A homebuilding giant is lobbying for the power to collect endless profits from homeowners

A bill backed by Fortune 500 homebuilder Lennar Corp. would to let developers lock homebuyers into paying perpetual fees that do nothing but pad developer profits.

Photo credit: CBRE

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Homebuilding giant Lennar Corp. is lobbying Florida lawmakers to let residential developers lock homebuyers into paying never-ending fees that would turn housing subdivisions into fountains of endless profit.

Records show that lobbyists for one of the country’s largest homebuilding corporations began shopping the idea in the Florida Legislature shortly after an appellate court ruled the scheme illegal under the state’s current laws.

The Lennar-backed legislation would overturn that court decision, in which another developer was ordered to refund nearly $35 million in fees it had improperly collected from residents of a retirement community south of Orlando.

It could also cripple a series of similar, and still-pending, lawsuits against other developers that have engaged in the same tactic — including a potential class-action complaint targeting Lennar, which did more than $35 billion in sales last year.

The legislation remains very much in play as Florida lawmakers enter an uncertain final week of their 2025 legislative session — thanks to some last-minute maneuvering in the Capitol that appears meant to sidestep a key lawmaker who has called the proposal “very problematic for consumers and homeowners in Florida.”

Representatives for Miami-based Lennar, one of the most influential corporations in in Tallahassee, did not respond to requests for comment.

The issue involves master-planned communities that entice buyers with recreational facilities for residents — amenities like golf courses and clubhouses, spas and fitness centers, and tennis and bocce ball courts.

Often, the developer will turn those amenities over to the community’s homeowners’ association, or HOA, which collects assessments from residents to cover the cost of operations and maintenance. Residents who fail to pay their assessments can have liens placed on their property and ultimately lose their homes to foreclosure.

Some developers have chosen instead to retain ownership of those facilities for themselves. But they are still binding homebuyers to covenants that compel them to pay fees to the developer or another for-profit company in perpetuity. And they are then baking a profit margin for themselves into those charges — which can sometimes exceed more than $100 a month.

The strategy of setting up privately controlled “club plans” — and charging residents “amenity fees” or “membership fees” that a developer pockets as profit — relies on an aggressive reading of Florida’s homeowners’ association laws.

It’s a strategy that allows residential developers to charge homeowners unlimited fees that they alone control — without any input from residents or the HOA — and that residents are forced to pay under threat of foreclosure.

It’s also illegal. That’s according to Florida’s Sixth District Court of Appeal, which covers a territory stretching from Orlando to Naples. The appellate court ruled in June 2023 in a case known as Avatar v. Gundel that these kinds of fees amount to the same thing as HOA assessments. And HOA assessments cannot include a profit markup for a private company.

The Florida Supreme Court later allowed the ruling to stand.

The Sixth DCA issued its decision despite protests from the Florida Home Builders Association, an industry lobbying group, which warned in legal briefs that the ruling would have “an immediate and far-reaching impact across the state of Florida.”

But it’s not clear that the perpetual profits strategy is all that widespread right now.

During the case — which began in 2017 and centered on a retirement community in Polk County called “Solivita” that was built by a company later sold to Taylor Morrison Homes — the developer only identified 11 other planned communities using a similar club plan model.

More than half them are associated with Lennar developments, according to corporate disclosure records.

The Fortune 500 giant seems to have recognized the threat immediately.

Just a few months after the ruling in the Solivita case, records show Lennar lobbyists began pressing the Florida Legislature to overturn the decision by passing a law that would exempt amenity fees from the profit limits placed on HOA assessments.

“As you’re working to identify areas of the HOA law potentially in need of clarification, we had another client bring an issue to our attention,” Ashley Kalifeh, a lobbyist at the firm Capital City Consulting, wrote in an October 2023 email to staffers in the Florida House of Representatives.

“Apparently, there are some who are make the argument that amenity fees and assessments are one [and] the same,” Kalifeh added. “This is hindering the ability to operate clubs for the benefit of members due to the inability to collect revenue sufficient to support them.”

Kalifeh didn’t identify the client. But a short time later, another Capital City lobbyist emailed proposed legislation to a staffer in the Florida Senate. The document included an explanation that explicitly referenced Lennar.

“Homeowners are claiming that Lennar is double dipping with a club fee and HOA assessment fee,” the document read. “And so this needs to be clarified in the statute to avoid some HoA’s from conflating the two.”

The proposal never made it into a bill during last year’s session. But amenity fees may have become a more urgent issue for Lennar this year.

That’s because the company was recently hit with a potential class-action suit that accuses Lennar of illegally overcharging homeowners in ChampionsGate, a resort-like community of more than 1,000 homes near Walt Disney World.

Eight weeks after that suit was filed, amenity fee legislation similar to what Lennar’s lobbyists had proposed appeared in Senate Bill 1118.

It’s a sweeping piece of legislation that contains an assortment of favors for some of Florida’s largest developers — including provisions that would dissolve voter-approved protections for rural lands in Orlando, enable a publicly traded pulp company to build an ethanol plant in Fernandina Beach, and make it easier for developers to build subdivisions on farmland.

Lennar isn’t the only developer pushing lawmakers for the amenity fee changes. Emails show that a lobbyist for the Kolter Group has been working with Lennar’s lobbyists on the issue, too.

Kolter is also facing an amenity fee-related lawsuit alleging that the company has overcharged residents of a roughly 525-home community in Lakeland.

Senate Bill 1118 stalled midway through session when a key senator refused to hold a hearing on it: Sen. Jennifer Bradley, a Republican from near Jacksonville who is one of the Legislature’s leading voices on HOA issues and who chairs the Senate Regulated Industries Committee.

But Lennar and the broader homebuilder lobby may be trying to work around her.

After the Senate Regulated Industries Committee held its final hearing of this year’s session — presumably killing Senate Bill 1118 — a new version of the amenity fee legislation suddenly surfaced as a last-minute amendment to an unrelated bill in the Florida House of Representatives. Lennar lobbyists have discussed the issue directly with the chief of staff to House Speaker Danny Perez (R-Miami), records show.

The revamped House bill — House Bill 579 — also added other elements of Senate Bill 1118, including a provision that would help Jacksonville-based Rayonier Advanced Materials build an ethanol plant in Fernandina Beach that has been fiercely opposed by locals.

The full House could take up the package at any time during the final week of session.

At the same time, the sponsor of Senate Bill 1118 — Sen. Stan McClain, a Republican from Ocala — orchestrated a last-minute rewrite of another bill he is sponsoring. Senate Bill 492 was initially limited solely to issues dealing with mitigation banks. But the changes, made during a meeting last week of the Senate Rules Committee, turned the bill into a potential “vehicle” for any manner of development-related amendments.

And McClain is sponsoring yet another bill — Senate Bill 1080 — that could that could become a landing spot for an amenity fees amendment.

Bradley, who serves on the Rules Committee, tried to extract a promise from McClain that he wouldn’t use another bill as a means to resurrect the amenity fee legislation.

“I know that your companion on the House side includes an amenity fees provision, which I would find to be very problematic for consumers and homeowners in Florida,” Bradley said during a recent hearing on Senate Bill 1080. “Is it your intent that this bill will move forward without an amenity fees provision?”

“That is my intent,” McClain responded.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the bill that was the subject of a discussion between Sens. Jennifer Bradley (R-Fleming Island) and Stan McClain (R-Ocala.).