It’s About Time! Tolling the Statute of Limitations on Damage Claims for Construction Defects
On January 11, 2022, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed into law a statute that amends the Statute of Limitations (SOL) for the filing of a lawsuit against a developer. While it was commonly believed that an owner-controlled board had at least six years from the date owners had a majority of the seats on an association board of trustees, the New Jersey Supreme Court turned that understanding upside down in the 2017 case of The Palisades at Fort Lee Condo Ass’n, Inc. v. 100 Old Palisade, LLC, 230 N.J. 427 (2017). In that case, the court held that the six-year SOL period started to run when the developer-controlled board learned of a defect in the association’s common elements. Application of that ruling meant that, in some instances, by the time the owners took control of the board, the SOL could have already run, precluding the ability to file suit against the developer. Further, since the developer-appointees to the board would be unlikely to ever tell the owner members of the board when they learned of a defective condition, the owner-controlled board would not know when the six-year SOL had started to run.
