A two-bedroom condo on Ocean Boulevard and a three-bedroom house ten minutes inland are technically in the same city. In 2026, they are behaving like they belong to different markets entirely.
Look at Pompano Beach's numbers from the first half of this year and something doesn't add up at first glance. Single-family home prices are climbing hard. Condo prices, especially in older buildings, are dropping just as hard. If you're comparing a house to a condo here, the gap between those two trend lines isn't noise. It's the most useful piece of information in the entire market, and almost nobody is reading it correctly.
The number that doesn't add up
Depending on which slice of 2026 you look at, the story reads differently, and both versions are true at once. Year-to-date data compiled from Broward, Palm Beaches and St. Lucie Realtors and BeachesMLS through June 2026 showed the citywide single-family median sales price up 7.5 percent to $535,000, with the average sales price up 22.5 percent to roughly $882,429. Condo and townhouse sales volume rose 5.2 percent over the same stretch, but the year-to-date median price for that segment fell 4.7 percent, to $276,250.
Zoom into a single month and the split gets sharper. A June 2026 market recap built on Zillow and Redfin figures put the single-family median at $604,000, up 28.1 percent year over year, while the condo median sat at $250,000, down 14.7 percent, and the citywide price per square foot slid 5.1 percent to $290.
Both readings are accurate. They're just measuring different slices of the same event: a repricing that is landing unevenly across Pompano Beach's condo stock depending on how exposed each individual building is to a law that finally has teeth in 2026.
A cheaper condo in Pompano Beach right now isn't automatically a better deal. It might be a building that just started telling the truth about what it owes.
What changed on January 1, 2026
Florida's response to the 2021 Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside created two separate obligations for condominium and cooperative buildings three stories or taller: a milestone structural inspection tied to the building's age, and a Structural Integrity Reserve Study, or SIRS, that forces an association to actually save for eight specific structural components rather than voting to skip the bill.
The mechanism that matters for 2026 buyers is narrow and specific. For budgets adopted on or after January 1, 2025, associations subject to SIRS lost the ability to waive those structural reserves at all. For associations that had previously voted to waive or reduce them under an older budget, full reserve funding according to the study's schedule had to begin January 1, 2026, a deadline the Department of Business and Professional Regulation confirms is now in effect statewide. For decades, a board could keep monthly dues artificially low by voting to underfund reserves. That option is gone for the roof, load-bearing structure, plumbing, electrical, waterproofing, windows and fireproofing systems the law now treats as non-negotiable.
Pompano Beach has a specific geography problem layered on top of that timing. The statewide milestone rule triggers a first inspection at 30 years, but buildings within three miles of the coastline face the same requirement at 25 years. Nearly all of Pompano Beach east of the Florida Turnpike, including the A1A corridor and the stretch near the Hillsboro Inlet, falls inside that coastal zone. Much of that beachfront condo stock went up between the late 1960s and the 1980s, which means a large share of it is now 40 to 55 years old, according to a local milestone inspection engineering firm that tracks compliance along this stretch. It is not approaching its first deadline. It is decades past it.
Separately, Broward County's own Building Safety Inspection Program requires structures 25 years or older to be reinspected every ten years, a layer the City of Pompano Beach confirms sits alongside the state milestone law, not instead of it.
What "the bill coming due" has looked like elsewhere
The dollar figures attached to this mandate elsewhere in South Florida explain why buyers have started pricing risk into older buildings before an actual assessment notice ever arrives. At the Cricket Club, a bay-front building in North Miami built in 1975, owners were hit with a special assessment reported at roughly $134,000 per unit. At Mediterranean Village in Aventura, assessments reportedly reached as high as $400,000 per unit. At Palm Bay Yacht Club in Miami, a 235-unit, 27-story building, the total assessment reached $46 million, or up to $175,000 per unit.
None of those three buildings sit in Pompano Beach. They sit in the same regulatory environment, subject to the same law, and they show what happens when a building's deferred maintenance finally gets measured instead of voted away.
Old stock and new stock are not the same asset
| Older coastal stock (built 1960s-1980s) | New construction (2025-2027) | |
|---|---|---|
| Milestone inspection status | Already past the 25- or 30-year trigger | Not due for decades |
| SIRS reserve funding | Must be fully funded starting 2026, no waiver allowed | Starts near zero deferred maintenance |
| 2026 price trend | Declining, citywide condo median near $250,000-$276,000 | Holding or rising, from roughly $2 million into eight figures |
| Representative projects | 1970s-80s A1A corridor towers | Salato Residences, and other branded and boutique towers under construction |
Salato Residences illustrates the other side of the split clearly. The nine-story, 40-unit building at 305 Briny Avenue topped out in May 2025 with completion set for 2026, developed by U.S. Development with Kast Construction as general contractor, Randall Stofft Architects as architect of record, and interiors by Steven G. Residence prices run from $2 million to $4.9 million, and according to Multi-Housing News, nearly 60 percent of units had sold at the time of reporting, with $73.8 million in construction financing secured from Maxim Capital Group.
A handful of other towers underway along the same stretch of coastline are following the same pattern: new construction with reserve studies that start from a clean slate, priced with no discount attached, because there is no deferred structural liability to discount.
Old buildings aren't just getting cheaper, some are getting replaced
The clearest evidence that this is a structural repricing rather than a demand slump is what's happening to some of the oldest parcels themselves. A major investment firm has been assembling small, aging oceanfront buildings north of downtown Pompano Beach into a single site for a proposed 15-story, 59-unit tower, having already acquired a seven-unit building dating to 1951 and put an adjacent 1953 duplex under contract. The city's Development Review Committee considered the rezoning and land use amendment on February 18, 2026, and as of that meeting, formal site plans had not yet been filed.
That is the mandate working exactly as the legislature intended, just not in the direction most sellers were hoping for. Post-Surfside structural requirements have made holding an aging, undercapitalized building materially more expensive, which accelerates exactly this kind of teardown-and-rebuild economics on parcels with strong land value and weak structural bones.
Why houses didn't move the same way
Single-family homes in Florida are governed by Chapter 720, not Chapter 718. There is no shared structural reserve obligation, no SIRS, no milestone inspection tied to a certificate of occupancy date. The rally in Pompano Beach house prices this year is a straightforward supply story: single-family inventory has fallen more than 22 percent and months of supply sits near 5.1. Nothing about a house's price is being adjusted downward for a liability that doesn't exist on that side of the ledger. Condos and houses aren't just different property types in Pompano Beach right now. They're subject to entirely different regulatory exposure, and the price charts reflect that split precisely.
What to actually check before calling a low price a bargain
A discounted price per square foot in an older building isn't information about the unit. It's a signal about the association behind it. Before treating that discount as value, request:
- The most recent Structural Integrity Reserve Study, or written confirmation that none exists
- The milestone inspection report and, if Phase 2 testing was triggered, the engineer's findings
- The reserve funding schedule and whether actual contributions match it
- Board meeting minutes from the last 12 months for any assessment under discussion
- The date the current budget was adopted, since anything adopted after December 31, 2024 cannot waive SIRS reserves
Not every Pompano Beach condo carries the same exposure
The city's condo stock isn't one market any more than "condo" is one property type. Palm Aire's golf-course buildings, the boating-oriented stock around Harbor Village, Garden Isles, Cypress Harbor and Terra Mar, the beachfront towers of Hillsboro Shores, and the redevelopment parcels concentrated in Old Pompano each carry a different age profile, a different structural exposure, and a different reason a buyer might choose one over another. A blended citywide median flattens all of that into a single number that describes none of these buildings accurately.
Frequently asked questions
Does this law apply to single-family homes or HOAs? No. SIRS and milestone inspections apply to condominium and cooperative buildings three habitable stories or taller under Chapter 718. Single-family HOAs fall under Chapter 720 and face different reserve rules entirely.
What's the difference between a milestone inspection and a SIRS? A milestone inspection is a physical structural examination performed by a licensed engineer or architect, triggered by the building's age. A SIRS is a financial planning document that tells the association how much it needs to reserve, and by when, to maintain those same structural components. Florida requires both, and they often get scheduled together.
If a condo's price already dropped, is the risk already priced in? Not necessarily. A lower list price reflects the market's general wariness toward older, uninspected or underfunded buildings. It does not confirm the specific building has a completed SIRS, a clean milestone report, or fully disclosed reserve status. That still has to be verified document by document.
Is this a bad time to buy any condo in Pompano Beach? It depends entirely on the building, not the city average. A well-funded, recently inspected older building can be a sound purchase at a fair price. The risk sits with buildings where documentation is incomplete or reserves don't match the funding schedule, and those buildings exist at every price point.
Comparing an older building's discount against a new tower's premium isn't something a listing sheet will do for you. If you're weighing that decision in Pompano Beach, Engel & Völkers Fort Lauderdale can pull the SIRS, the milestone report and the reserve funding schedule on any building you're considering before you write an offer. Contact us.
