In Florida, Lawsuits Abound Over Allegedly Shoddy Condo Construction

Condominium developers and building contractors are facing a wave of construction-defect lawsuits in Florida, where legal and financial propellants are driving the litigation, along with the sheer volume of condo development. 

And the pileup of cases may not recede anytime soon.

“They’re going to continue to spike for the next several years,” said Miami-based attorney Scott Kravetz, office managing partner of law firm Duane Morris. “If you just look out the window and you see all the cranes, it seems likely that this defect litigation is going to continue to spike for years to come. … You’ve got more high-rises presently being built within a five-mile radius of Downtown Miami area than in the entire state of California.”

Some owners sue over construction defects long after their condos are built, because, while some mistakes are quickly identified, latent defects manifest themselves slowly. Florida law gives condo owners a seven-year statute of limitations, or “statute of repose,” to sue developers and contractors for defective construction.

For example, Kravetz represents a billionaire who bought a penthouse about six years ago at the Arte oceanfront condominium in Surfside, a Miami suburb. The Real Deal reported that the owner of the penthouse is a company controlled by Ramzi Musallam, managing partner of New York-based Veritas Capital Management. He paid $33 million in 2020 for the penthouse, which allegedly has defects that include glass and glazing problems and a mechanical system that allows water intrusion. 

A spokesman for the developer, New York-based Alex Sapir, told TRD that the lawsuit is “meritless,” and an attorney for the joint-venture construction contractor, Americaribe-Moriarty, declined to comment. Sapir’s office did not return a request for comment by the time this issue went to press.

“Historically, in a development boom like there’s been in the last several years, quality gets compromised for quantity, time and time again,” Kravetz told Commercial Observer. At the 12-story, 16-unit Arte condominium, “we have seen significant mechanical deficiencies throughout the building that have caused excessive condensation,” he said.

Water intrusion, a common construction defect in Florida, is “hard to defend,” Kravetz said. “The defenses we see all the time are the contractors say they built it per plans and specs, and they got approvals from the building department. And that’s just not an adequate defense.”

As new luxury condos in Florida increasingly sell for seven- and eight-figure prices, the buyers have become affluent enough to aggressively litigate over defects in construction or poor substitutions for promised materials and finishes. “A lot of these condo units are selling for millions, so you’ve got sophisticated buyers, and, if they don’t get the product they wanted to acquire, they also have the means to litigate,” said Ralf Rodriguez, a Miami-based specialist in construction law with law firm Cozen O’Connor. “So, you’re seeing a lot of that.” 

Rodriguez said his law firm represents building contractors as well as condo owners and developers in more than two dozen active construction-defect cases across Florida. His firm recently won a multimillion-dollar settlement on behalf of the condo’s homeowners association (HOA) at a new building where stormwater stagnated on balcony floors and seeped into the mortar. 

“Then you get this efflorescence that comes out from underneath the finishing tile at the edge of the balcony, and it begins to work its way down the exterior wall,” Rodriguez said. Calcium deposits accumulated in the stormwater, which passed beneath the finishing tile before cascading off the edge of the balconies. “It was damaging the units below, where calcium deposits were hitting the glass and staining the glass,” Rodriguez said. “It was kind of an ugly situation.”

After new condominiums open for occupancy, Florida law requires condominium HOAs to arrange for independent inspections of the buildings, then notify the developer of possible construction defects, before filing a lawsuit to get them fixed. Defects often are detected during this due-diligence process.

The state’s climate and geography add to the vulnerability of buildings in Florida, especially in coastal regions with corrosive salt air and a high water table just below ground. 

“You go down three feet, and you hit the water table,” Rodriguez said. In addition, Florida’s construction industry has too few skilled workers and too many unlicensed contractors, he said. “The people working on some of these projects are not necessarily people who know what they’re doing, so that’s a recipe for disaster.”

The numbers seem to bear this out, too. The Association of Builders and Contractors reported Feb. 18 that employment in the U.S. construction industry grew to 9 million in 2025, but many jobs remain unfilled, and the industry faces a nationwide shortage of 349,000 workers.

But, besides the volume of condo development in Florida, the biggest driver of lawsuits over construction quality may be heightened awareness of personal liability for defects – part of the legal fallout from a deadly partial collapse of a 12-story beachfront condo in Surfside in 2021.

Champlain Towers South was 40 years old when the condo came down, killing 98 people. Corroded steel in the building’s reinforced concrete structure was a major factor in the disaster. Florida lawmakers subsequently enacted tougher regulations that require HOAs to closely monitor the condition of older condominium buildings three stories or taller and to maintain sufficient financial reserves for future repairs.

Though the Surfside disaster has focused attention on aging condominiums, the disaster’s impact also has been felt at brand-new condo buildings. HOA officers and directors and their advisers are now wary that they could be personally liable for the consequences of defective construction.

“The impact of Surfside transcends just older condos. The impact of Surfside is it imputes liability to parties that before didn’t think that they had exposure to defect claims,” Rodriguez said. “It certainly has awakened and opened the eyes of engineers and [HOA] board members who have fiduciary duties, and, if they fail to follow those duties, they can be held personally liable. … That’s the lesson from Surfside. Even the lawyers who were advising on Surfside were exposed to liability.”

Brett Duker, a partner at Boca Raton law firm Sachs Sax Caplan, agreed that personal liability, post-Surfside, has contributed to a spike in condo-defect litigation, citing “increased statutory obligations of [HOA] directors and officers to look at the repair and maintenance conditions of the common property.”

Ongoing condo construction in Florida suggests that the statewide uptick in defect lawsuits has not yet peaked, Duker said. “I don’t know that we have reached a peak,” he said. “There are 10-plus buildings in Miami-Dade County that are in various stages of construction. I’ve certainly seen announcements of other buildings that are going to be in preconstruction. In West Palm Beach, there’s a lot of construction going on, and obviously that has become a very popular place to develop housing.”

No slowdown is in sight from the vantage point of attorney Mark Stempler, managing shareholder of the West Palm Beach office of law firm Becker & Poliakoff. He is currently handling construction-defect lawsuits by owner associations at four condominiums in Boca Raton, including three with water intrusion issues. At one of the three, a 32-unit complex called Boca Beach Residences, water chronically seeps into an underground parking garage, even on sunny days, the West Palm Beach Post reported, citing comments by a couple who paid $4 million for a condo there. The Post also reported that Ignacio Diaz, co-owner and managing partner of the developer, Group P6, declined the newspaper’s request for comment.

Stempler said common sources of water intrusion in condominiums include subterranean parking garages with inadequate waterproofing, stucco that cracks excessively due to improper application, and tilted balcony slabs that push stormwater into condo units.

The uptick in condo-defect litigation in Florida is due to rapid development “coupled with some cases of lax oversight or improper construction methods,” Stempler said. But he challenged the premise that condo builders and developers are more vulnerable to defect claims in Florida than they are elsewhere. 

“I don’t know that it’s a Florida-specific thing,” he said. “It’s just because of the number of condominiums and high-rise buildings we have down here. Maybe that makes it more prevalent in terms of a statistic.”

Miami-based real estate broker and podcaster Peter Zalewski, a longtime observer of the South Florida condo market, said developer inexperience is a common element in recent condo-defect lawsuits.

“The reason it’s making headlines now is that you have newbie developers,” said Zalewski, citing the difficulty of profitably breaking into the Miami condo development market. “Their big focus is marketing, so it’s all done on the front. And on the back end, some of these developers aren’t even general contractors. … They may or may not know how the hell to build.”

Experienced developers know Miami condo projects, especially high-rises, almost invariably trigger litigation, so they take precautions in anticipation of lawsuits, he said. “And newbie developers, that’s just part of their learning curve.”

For example, he said, the new Missoni Baia condominium in Miami’s Edgewater area was the first condo project in the city by OKO Group, led by billionaire developer Vladislav Doronin. The condo association at Missoni Baia has filed a lawsuit against OKO and other defendants alleging 76 construction defects in the 249-unit, 60-story tower, ranging from cracked floor slabs, the absence of hot water in parts of the building, defective fire alarms, and water intrusion in units and common areas, according to TRD. Doronin declined to comment to TRD, and did not return Commercial Observer’s request for comment by press time.

Regardless of their experience, developers and contractors are dealing with more sophisticated condo buyers willing to litigate as sale prices ascend. 

“What is acceptable versus what is expected, especially when you’re dropping big money, it can vary, and that’s the rub. These people feel like they’re getting gold, and, if they get silver, they’re going to push back,” Zalewski said. “If you’ve got a guy dropping $300,000 on a condo, he probably doesn’t have the wherewithal, nor does he have the desire and the time, to get involved in one of these lawsuits.”