Chapter 720

Section 720.301 sets the vocabulary the rest of Chapter 720 relies on, and four of its definitions carry most of the weight on a residential street.

The last row is the entity the chapter governs, described on its own under homeowners association. Common area is Chapter 720's word for shared property; Chapter 718 uses a different term for a condominium, common elements. The same section names the offices the chapter refers to: “department” means the Department of Business and Professional Regulation under 720.301(5), and “division” means the Division of Florida Condominiums, Timeshares, and Mobile Homes in that department under 720.301(7).

What the chapter declines to create matters as much as what it defines. In 720.302(2), the Legislature says “it is not in the best interest of homeowners' associations or the individual association members thereof to create or impose a bureau or other agency of state government to regulate the affairs of homeowners' associations.” The same subsection gives the department two narrower jobs: hearing and determining election and recall disputes, and presuit mediation of other disputes involving covenant enforcement.

The chapter also marks its own edge. Under 720.302(4), Chapter 720 does not apply to an association subject to regulation under Chapter 718, Chapter 719 or Chapter 721, except where a provision of those chapters is expressly incorporated into Chapter 720. Chapter 718 is the condominium statute, so a condominium's association answers to Chapter 718 instead.

Two sections are the ones a Naples home's exterior runs into: 720.3035, on the standards for how a home looks, and 720.305, on the fines that follow a violation.

720.3035: appearance authority has to trace back to the documents

Under 720.3035(1)(a), the authority of an association, or of its architectural or similar committee, to enforce standards for the external appearance of a structure or improvement on a parcel is permitted only to the extent it is “specifically stated or reasonably inferred” in “the declaration of covenants or other published guidelines and standards authorized by the declaration of covenants.” The section names no roof cleaning, no pressure washing and no paver sealer.

So whether a community's documents reach a stained roof, or call a cleaning maintenance at all, is a question those documents answer, and it is taken up in whether roof cleaning counts as maintenance for an HOA. The section applied to a roof is laid out in the Florida rules for roof cleaning, and applied to a sealed driveway in the paver cleaning rules.

720.305: fines, with caps and a procedure in front of them

Section 720.305(2) lets an association levy “reasonable fines” for violations of the declaration, the bylaws or reasonable rules. It caps the fine for each violation and caps the total for a continuing violation fined by the day, in each case “unless otherwise provided in the governing documents,” and it keeps a fine below a threshold the section sets from becoming a lien against a parcel. The amounts are printed in the section itself, listed in the sources below.

The same subsection sets the written notice and the hearing a fine has to pass through before it can be imposed. How that procedure meets a real letter is the subject of responding to an HOA roof cleaning notice; this entry describes the statute, and what a particular notice asks for is written in that notice and the community's documents.