HOA Construction Dispute Attorney

Cory Cannon represents condominium and homeowners’ association boards (and the community association managers who support them) in construction performance disputes across Tampa Bay: payment fights, delay claims, contested terminations, and abandoned projects. We approach these disputes the way I was raised to look at construction, after generations of family history in the Florida construction trades: read the contract, read the pay applications line by line, walk the site, and compare what was billed against what was built.

An association construction project fails differently than a private one. The money comes from reserves, a special assessment, or a bank loan, and every dollar was approved in a recorded vote, in front of the membership. So when the contractor bills ahead of the work, lets the schedule slide into another rainy season, or stops showing up altogether, the board is not just managing a construction problem. It is managing a fiduciary problem, a budget problem, and a community of owners who want to know where their assessment money went.

What This Page Covers, and What It Does Not

This page is about performance disputes on association-funded projects: whether the contractor is entitled to the money it is demanding, who owns the schedule failure, whether the board can terminate, and what to do when the crew disappears mid-project. These disputes arise on the projects associations actually run: concrete restoration, roof replacement across multiple buildings, painting and waterproofing cycles, repaving, drainage and site work, clubhouse and amenity renovations.

One distinction matters before anything else. If your complaint is that the finished work itself is bad (a repair that leaks, stucco that cracks within a year, a system that fails after acceptance), that is a construction defect claim, and it follows a different legal track with its own pre-suit process and deadlines. Our condo and HOA construction defect attorney page covers it, and boards facing original-construction problems rather than a repair contract should start with our answer on whether an association can sue the developer. This page covers disputes about how the project is going, not the quality of completed work. For the full scope of our contractor-dispute practice, start with the construction litigation overview.

Why Association Construction Disputes Are Different

Condominium associations operate under chapter 718, Florida Statutes. Homeowners’ associations operate under chapter 720. Both chapters shape a construction dispute in ways a private owner never has to think about.

• The board owes fiduciary duties. Directors must act in the association’s interest, and every project decision (approving a draw, granting a time extension, terminating the contract) lands in the minutes, where members and future boards can read it. A dispute handled loosely becomes an exhibit later.
• The money is procedural. Reserve expenditures, special assessments, and construction loan draws each carry their own approval and notice requirements. When a contractor demands more money mid-project, that demand can force the board back to the membership. The contractor’s cash-flow problem becomes the association’s governance problem.
• Competitive bidding rules apply. A condominium association must obtain competitive bids for a contract that, in the aggregate, exceeds 5 percent of its total annual budget, including reserves (section 718.3026). For homeowners’ associations, the threshold is 10 percent (section 720.3055). Both statutes require these contracts to be in writing. The bid file the association built at the start of the project often becomes useful evidence at the end of it: it documents what the market actually charged for the scope, before anyone had a reason to argue.
• Authority questions cut both ways. The declaration, bylaws, and statutes determine which decisions the board may make on its own and which require a membership vote. We examine that authority question early, because a contractor facing termination will look for any argument that the board acted outside its documents.
• The site is occupied. Residents live through the project. Access windows, noise limits, closed balconies, lost parking: every schedule dispute plays out with owners watching, and contractor claims of “owner interference” often begin with ordinary resident friction that nobody documented at the time.

Milestone Inspections and Reserve Studies: Why Boards Are Signing Bigger Contracts

After the 2021 collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside, the Legislature rebuilt the rules for aging condominium buildings. Two of those rules now drive a large share of association construction work in Tampa Bay, and, with it, a large share of association construction disputes.

First, condominium and cooperative buildings three habitable stories or taller must undergo a milestone inspection (a structural inspection by a licensed architect or engineer) by December 31 of the year the building turns 30, measured from its certificate of occupancy, and every ten years after that (section 553.899). A local building official may require the first inspection at 25 years where local conditions justify it, including proximity to salt water. That describes much of the coastal condominium stock from Clearwater down through Sarasota.

Second, condominium associations must obtain a structural integrity reserve study (a study of the building’s structural components and the money needed to maintain them) at least every ten years. For budgets adopted on or after December 31, 2024, unit-owner-controlled associations that must obtain the study can no longer vote to waive or underfund reserves for those structural items, subject to narrow exceptions (section 718.112).

The practical result: more associations are under contract for structural repair work than the statutes ever pushed before, often on compressed timelines, with an engineer’s repair scope attached. That creates a negotiating problem the statutes did not solve. Contractors know when a board is working against a compliance date. An association that must show completed repairs to close out a milestone inspection finding has less room to hold the line against a padded pay application or a slipping schedule, and some contractors price that pressure in. Disciplined contract administration, backed by early legal review, is how a board takes that leverage back.

Payment Disputes on Association Projects

Three terms come up in nearly every payment fight, so we define them here. A pay application is the contractor’s periodic request for payment, usually certified, tied to the percentage of work completed. The schedule of values is the line-item breakdown of the contract price across categories of work: it is the ruler every pay application is measured against. Retainage is the percentage withheld from each payment and held until the work is complete, the owner’s main financial hold on performance.

The patterns we see on association projects are consistent:

• A front-loaded schedule of values. Early line items (mobilization, demolition, temporary protection) are priced above their real cost, so the contractor collects its margin before the hard work starts. If the project later stalls, the association discovers it has paid 60 percent of the price for 40 percent of the work.
• Billing ahead of progress. The percent-complete column advances faster than the building does. On a multi-building roof or restoration project, few board members can check the math from the parking lot.
• Stored materials games. The contractor bills for materials “stored” that are not on site, not insured, or not segregated for this project.
• Change orders priced after the work. Extras get performed on a handshake and priced once the board has no leverage. Disputed extras are a discipline of their own. Our change order dispute attorney page covers them in depth.
• Early release of retainage. The contractor asks the board to release retainage “to help cash flow.” Once it is gone, the association’s leverage over the punch list goes with it.

Our review is arithmetic before it is legal. We reconcile each pay application against daily reports, photographs, and inspection records, and we check the contractor’s pricing on extras and disputed line items against real bids from licensed local contractors, not against the contractor’s own paperwork. Where the dispute turns on how much structural work is physically complete (linear feet of spall repair, square footage of waterproofing membrane, roofing squares actually dried in), we retain independent licensed engineers to measure it. When the numbers are wrong, we can usually show a mediator, an arbitrator, or a judge exactly where.

Two cautions for boards mid-dispute. Do not exchange a progress payment for the wrong release: the answer to “should I sign a lien waiver?” depends entirely on which form is on the table. And if the fight has hardened into a full stop (the contractor refusing to work without payment the records do not support), our construction payment dispute lawyer page walks through the escalation paths.

Delay on Association Projects

Construction contracts manage time with a few standard tools. Liquidated damages are a per-day amount the contract fixes in advance for late completion, so nobody has to prove the daily cost of delay after the fact. Time-extension clauses say when the contractor gets more time instead of owing damages. Some contracts include a no-damages-for-delay clause, which limits the contractor to extra time (not extra money) when delays occur. Whether the association can hold the schedule depends on how those clauses were drafted and how the project was documented while it slipped.

Association projects carry delay pressures private jobs do not. The work is seasonal: concrete restoration and roofing in this region are planned around the rainy season and hurricane season, and a schedule that slips out of its weather window rarely slips by just the overrun. Milestone-inspection compliance dates do not move because a contractor is behind. Special assessments are collected on a schedule that assumed a completion date. And the buildings are occupied, which means every month of overrun is another month of closed balconies, scaffolding, and resident complaints that the board absorbs.

When we evaluate a delay dispute, we start with the notice provisions (most contracts require the contractor to claim a delay in writing, within a stated number of days, or lose it) and then rebuild the schedule story: what the critical path was (the sequence of tasks that controls the end date), what actually moved it, and whose conduct did the moving. Boards should know that contractors build owner-caused-delay claims out of slow approvals. A board that takes three weeks to vote on every submittal hands the contractor an argument. Setting a decision cadence at the start of the project, and documenting response times, closes that door. The full analysis (weather claims, supply-chain claims, acceleration demands, liquidated damages enforcement) lives on our construction delay claim lawyer page.

Termination and Abandonment

Terminating the contractor without creating a bigger claim

Most construction contracts allow two kinds of termination. Termination for cause ends the contract because the contractor defaulted: persistent schedule failure, failure to pay subcontractors, refusal to perform. Termination for convenience ends it without fault, usually at a defined price. The distinction controls who pays for what comes next, so contractors fight hard to convert a for-cause termination into a wrongful one.

The sequence is where boards get hurt. Nearly every contract requires a cure notice (a written notice describing the default and giving the contractor a stated number of days to fix it) before a for-cause termination is effective. A termination that skips or shortcuts that step can convert the association’s strongest position into its weakest: the contractor stops being the party in default and becomes the plaintiff. If the project is bonded, the performance bond almost always requires notice to the surety before termination as well; miss it and the bond’s value can evaporate. Our performance bond claims lawyer page explains that sequence. Before any board votes to terminate, the contract file should be reviewed against the termination clause step by step: the vote itself should be the last event in the sequence, not the first.

When the contractor abandons the job

Abandonment is usually unambiguous by the time a board calls us: the crew has been gone for weeks, calls go unanswered, subcontractors are phoning the manager about unpaid invoices. The steps that protect the association are practical ones, taken in order:

• Document the site as it stands. Dated photographs and video of every work area, stored materials, and unfinished conditions, before anyone touches anything.
• Secure the site and the materials. Materials the association has paid for through prior draws should be inventoried and protected.
• Send the contract-compliant notice. Even an absent contractor is entitled to whatever notice the contract requires. Serving it correctly preserves the association’s for-cause position.
• Bring in the completion contractor carefully. The cost to complete, above the unpaid contract balance, is the core of the association’s damages, so the completion contract, its bid file, and its accounting need to be built with litigation in mind from day one.

Termination rights, cure mechanics, and the clause-level detail behind all of this are covered on our construction contract dispute lawyer page.

When a Lien Hits the Association’s Property

Payment disputes on association projects escalate into lien filings, and condominium liens have a feature that surprises boards. Under section 718.121, work on the common elements that the association authorized is deemed performed with the express consent of every unit owner, so a contractor’s or subcontractor’s claim of lien can attach to all condominium parcels, in proportion to each owner’s share of common expenses. Individual owners can relieve their own units by paying their proportionate share. In practice, a lien recorded over a payment dispute puts every owner’s title in play at once, which is why boards feel the pressure immediately.

The lien statutes run on fixed clocks. These are the ones an association board needs on the wall:

These deadlines have exceptions and traps that depend on the facts: early termination of the contract, amended liens, and service details all move the clocks. Use our construction lien deadline calculator to map the dates for your project, and verify the result with counsel before relying on it.

An association served with a claim of lien has affirmative tools, not just defenses. Recording a Notice of Contest of Lien compresses the lienor’s one-year suit window to 60 days: the contractor must sue promptly or lose the lien. The association can also transfer the lien from the property to a cash or surety bond under section 713.24, clearing every owner’s title while the underlying fight continues. One caution belongs in every board’s calculus: under section 713.29, the prevailing party in a lien enforcement action recovers its attorney fees, which means fee exposure runs in both directions, and the decision to fight a lien should rest on the strength of the payment records, not on frustration. Our construction lien lawyer page covers the lien statutes in full, and if a lienor has already filed suit against association property, our lien foreclosure attorney page addresses that posture directly. If your project timeline is complicated, run the dates through the lien deadline calculator first and bring the output to the consultation.

How We Evaluate a Stalled or Disputed Project

Every engagement starts with the same file: the contract and its general conditions, the schedule of values, every change order and pay application, the project correspondence, the board minutes that touch the project, the draw history, and the site photographs. From that file, the analysis runs in a fixed order.

• Authority. Did the board have the power to sign what it signed, and does it have the power to do what it is contemplating now? This is the question opposing counsel will ask, so we ask it first.
• Money. We tie every dollar billed to work in place. The gap between the two (paid-for work that does not exist, or completed work that was never billed) is the spine of the dispute.
• Time. We reconstruct the schedule from records, not recollection, and assign each slippage to a cause and a party.
• Options. The board receives a written assessment of its positions: cure and continue, renegotiate, terminate, or litigate, with the risks of each stated plainly, including the fee-shifting exposure.

The reason we can do this work at the line-item level is background, not just practice focus. I am a Florida attorney who grew up around construction, in a family that has worked in the trades here for generations. Pay applications, mobilization costs, stored-materials billing, punch lists, critical path: this is a first language, not a learned one. Boards and managers should not have to translate their project for their lawyer.

If the Real Dispute Is With the Association’s Insurer

Some association projects are repair projects, funded, in whole or part, by insurance proceeds after a storm or other loss. If the true obstacle is not the contractor but the carrier (an underpaid or stalled claim that has starved the project of funds), that is an insurance dispute, and it belongs on a different track. Start with our condo and HOA insurance claim lawyer page, or the property insurance claims practice overview.

Fees in Association Construction Disputes

We do not apply one fee model to every association dispute, because the disputes are not all shaped alike. Draw reviews, cure-notice strategy, and termination sequencing are typically handled at hourly rates or flat fees for defined phases, so the board can budget the work and show the membership what it bought. Litigation is usually hourly, and in appropriate cases we will discuss hybrid structures. Two fee-shifting sources matter in this area: most construction contracts contain prevailing-party attorney fee clauses, and section 713.29 awards fees to the prevailing party in lien actions. Fee-shifting can fund a strong case, and it can penalize a weak one, in either direction, which is why our written assessment addresses it before the board commits to a course. For a fuller treatment, see who pays attorney fees in a construction dispute? Every engagement begins with a written agreement that states the model plainly.

Serving Tampa Bay Associations

We represent condominium and homeowners’ associations across the Tampa Bay region: Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Bradenton, Sarasota, Venice, and the communities between. The building stock here is exactly what the milestone-inspection statutes were written for: coastal, concrete, and aging into its structural-repair years. Association construction disputes are one part of our association practice; the full picture (governance, insurance, defects, and disputes) is collected on our condo and HOA lawyer page.

If your association’s project has stopped moving, or the contractor’s numbers have stopped matching the building, send us the contract, the pay applications, and the last three months of correspondence. The initial consultation is free, and the first thing we will give you is an honest read of where the project actually stands. Contact Cory Cannon to schedule it.