What is the Fannie Mae condo questionnaire and how does insurance factor in?

The Fannie Mae condo questionnaire is a standardized data-collection form a lender sends to the association or its management company when a buyer or refinancing owner in the project applies for a conventional loan. The full version is Fannie Mae Form 1076, the Condominium Project Questionnaire, with a shorter version, Form 1077, used for limited reviews of established projects. The association fills it in and returns it, and the lender's condo project review team uses the answers to decide whether the project is warrantable, meaning a loan on a unit can be sold to Fannie Mae.

It is not itself an insurance document, but a meaningful block of it is about insurance, and that block is where community associations most often stumble. The form was expanded after the Surfside collapse to add questions about structural condition, critical repairs, deferred maintenance, and special assessments, so a modern questionnaire probes both the coverage and the physical and financial health of the project. Treat it as the lender's structured way of asking the same questions the Selling Guide requires, in one place, with the association's signature on the answers.

The insurance portion of the questionnaire is not freeform. Each answer lines up with a specific Selling Guide section, and knowing which section governs which answer is what keeps a review from going sideways. Property and flood coverage is tested against section B7-3. Commercial general liability is tested on its own against section B7-4-01. Fidelity or crime coverage is tested against a third section, B7-4-02. A board that reviews its policies one at a time, without mapping each to its governing section, will routinely answer a questionnaire in a way that looks fine but fails the bundle.

The floors those sections set are what the answers are checked against. Property has to be written at 100 percent replacement cost, not actual cash value. General liability has to be at least 1,000,000 dollars per occurrence, which is a true regulatory floor rather than a market range, even though the dedicated community-association markets typically write primary limits in the 1,000,000 dollar to 2,000,000 dollar band with an umbrella above. Fidelity or crime coverage, for projects of more than 20 units, has to equal at least three months of aggregate assessments plus the association reserve funds and extend to any management agent that handles the money. The questionnaire is the collection instrument; the Selling Guide is the standard the collected answers are graded on.

Under B7-3, the questionnaire asks how the master property policy is valued and whether it protects against an underinsurance penalty. An answer showing actual cash value, which deducts depreciation, fails the replacement-cost standard, and an older building can be dramatically underinsured on that basis. The form also reaches flood: if any building sits in a FEMA-designated Special Flood Hazard Area, the project has to carry flood coverage equal to the lesser of the National Flood Insurance Program maximum or the building replacement cost, and a building can move into that zone between reviews as FEMA revises its maps.

The post-Surfside additions sit next to the insurance questions and increasingly gate the same review. The form asks whether the association is aware of any deferred maintenance or needed critical repairs, whether an engineer has flagged unsafe conditions, and whether there is a current reserve study and any special assessments outstanding. These are condition and funding questions, not coverage questions, but they feed the same warrantability decision, and a project that answers them poorly can be found ineligible even with clean insurance. In Florida, this is where milestone inspection and Structural Integrity Reserve Study documentation surfaces on the lender side.

The recurring failures are predictable. A certificate of insurance attached to the questionnaire that shows a property policy on actual cash value breaks B7-3. A general liability limit left below 1,000,000 dollars per occurrence, which happens when a legacy policy never got raised as the community grew, breaks B7-4-01 even when the property and fidelity legs are clean. A fidelity bond frozen at a flat number the prior agent picked, one that has drifted below three months of assessments plus reserves as reserves grew, or one that never named the management agent, breaks B7-4-02.

A subtler failure is a mismatch between the questionnaire answers and the evidence of insurance behind them. A manager who fills in the insurance section from memory or from last year's file can attest to coverage the current certificate does not actually show, and the reviewing lender reconciles the two. When they do not agree, the review stalls on a discrepancy rather than a coverage gap, which is slower to clear. The answers on the form should be pulled from the current policy and certificate, not recalled.

The board or manager owns the questionnaire, but the insurance questions should be routed to the association's agent rather than answered from memory, because the agent can map the current master program to each Selling Guide section and attach a certificate that reads to those items. The most useful preparation is to have evidence of insurance on file that mirrors the questionnaire structure: property at 100 percent replacement cost with an agreed value or coinsurance waiver, flood where a building is in a Special Flood Hazard Area, general liability at or above the per-occurrence floor, and a fidelity bond with the management-agent extension and the math shown against current reserves and assessments.

The reason to run this before a unit is under contract is timing. A warrantability failure almost never surfaces at renewal; it surfaces when a buyer's lender sends the questionnaire during a sale and an answer or an attached certificate does not clear, and the board usually hears about it from an angry seller. Reviewing the master program against the three Selling Guide sections in advance, so the questionnaire can be answered accurately and backed by matching evidence, is what keeps a single unit sale from stalling the whole project's financing reputation.