What a Florida engineer looks for first in an older building
If you sit on a condo or homeowners' association board in Florida, you already know the name Becker. If you do not, here is the short version. Becker is a law firm founded in Fort Lauderdale in 1973 that has spent fifty years representing community associations, and says it has more Florida Bar board certified condominium and planned development attorneys than any other firm in the state. When a board wants to know what the law now expects of it, Becker is one of the places it looks.
The firm produces a podcast called Take It To The Board. The host is Donna DiMaggio Berger, a shareholder at Becker and the founder of the Community Association Leadership Lobby, which works with legislators on behalf of the people who live in and run these communities. In January the show recorded its first live episode, at the Cooperator Expo in Fort Lauderdale, with structural engineer Evan Swaysland, whose firm carries out the building inspections Florida now requires of its older condominiums.
About fifteen minutes in, Donna stopped to mention a previous guest: Trish Mackie-Smith, the founder of inndox.
Trish Mackie-Smith, inndox Founder
Trish is a former property lawyer from Brisbane, Australia. After law she co-founded a building consultancy that went on to become the most awarded in the country, and she spent years watching the same thing go wrong at both ends of a property's life: at the legal transaction, where a buyer decides with no history in front of them, and at the building inspection, where a board discovers the history was never kept. In 2022 Proptech Australia named her its Proptech Leader of the Year.
inndox is what she built in response. It is a digital logbook for a building, holding its documents, warranties, maintenance history and contacts in a record that belongs to the property rather than to whoever happens to be managing it.
Trish had been Donna's guest in April 2025, in . She recorded it at 4am Brisbane time, which Donna was kind enough to remember on air. What made her bring it up nine months later, though, was not the hour. It was what Evan had just said.
The first thing an engineer checks is not the concrete
Donna had asked Evan a simple question. When he walks into a 30, 40 or 50 year old building, what tells him whether it has been looked after or neglected?
His answer, at , was not cracks, spalling or balcony slabs. "The first thing that tells us it's been well-maintained is documentation."
He described the associations he trusts. They can say when the last major work was done. They have the files for it: the scope, the payment applications, the as-builts. Their original plans have been digitised so they can be sent to a vendor the same day. When a board like that describes its repair history, he believes it.
Then he described the other kind. The plans are in a corner somewhere. Nobody has looked in that closet. His own firm has gone back to buildings they worked on fifteen years earlier and found nothing they prepared survived, even though they know they handed it over. One association told him they delete their records every seven years.
That was the moment Donna brought up Trish and inndox. It was, she said, exactly what Trish had come on the show to talk about: an association's records should outlive the people who happen to be holding them.
Why records disappear
Evan made a point at that surprises most boards. The building department usually does not have your records. If the association does not keep them, nobody does.
That is not carelessness. It is structure. A board turns over. A manager changes companies. A management company changes systems. A CD of drawings sits in a drawer until nobody has a drive to read it. The record was always tied to a person, a firm or a format, and when that goes, the record goes with it.
This is the failure Trish saw from both sides of the same transaction, first as a lawyer and then as a consultant. It is the reason inndox exists.
Two documents, two jobs
Since much of the episode is about the inspections themselves, it is worth being clear on what they are, because Evan says boards routinely confuse them.
The milestone inspection is the engineering assessment. In Miami-Dade and Broward it has a longer history as the safety certification, and since the post-Surfside legislation it applies across the state. Evan's view, at , is that waiting for a building to turn 40 already puts you around 20 years behind a preventative cycle, and that 25 years is a far better target for buildings near the coast.
The Structural Integrity Reserve Study is the financial plan. Donna described it at as the document that tells you how to fund the work the inspection says you must do. Reserve companies typically build it from the engineer's reports and service life estimates.
Both produce documents an association will need again, years later, for the next inspection, the next insurance renewal, the next sale and the next board. Which brings us back to Evan's first question.
What a board can do this quarter
None of this needs a project. It needs a decision about where the record lives.
Put the record somewhere that belongs to the building. Not to the current manager's server, not to a board member's laptop, not to a file share whose owner will one day leave. The test is simple: if every person involved today walked away, would the next board still have everything?
Start with what the engineer will ask for. The last inspection reports. The scope and close-out of the last major repair. Original plans, digitised. Warranties and their expiry dates. Insurance and claims history. If those five things can be produced in a day, you are the association Evan described first.
Make the record work between inspections. A static archive is better than a closet, but a record that reminds you when a warranty is ending or an inspection is due is the difference between reacting and planning.
This is what inndox is built to help with. Each building gets its own logbook, independent of whoever is managing it this year. Documents, warranties with expiry alerts, maintenance reminders, an issue log and controlled sharing, so a manager, an engineer or a lawyer can be given what they need without handing over everything. Across Australia and the United States there are now more than 8,800 property logbooks on the platform. The obligations remain the board's, as they should. The record keeping is what inndox helps with.
Listen to both episodes
The live episode with Evan Swaysland, , is worth the full 39 minutes for any board facing a milestone inspection. Trish's own conversation with Donna, , goes deeper on what to keep and how to get a reluctant board to start.
To see how a building logbook works for an association, with the inndox team.