HB 913 Conflict Screening: Prove You Vetted the Firm
The statute tells you conflicted vendors are barred. It does not tell you how a five-person management company proves it screened. This does.
The short answer
HB 913 bars an engineer, architect, contractor, or inspection firm with a financial or ownership interest in the recommended repairs from performing a condo's milestone or SIRS inspection. To screen, cross-reference the firm against your repair contractors, board members, and prior engagements, then keep a dated log of who you checked and what you found.
What HB 913's conflict rule actually prohibits
Plain English
The conflict-of-interest provision bars any engineer, architect, contractor, or inspection firm from performing a milestone or Structural Integrity Reserve Study (SIRS) inspection if that firm, or a person with an ownership interest in it, stands to profit from the repairs the inspection recommends. The inspector cannot also be the one selling you the fix.
A conflict of interest under the new rules is any financial, ownership, familial, or contractual relationship that gives the inspecting firm a stake in the outcome of its own inspection. The clearest example: an engineering firm that recommends a $2M facade repair and also owns or is affiliated with the contractor bidding that repair.
The reason the Legislature tightened this is obvious once you have seen a few reserve studies. If the same firm that finds the problem also sells the cure, the incentive to inflate scope is baked in. Boards were signing SIRS reports without ever asking whether the engineer profited downstream.
The statute assigns the duty to the association, which in practice means the board and its management company. Florida's condo framework, administered through the Florida DBPR, now expects associations to hire clean vendors and to be able to show they checked.
Why this bites small management companies hardest
Large firms have compliance staff and vendor databases. A five- or ten-person management company running 20 condo associations does not, and it is now on the hook to prove a negative: that the firm it hired is not conflicted.
The uncomfortable part nobody says out loud: most small operators hire the same three or four engineering firms across every building they manage. Those same firms often have longstanding relationships with the same repair contractors and, sometimes, with board members who sit on multiple associations. The web of relationships that makes referrals easy is exactly what a plaintiff's attorney will map after an assessment dispute.
Screening is not hard. Documenting that you screened is the part that falls through the cracks, because it is unbilled, deadline-driven, repetitive work that gets skipped when a manager is juggling 300 doors and a hurricane forecast.
The conflict-of-interest screening checklist
Screen every milestone and SIRS firm against three buckets before you sign: the repair contractors, the board, and prior engagements. Run this checklist for each candidate and save the answers with dates.
Checklist
0/10Run this before you engage a milestone or SIRS firm
The signed attestation matters, but it is not sufficient on its own. A firm can attest truthfully to what it knows while an affiliation you never asked about sits one entity away. Your cross-reference of the firm's principals against the repair contractors is what catches that. Do both.
The screening log that actually protects you
What a defensible log needs
A defensible screening log records, per firm and per date: what relationships you checked, what you found, who at the firm attested, and who at the association reviewed it. It is not a one-line 'no conflict found.' It is a timestamped trail showing a reasonable, contemporaneous inquiry that a court can read years later.
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Date screened | Proves the check happened before engagement, not after a dispute |
| Firm and principals checked | Shows you screened people, not just the company name |
| Repair contractors compared against | Documents the core cross-reference the rule targets |
| Board relationships checked | Catches the multi-association board member overlap |
| Prior engagements reviewed | Shows you looked for a pattern of inspect-then-repair |
| Attestation on file (Y/N + date) | Links the firm's own written representation to the record |
| Finding | 'No conflict' or a described conflict and how it was resolved |
| Reviewed by | Names the human who made the hire decision |
Keep the log for at least as long as the reserve study and milestone report retention runs, and longer if litigation is foreseeable. Structural claims surface years after the inspection. A log you deleted after the project closed is worse than no log, because it looks like you had something to hide.
Store it where it survives a manager leaving. If the only copy of your screening record lives in a departed employee's inbox, it may as well not exist.
How an agent like Victor builds and timestamps the log
The cross-referencing and record-keeping are exactly the kind of documented, repetitive, deadline-bound work an AI operations agent handles well, while the hire stays with the board. At One Home Agent, this is Victor Vendors: he tracks vendor licenses, COIs, and relationships across a whole portfolio and can flag when a proposed inspection firm shares principals or referral ties with a repair contractor you already use.
The pattern is straightforward. When a manager proposes an engineering firm for a milestone or SIRS inspection, Victor cross-references that firm's principals against the association's repair contractor roster, the board member list, and prior engagements, then drafts the screening log entry with the date, what was checked, and what surfaced.
What Victor does not do is decide. He assembles the record, flags the overlaps a human would miss under deadline, and timestamps the file. The manager and board read the flags and make the call. That division is the whole point: the machine keeps the audit trail honest so the people can focus on judgment.
“The vendors were never the risk. The missing record was. When an assessment gets challenged three years later, the board that can produce a dated screening log wins the argument before it starts. The board that says 'we always trusted that firm' loses it.”
Todd Paton, Partner, One Home Agent
What an undocumented conflict looks like in litigation
Picture a 96-unit condo that gets a milestone report recommending $1.8M in concrete restoration. The board approves a special assessment. The engineering firm that wrote the report shares a principal with the contractor that wins the repair bid. Nobody at the management company asked. A group of owners refuses to pay and sues.
In discovery, the owners' attorney asks one question: show us how you screened the inspecting firm for conflicts. The management company has an engagement letter and an invoice. No attestation. No cross-reference. No log. The special assessment is now defending itself on the worst possible footing, and the manager is explaining to the board why there is no record of a check the statute required.
None of that turns on whether the firm was actually corrupt. The firm may have been perfectly clean. The exposure comes from being unable to prove you looked. A ten-minute cross-reference and a dated log entry, done before the engagement, is the difference between a defensible file and a deposition.
Key takeaways
- The conflict rule targets inspectors who profit from the repairs they recommend.
- Your legal exposure is failing to document the screening, not the conflict itself.
- Screen firm principals against repair contractors, board members, and prior engagements.
- A defensible log is dated, per-firm, and names the human who reviewed it.
- AI does the cross-referencing and record-keeping; the board still makes the hire.
Make the screening log automatic
Bottom line
HB 913 did not make vendor hiring harder. It made proving you screened non-negotiable. The associations that get burned will not be the ones that hired a conflicted firm. They will be the ones that hired a clean firm and kept no record they checked. Build the log before you need it.
Let Victor Vendors keep your conflict screening log
We build a custom vendor-tracking agent trained on your communities that cross-references inspection firms and timestamps the screening record. The first agent is free, and your company keeps it.
See how it worksFrequently asked questions
Best practice under the conflict rules is to obtain a signed, dated attestation from the milestone or SIRS firm disclosing any financial or ownership interest in the recommended repairs. An attestation alone is not enough. Pair it with your own cross-reference of the firm's principals against repair contractors and board members.
Sources & further reading