Florida now has two flood disclosure laws on the books, and between them they touch nearly every residential sale, lease, and condo transaction in the state. If you sit on an HOA board or manage properties professionally, the practical question isn't whether these laws apply to you — it's whether you can produce the documentation they assume you have.
This article is a plain-language overview, not legal advice. Statutory details matter — confirm your specific obligations with your association's counsel.
HB 1049: flood disclosure in home sales (effective October 1, 2024)
House Bill 1049, passed in the 2024 legislative session, requires sellers of residential real estate in Florida to give buyers a written flood disclosure before signing a contract. In broad strokes, the disclosure covers whether the seller has filed flood insurance claims and whether federal assistance (such as FEMA aid) has been received for flood damage to the property.
The intent is simple: buyers should learn about a property's flood history from the seller, not from the neighbors after closing. For boards and managers, the effect is indirect but real — when units in your community sell, sellers and their agents come asking what the association knows about flooding at the property.
SB 948: leases and condos join in (effective October 1, 2025)
Senate Bill 948 extended flood disclosure into the territory HOA boards and property managers deal with every day. As of October 1, 2025, written flood disclosures are required in residential leases, and condo and co-op transactions carry their own disclosure obligations — with real teeth: where required disclosures are missing or defective, buyers can have a 15-day right to cancel.
That moves flood history from "nice to have on file" to "document your landlord or seller may be legally required to produce." A landlord renewing twenty leases in a garden-style community and a condo association fielding estoppel-adjacent requests from unit sellers are both, functionally, in the flood-records business now.
What boards and managers should be documenting
Regardless of which statute is in play, the same underlying records keep coming up:
- Flood events on the property — dates, locations (garage, lobby, parking lot, specific roads), and severity, with photos where possible.
- Insurance claims filed for flood damage to common elements or units, and any FEMA or other federal assistance received.
- Recurring problem areas — the entrance that ponds every heavy rain, the street that becomes impassable during king tides. Patterns matter to buyers and insurers.
- What you told whom, and when — copies of the disclosures actually delivered, since the 15-day cancellation right turns on whether disclosure happened.
The hard part: contemporaneous records
Every board can reconstruct a rough flood history from memory and old emails. What's hard is producing a contemporaneous record — evidence created at the time of the event, with timestamps and photos, rather than a recollection assembled two years later when a sale is on the line. That's the gap most communities have today.
This is where a monitoring layer earns its keep. Floodi logs flood reports at your properties as they happen — timestamped, geolocated, with photos and severity — and keeps official context (NWS alerts, USGS gauge readings) alongside them. When a disclosure question arrives, you export the property's flood history instead of reconstructing it. It doesn't replace your attorney's judgment about what a specific disclosure must say, but it does mean the factual record exists when they ask for it.
A practical starting checklist
- Ask your counsel which of your communities and lease forms are covered by SB 948 today.
- Pull together whatever flood history you already have — claims, work orders, photos.
- Start capturing new events systematically from this hurricane season forward.
- Put someone's name next to "flood records" — undocumented events are usually nobody's job.
Boards that get ahead of this spend a few hours setting up a system. Boards that don't spend far longer reconstructing history under deadline pressure — with a buyer's cancellation right ticking.
If you manage HOA communities or a rental portfolio in Florida, the Florida Flood Readiness Program is the fastest way to see what systematic flood documentation looks like for your specific properties — free for qualifying organizations, no long-term commitment.