Their own emails undercut the story, but not the argument that mattered

The situation

By the time Mihaela and Bassam called our office, they had already tried the direct approach twice. Their first move, after the status certificate for the Cambridge condo they wanted to buy revealed a reserve fund shortfall and a pending special assessment, was to ask the sellers informally to knock the anticipated cost off the purchase price. The sellers refused, pointing out that the assessment had not been finalized and might not even apply the way the buyers assumed. Their second move was to email Yasmin, the property manager, directly, asking her to simply explain, in plain terms, how the assessment would be split among owners. Her reply was a copy of a board resolution with no explanation of the underlying formula at all.

Mihaela worked as a baker and Bassam as a forklift operator, and the Cambridge unit they had found was priced comfortably within reach for a first home together, somewhere in the four to six hundred thousand dollar range depending on how financing worked out. They had saved carefully for the down payment and had little room to absorb a surprise assessment on top of it, which is exactly why the vague answers from management worried them enough to bring in a lawyer before their conditional period expired.

The reserve fund shortfall itself was not unusual. Reserve funds pay for major repairs and replacements the building will eventually need, and corporations periodically discover the fund is not keeping pace with what a reserve fund study says it should hold, which triggers a special assessment to top it up. What caught our attention when we reviewed the documents was not the existence of the shortfall but the method the board had used to divide the assessment among units, which appeared to depart from the proportionate formula set out in the declaration.

Mihaela and Bassam were not trying to avoid paying their share. They wanted to know what their share actually was, calculated correctly, before they closed on a unit they intended to live in for years. What had looked at first like a simple disclosure problem was, once we read the governing documents closely, a question about whether the corporation had the authority to apportion the assessment the way it had.

That frustration was part of why their earlier attempts to get a straight answer from the sellers and from management had been so blunt, and part of why they wanted someone else to take over the conversation before their conditional deadline forced a decision either way.

The legal question

Every condominium corporation's declaration sets out how common expenses, including special assessments raised to cover a reserve fund shortfall, are to be shared among owners. In most declarations this is done by a proportionate share tied to unit size or a similar formula fixed at registration, precisely so that owners can rely on a known, stable method rather than the board deciding case by case what feels fair.

The special assessment notice Mihaela and Bassam had received showed a different pattern. Larger units, including the two-bedroom the couple was buying, were being assessed a noticeably higher share than the declaration's proportionate formula would produce, while several smaller units appeared to be paying less than their proportionate share would suggest. When we asked Yasmin for the calculation behind the figures, the explanation offered was that the board had decided to weight the assessment toward units that had used certain building amenities more heavily, a rationale with no basis in the declaration at all.

This is the legal question the file turned on: a condominium board's authority to set a special assessment does not include authority to invent a new apportionment method that departs from what owners agreed to when the declaration was registered. A board can decide how much needs to be raised. It generally cannot decide, on its own judgment of fairness, who pays more of it than the declaration provides for, without amending the declaration itself through the process the legislation sets out for that.

Complicating the picture was something we found in Mihaela and Bassam's own file. In their earlier email to property management, they had written that they had 'no problem paying our full share once it's calculated properly,' a sentence that, taken alone, looked like an acknowledgment that some version of the higher figure might be legitimate. It was not the strongest position to be arguing from a technical apportionment error while having already signalled willingness to pay a share that had not yet been correctly worked out. The email did not undermine the legal argument, since the declaration's formula was what it was regardless of what either side had written casually beforehand, but it meant we had to be precise about the difference between accepting a fair share and accepting whatever number the board happened to produce.

The couple were understandably rattled when we pointed the email out to them, since it had not occurred to either of them that a sentence meant to smooth things over could later read as a concession. It was a useful reminder that informal correspondence written before a lawyer is involved can end up shaping the argument later, even when nothing in it was legally significant at the time it was sent.

What we did

1. Obtained the full declaration and reserve fund study directly from the corporation rather than relying on the summary printed in the status certificate, because the proportionate share formula that governs how a special assessment must be divided is set out in the declaration itself and has to be read precisely to know what the correct apportionment actually is. This gave us the exact percentage figures assigned to each unit at registration, the fixed baseline every later calculation was checked against.
2. Recalculated the assessment under the declaration's stated formula, unit by unit wherever the underlying data was available, rather than accepting the board's total as a starting point. Setting the two sets of numbers side by side demonstrated concretely, in dollars rather than in the abstract, how far the board's amenity-based weighting had drifted from what owners had actually agreed to at registration, and gave us a specific figure to put in front of the corporation's counsel.
3. Addressed the earlier email directly with Mihaela and Bassam before raising anything with the corporation, walking through exactly how a sentence meant to sound cooperative could be read later as an admission. We made sure they understood the real distinction between agreeing to pay a properly calculated share and having already conceded the board's inflated figure, so the argument we put forward stayed consistent and was not later undercut by their own earlier words.
4. Reviewed the board's meeting minutes for the full period surrounding the amenity-weighting decision, looking specifically for any record of a formal owner vote to amend the declaration's cost-sharing terms, since that is the only process the legislation recognizes for changing how expenses are divided. We found none. That absence confirmed the board had acted on its own view of fairness rather than through any procedure capable of actually altering the formula, which became the core of the letter to counsel.
5. Wrote to the corporation's legal counsel, not Yasmin's office, setting out the discrepancy between the declaration's formula and the assessment notice line by line, and asking specifically what authority the board relied on to depart from it. Directing the letter to counsel rather than to property management put the question on record with someone actually able to give a binding answer, rather than a manager with no power to change the board's course on her own.
6. Set out the correctly calculated figures alongside the board's figures in the same letter to counsel, unit by unit, so the exact dollar impact of the discrepancy was visible immediately for Mihaela and Bassam's unit and for others without counsel needing to redo the arithmetic themselves. A side-by-side comparison like that tends to move an internal review along considerably faster than a purely legal argument stated in the abstract, since it hands the reviewing lawyer the answer rather than just the question.
7. Extended the conditional period on the purchase agreement, negotiated with the sellers' lawyer, so Mihaela and Bassam were not forced to waive their financing and status certificate conditions and commit to the purchase before the apportionment question was actually resolved. This gave the corporation's counsel enough time to review the discrepancy properly without pressuring our clients into closing on numbers neither side yet trusted, and it cost nothing beyond a short delay.
8. Pressed for a written correction rather than accepting a verbal assurance, once the corporation's counsel confirmed informally on a call that the amenity-weighting approach had never gone through the process required to alter the declaration's cost-sharing formula. A verbal concession from counsel carries no weight against a board that could simply reissue the same notice later, so we insisted on a corrected assessment notice in writing before treating the issue as resolved.
9. Reviewed the corrected assessment notice line by line against the declaration's formula before advising Mihaela and Bassam that anything had actually changed, rather than accepting the corporation's word that the fix had been made correctly. Only once the figures matched what the governing documents required did we clear the way for them to close, with an accurate and independently verified understanding of their ongoing financial obligation rather than a second set of numbers we had not checked.
10. Explained the corrected figures to Mihaela and Bassam in plain terms before closing, walking through exactly how the new number was calculated under the declaration, and how it compared to both the original inflated assessment and the amount they had already budgeted for. That conversation mattered because it meant they closed with genuine confidence in the number and understood why it was correct, rather than simply trusting secondhand that someone else had fixed it on their behalf.

The outcome

The corporation's counsel agreed that the board had not followed the proper process to depart from the declaration's proportionate formula and issued a corrected assessment notice before Mihaela and Bassam's closing date. Their unit's share dropped from the inflated amenity-weighted figure to the amount the declaration's formula actually produced, a difference of several thousand dollars spread over the payment period the corporation had set.

The correction applied to every unit, not just theirs, since the formula in the declaration does not allow for one owner's share to be fixed and another's left wrong. Several other owners who had also questioned the original notice benefited from the same recalculation, though none of them had pushed the issue to the point of getting written confirmation the way Mihaela and Bassam had.

They closed on the unit on schedule, with a clear written record of what their assessment obligation actually was and why, rather than a vague promise that things would be sorted out later. The earlier email exchange with management never became an issue once the corporation's own counsel accepted the declaration governed, which is often how these disputes resolve: not by finding fault in what either side said informally beforehand, but by returning to what the governing document actually says.

The earlier negotiation with the sellers and the unanswered emails to management had not moved the actual number. What changed things was identifying the precise document the board was required to follow and holding the corporation to it, a step neither the sellers nor the property manager had any incentive to take on the couple's behalf. Mihaela and Bassam moved into the unit with more confidence in their monthly costs than most new condo owners get, having watched the number tested and corrected before they signed for it permanently.

What you can learn from this