Responding to a Condominium Records Request: Ten Working Days, and Where Boards Go Wrong

Jason Hamilton Mikes, JD, MBA
Founder & Managing Shareholder

• Published September 25, 2026
• Reviewed by Jason Hamilton Mikes, JD, MBA, September 26, 2026
• Florida Statutes as of July 1, 2026
• Applies to: Condominiums

Most records disputes are not about the records. They are about a deadline the board did not treat as a deadline. Section 718.111(12) gives the association 10 working days from receipt of a written request, and after that a presumption of willful failure, a daily damages figure and the owner's attorney fees are all on the table. The requests that end badly follow the same short pattern, and it is a pattern a board can break with a written procedure and one responsible person.

The clock, and where it starts

Section 718.111(12)(b) requires the records to be made available to a unit owner within 45 miles of the condominium property, or within the county where the condominium property is located, within 10 working days after receipt of a written request by the board or its designee. Three features of that sentence create most of the trouble.

First, the trigger is receipt, not the board's next meeting. If the manager opens the letter on a Tuesday, the clock started Tuesday. The board does not get to wait until the monthly meeting, and a board that meets every other month cannot use its own calendar as an excuse.

Second, the request only has to be written. It does not have to be on a form, sent by certified mail, worded a particular way, or addressed to a particular officer. An e-mail to the manager is a written request. Boards that instruct owners to use a form and then ignore requests that arrive some other way are running the clock on themselves.

Third, working days are not calendar days, but ten working days is still under three weeks, and it is consumed quickly when the records sit with a third party or a prior management company. Assume the first two days go to locating the material rather than producing it. Where the records were never organized in the first place, the underlying problem is the one described in our guide to what the association must keep and where.

Reasonable rules, and what a rule cannot do

Section 718.111(12)(c)1.a. lets an association adopt reasonable rules regarding the frequency, time, location, notice and manner of record inspections and copying. Those five words are the whole of the rulemaking power, and a rule reaching beyond them is not enforceable.

Rules that are generally defensible set inspection hours during normal business hours, require reasonable advance notice, designate a location at the management office or on the condominium property, provide that the inspection is supervised, and set a per-page charge for copies the association produces. Rules that are not defensible impose a flat administrative fee for making a request, require the request to be notarized, cap the number of documents an owner may see, require board approval before any inspection, or bar an owner from bringing an accountant or attorney.

That last point is worth stating clearly because boards resist it. The inspection right belongs to the member and to any person the member authorizes as a representative. An owner may send an attorney, an accountant or an adult child. The association may ask for written authorization identifying the representative. It may not refuse the representative because it dislikes who it is.

A rule also cannot lengthen the statutory deadline. An association may not adopt a rule providing that inspections occur only on the third Thursday of the month if the effect is that a request received on the fourth Thursday is answered outside ten working days.

Asking why

This is a live source of friction, and the statute resolves it in one clause. Section 718.111(12)(c)1.a. provides that the association may not require a member to demonstrate any purpose or state any reason for the inspection. The owner's motive is legally irrelevant. An owner who is suing the association, running for the board, or simply unhappy has the same right as anyone else.

There is a practical distinction worth preserving. Nothing prevents a manager from asking what the owner is looking for in order to find it faster. "Are you after the roof contract or the roof bids?" is a service question and it usually shortens the production. What the association cannot do is treat the answer as a condition. The moment the response becomes "tell us why and then we will decide," the association has required a purpose, and it has handed the owner an argument about willfulness in the same breath.

Train the manager on the difference and script it. Ask the clarifying question, then say plainly that the owner does not have to answer and that the records will be produced either way. Put that sentence in the written acknowledgment.

Copies, devices and charges

The association must allow a member or an authorized representative to use a portable device, including a smartphone, tablet, portable scanner or any other technology capable of scanning or taking photographs, to make an electronic copy of the official records in place of the association providing copies. The association may not charge the member or the representative for use of the portable device.

That provision has quietly removed most copying disputes, and a board should welcome it. An owner photographing documents at the management office costs the association nothing, produces no per-page argument, and closes the request faster than any copy job. Refusing to allow a phone, insisting the owner pay for staff-made copies instead, or charging a scanning fee are all violations of a rule the statute states without qualification.

Where the association does make copies itself, a reasonable per-page charge under its adopted rules is permissible. Where the records are already digital, the cheapest and fastest answer is usually to send a link. Associations that have built out a records portal find that most requests are answered by pointing the owner at documents already posted, and that the portal itself is evidence of a good-faith system.

What it costs to get this wrong

The consequences stack, and each is independent of the others.

• The presumption. Failure to make the records available within 10 working days after receipt creates a rebuttable presumption that the association willfully failed to comply. Rebuttable means the association can explain itself, but the burden has moved and the explanation has to be good.
• Minimum damages. The owner is entitled to actual damages or to minimum damages for the association's willful failure to comply. Minimum damages are $50 per calendar day for up to 10 days, beginning on the 11th working day after receipt of the written request.
• Attorney fees. The failure to permit inspection entitles any person prevailing in an enforcement action to recover reasonable attorney fees from the person in control of the records who, directly or indirectly, knowingly denied access. This is the number that matters. The damages are capped at a few hundred dollars. The fees are not capped at all.
• The Division. An owner may complain to the Division of Florida Condominiums, Timeshares, and Mobile Homes, which can investigate and impose civil penalties. Most records disputes that escalate arrive there before they arrive in court.
• Criminal exposure. The 2024 amendments added criminal penalties, described below.

Boards consistently misjudge the arithmetic. A five-hundred-dollar damages ceiling sounds survivable, so the request is treated as a low-stakes annoyance. The fee-shifting provision is what converts a small dispute into a five-figure one, and it does not reward an association that answered late.

The criminal penalties added in 2024

This is new enough that many boards have not absorbed it, and it is the reason a records request should never be handled casually. Chapter 2024-244 added three criminal provisions to section 718.111(12)(c).

1. A director, officer or association member who willfully and knowingly or intentionally violates the records access requirements commits a misdemeanor of the second degree.
2. A person who willfully and knowingly or intentionally defaces or destroys accounting records that are required to be maintained during the period for which they must be kept, or who fails to create or maintain those records with the intent of causing harm to the association or one of its members, commits a misdemeanor of the first degree.
3. A person who willfully and knowingly or intentionally refuses to release or otherwise produce association records with the intent to avoid or escape detection, arrest, trial or punishment for the commission of a crime, or to assist another person in doing so, commits a felony of the third degree.

Read those elements carefully before repeating them to a board, because the intent requirements are demanding and these provisions do not criminalize a late response. Negligence, disorganization and a missed deadline are not crimes. Shredding ledgers to hide something is. The practical significance is narrower but real. It removes any argument that refusing to hand over records is a purely civil matter, and it makes the destruction of accounting records during a dispute a decision no volunteer should make without counsel.

There is a related civil provision worth knowing. Under section 718.111(12)(f), an outgoing board or committee member must relinquish all official records and association property in his or her possession or control to the incoming board within 5 days after the election, and the Division must impose a civil penalty on an outgoing member who willfully and knowingly fails to do so.

The mistakes, and the fixes

Nearly every records case we see comes out of the same short list.

A workable procedure fits on one page. Log the request with the date received. Acknowledge it in writing the same week, stating the date the records will be available. Identify which categories are implicated and where they live. Redact and produce, with the statutory checklist. Send contested items to counsel early rather than on day nine. Keep the log, the checklist and the production for seven years. Our records request checklist and our guide to responding to records requests walk through the same sequence in more detail.

Where a request looks like the opening move in a larger dispute, or where the owner already has counsel, call the association's attorney at the start rather than after the deadline. The first ten days usually determine whether the matter ever becomes a claim. If it does, the association will be explaining what it did in those ten days in a forum described in our overview of arbitration and mediation.

The fix that prevents most of this list

Read the left column again. Waiting for the next meeting, fighting about copies, holding an entire production while one item is reviewed, losing the file in a management transition — each of those is a retrieval problem, and each of them disappears if the records are already online when the request arrives. Our standing recommendation to condominium boards is to digitize every official record outside the exempt categories and post all of it in the owner-only section of the association's website, well beyond the list section 718.111(12)(g)2. requires. A board that has done that answers most requests the day they arrive, and answers them with a link.

This is practice advice rather than a rule, and it has limits worth stating. The portal does not answer a request for something that is not in it. It does not move the 10 working days, which still run from receipt whatever the site contains. And the categories described in section 718.111(12)(c)5.a.–h. never go on the website; subparagraph (g)3. requires protected content inside a posted document to be redacted first, and posting more records means reviewing more of them. A portal built without that review step becomes its own entry on the table above, and the most expensive one.

Contact Hamilton Mikes

Hamilton Mikes helps Southwest Florida condominium boards answer records requests on time, build a written response procedure, and resolve requests that have already become disputes or Division complaints. Call 239-594-7227 or visit our Official Records page.