New England's heaviest storm risk runs from late August through October. Your board does not need a named storm to have a bad week - the remnants of one, or an ordinary summer cell that drops two to four inches in a few hours, does the same damage. And in Greater Boston, buildings fail from the same short list of causes every single time. None of them are expensive to fix in August. All of them are expensive to fix in September, at night, with water moving. Walk the property before the forecast, not during. What to look at: Roof drains and scuppers. Clear of debris, strainers actually present and secured. A single blocked drain on a flat roof turns the roof into a pond, and standing water finds the seams. Gutters and downspouts. Clean, connected, and discharging away from the foundation - not into a splash block that has shifted so runoff now runs back toward the building. Catch basins and area drains. Have them cleaned out. Spring debris and pollen sludge sit in there all summer, and nobody notices until the parking lot holds four inches of water. Sump pump. Test it by pouring water into the pit until the float triggers - do not just look at it. Check the discharge line for a clean exit, confirm the check valve holds, and if there is a battery backup, note the battery's date. Battery backups have a service life and most boards have never replaced one. If the building has no backup at all, price one now, because a sump pump is useless in the exact scenario where you need it most: a storm that takes the power out. Basement window wells, stairwells, and garage entries. Anything below grade needs a working drain. Check that the drain flows, not just that it exists. Trees. Have an arborist look at deadwood and limbs hanging over parked cars, walkways, and electrical service drops. A limb through a service drop is a power outage plus an insurance claim plus a dead sump pump, all at once. Roof penetrations and flashing. Vents, skylights, HVAC curbs, and chimney flashing are where roofs actually leak.

The roof bid comes in at $420,000. Your reserve account holds $150,000. You have a $270,000 gap and a contractor who needs an answer. Most boards default to a special assessment because it is the option they have heard of. But in a 30-unit building, that is roughly $9,000 per unit due inside 60 to 90 days, allocated by beneficial interest. Some owners write the check. Some open a HELOC. Some quietly stop paying their monthly dues to cover it - which is how a capital project turns into a delinquency problem, and how a delinquency problem turns into a financing problem for every owner in the building. The second option is an association loan. Massachusetts banks do lend to condominium associations, secured not by the building but by an assignment of the association's right to levy and collect assessments. Lenders generally want a board vote authorizing the loan (check your bylaws first - some documents require an owner vote), a signed contract and scope of work, clean delinquency numbers, and reserve and budget history. Run the same $270,000 both ways for a 30-unit building: Special assessment: about $9,000 per unit, due in 60 to 90 days. No interest cost. Maximum pressure on owners. Ten-year association loan: at rates in the range associations have recently seen, total debt service lands somewhere near $37,000 to $39,000 a year, which is roughly $105 to $115 per unit per month for ten years. Total interest over the life of the loan works out to roughly $3,500 per unit. Get an actual quote - rates move, and terms of 5, 10, and 15 years price very differently. Hybrid: adopt the assessment, then give owners a prepayment window - typically 30 to 60 days - to pay their share in full. Whatever is not prepaid gets financed, and only those owners carry the loan portion in their monthly assessment. Owners with cash avoid interest, owners without cash avoid a crisis, and the board gets its roof either way. This is the structure most boards land on once they see the numbers side by side.

The biggest Massachusetts condo story of the summer is still unfolding, and every trustee in the Commonwealth should be following it. Premier Property Solutions, a Boston-based management company that handled the finances of an estimated 200 condominium associations across Massachusetts, has collapsed. In a complaint filed in Suffolk Superior Court on June 2, 2026, the trustees of a 10-unit building at 30 Worcester Square in the South End allege that more than $805,000 was transferred out of the association's accounts through 64 separate transactions between June 2023 and February 2026, into four bank accounts with no known connection to the building. The money was not routine operating cash. The building burned in 2023, was left uninhabitable, and owners received roughly $2.97 million in insurance proceeds to fund the restoration. According to the complaint, the trustees only discovered the shortfall this spring, when they went to pay a contractor - and only confirmed it when they obtained records directly from the bank after the firm's principal stopped returning calls in May. Management reports as recent as April 2026 reportedly showed substantial funds available. The account held roughly $25,000. The firm has since made an assignment for the benefit of creditors, with KCP Advisory Group taking control of its assets, and a preliminary injunction hearing was held July 7. These are allegations that have not been proven in court, and the full picture across the other associations is still emerging - but counsel involved have described the potential exposure across all of them as running into the millions. Here is the part that matters for your board, and it has nothing to do with which company you hire. Every one of these associations had trustees who were reading reports instead of reading bank statements. The control that fails in cases like this is always the same one: the board's only window into its own money is a document produced by the person holding the money.