it and no sponsor named, in a body that dissolved on submitting the report.

This describes the statute. It is not advice about any particular transaction.