Fannie Mae Approved Condo List: How to Check a Project

Buyers keep searching for a Fannie Mae approved condo list. It does not exist as a public document, and that single fact explains most of the confusion around condo financing. Here is what actually governs whether a lender can finance a unit in your building.

What “Fannie Mae approved” actually means

“Fannie Mae approved” means a condo project meets the project eligibility rules in the Selling Guide, so a lender can sell a mortgage on a unit there to Fannie Mae. It is a judgment about the whole association, not about the buyer or the unit.

Fannie Mae does not lend money to anyone. It buys loans from lenders, and it will only buy loans secured by units in projects that clear its standards. A project that fails is what the market calls non-warrantable.

That distinction matters. Your credit and down payment can be flawless and the loan still dies, because the problem is the building’s finances, insurance, or condition.

How condo project review actually works

The lender performs the project review, not the buyer and not the seller. Lenders are responsible for reviewing a project at the time they underwrite the loan.

There are three main paths:

• Full Review. The lender collects the association’s budget, insurance certificates, and questionnaire responses and checks each Selling Guide requirement. If a project fails, a standard Fannie Mae-backed loan isn’t available, but buyers can look at non-warrantable condo financing instead, which uses loan programs built for exactly this situation.
• Condo Project Manager (CPM). A free web tool where lenders check whether a project already carries a Fannie Mae status and record their own review. CPM results now feed directly into Desktop Underwriter.
• Project Eligibility Review Service (PERS). A review Fannie Mae performs itself, on a package the lender submits. It is required for certain new and converted projects and optional for others.

Most of the underlying data comes from a lender questionnaire the association fills out. That document has its own guide — see the Fannie Mae condo questionnaire for what boards are actually being asked and how to answer it.

What changed on August 3, 2026

Fannie Mae retired the streamlined Limited Review for loan applications dated on or after August 3, 2026. The change came in Lender Letter LL-2026-03.

Limited Review was the shortcut. It let a lender skip most of the project questions when the borrower had a large down payment on a primary residence.

Full Review is now the standard path. Associations that never had to produce budgets, reserve figures, and insurance detail for a lender are suddenly producing them on every sale — and weaknesses that used to stay hidden now surface.

The “Fannie Mae condo blacklist” — what it actually is

There is no blacklist in the sense people imagine. What exists is an eligibility status attached to a project record inside CPM, and “ineligible” is one of the values that status can take.

The informal names — blacklist, do not lend list, exclusionary list, do not lend register — all point at the same thing. When a lender or Fannie Mae obtains information showing a project fails the Selling Guide, the project is marked ineligible. Loans on units there cannot be sold to Fannie Mae until the underlying reason is resolved. Buyers whose loan is already in process when that flag appears typically need to explore non-warrantable condo financing instead of a standard Fannie Mae-backed loan.

The scale is smaller than the headlines suggest. Fannie Mae reported that as of August 2025, 3.6% of projects carried an ineligible status. The consequence for those projects is severe, but most buildings are not on it.

Is there a public Fannie Mae condo eligibility lookup?

No. Fannie Mae’s own guidance states that it does not publish or disclose eligibility decisions to parties other than lenders, HOAs, their management companies, and authorized advisors.

That is the honest answer, and most articles on this topic get it wrong. There is no consumer-facing Fannie Mae condo lookup, no public list of ineligible projects, and no URL where you can type a building name and get a verdict.

Be careful about one specific mix-up. FHA runs a genuinely public condo approval search at entp.hud.gov, and FHA project approval is a separate program with separate rules. An FHA-approved building tells you nothing about its Fannie Mae status, and vice versa. We walk through that search step by step in FHA approved condo list, and the VA runs a third, separate list covered in VA approved condo list. If you want the three regimes side by side, see condo loan approval by loan type.

The Condo Status Finder — for boards, not buyers

Fannie Mae does offer one transparency tool, and its access rules are the detail almost everyone misses. Condo Status Finder is a free tool for HOAs, their management companies, and authorized advisors. New users register, identify their role, and agree to terms.

Homeowners and buyers cannot register. Fannie Mae’s stated path for them is to ask the HOA or the lender to run the check.

The tool returns one of four results: no findings, ineligible conditions, no project found, or too many projects found. “No findings” is not approval. It means Fannie Mae has not identified a disqualifying condition, not that anyone has reviewed and cleared the building.

How to check if a condo is Fannie Mae approved

Work the sequence below in order. Each step gives you information the next one cannot.

1. Ask your loan officer to run CPM before you write an offer. This is the only path that returns the actual Fannie Mae status to a buyer. Ask specifically whether the project has a status and what it is.
2. Ask the association to run Condo Status Finder. A board member or manager can register and search, then share the screen or the result. Put the request in writing so it reaches the right person.
3. Ask for the most recent completed lender questionnaire. Associations in active sale markets have usually filled one out in the last few months. It shows reserves, delinquencies, insurance, and litigation in the lender’s own format.
4. Ask for the current budget, reserve study, and master insurance certificate. These are the documents that actually decide the outcome. On insurance, compare the master policy’s building coverage limit to a current replacement-cost estimate for the structure; the Selling Guide generally expects coverage at or near 100% of that replacement cost, so a policy sized well below it is a common trigger for an ineligible flag. On reserves, read the reserve line and the deductible.
5. Check FHA’s public search separately if an FHA loan is on the table. It is a different approval with a different answer.
6. Ask the management company directly whether any lender has recently declined the project. Managers usually know before the board does. A different lender selling to Fannie Mae won’t get around an ineligible status, since the flag is tied to the project itself, not the lender; see non-warrantable condo financing for the alternative loan paths that do work.

Across the boards we work with, the first sign of trouble is almost never a notice from Fannie Mae. It is a listing agent calling to say a buyer’s lender walked, and the board learning its status from that phone call.

What gets a project flagged as ineligible

A project is flagged when a documented condition conflicts with the ineligible project rules in the Selling Guide. Fannie Mae reports that the two most common reasons are insufficient master property insurance and critical repair issues, including failure to meet state or local inspection requirements.

Common triggers:

• Critical repairs and significant deferred maintenance affecting safety, soundness, structural integrity, or habitability
• Insufficient master property insurance, including missing or inadequate coverage on common elements
• Missing fidelity or crime coverage where the Selling Guide requires it
• Single-entity ownership concentration — more than 20% of units in one owner’s hands for projects of 21 units or more, with tighter unit-count caps in small projects
• Commercial or non-residential space above 35% of total square footage
• Hotel or motel operation, including projects that manage daily or short-term rentals
• Pending significant litigation touching safety, structural soundness, habitability, or use of the property
• Inadequate reserves in the annual budget
• High assessment delinquency rates across the ownership
• High investor concentration relative to owner-occupants

The delinquency threshold is a fixed number: no more than 15% of the units may be 60 days or more past due on their assessments, under Selling Guide B4-2.2-02. The investor and owner-occupancy concentration thresholds are the ones that genuinely move with loan type and review path, so ask your lender for the exact figure that applies to your file. The single-entity, commercial, and repair-cost thresholds above come straight from the Selling Guide.

The 2027 reserve rule and why more projects are about to fail

LL-2026-03 raises the minimum reserve allocation from 10% to 15% of an association’s annual budgeted assessment income, for loan applications dated on or after January 4, 2027. Freddie Mac issued matching guidance.

There is an exception, and it is worth chasing. An association funding at the highest recommended level of a reserve study completed or updated within the last three years is not held to the flat 15%. A baseline or bare-minimum funding model does not qualify.

Note the nuance. A reserve study is not itself a standalone eligibility requirement — Fannie Mae does not make every project produce one. But from January 4, 2027 a study completed or updated within the last three years, funded at its highest recommended level, is the only route to qualifying below the flat 15% floor.

Why the timing hurts

Association Reserves has prepared more than 100,000 reserve studies. Across its client base, 34% of associations are under 30% funded, the “weak” band. The firm is explicit that this reflects its own clients rather than a statistically representative national sample, so read it as a directional benchmark — but those are the associations the new floor will catch first.

What the increase costs depends entirely on the budget. Work an example. A 200-unit association with a $1.2 million annual budget puts $120,000 a year into reserves at 10%, and $180,000 at 15%. That $60,000 gap is about $25 per unit per month. A leaner budget produces a smaller number and a large high-rise budget a bigger one, so do not carry that figure into your own meeting.

Run your own numbers before the board meeting with our reserve fund calculator. A board that walks in with the math has a much better shot at passing the increase.

Where the tightening came from

The 2021 Surfside condo collapse in Florida killed 98 people. Fannie Mae afterward broadened project oversight and updated its internal list tracking developments barred from conventional loans over safety, insurance, or maintenance concerns.

Not every change is a tightening. LL-2026-03 also loosens several condo insurance requirements that lenders had said were too burdensome, including rules on roof replacement-cost coverage and inflation guard endorsements.

How a project gets removed from ineligible status

The association fixes the underlying condition and submits updated documentation, either directly to Fannie Mae or through a lender. There is no appeal in the litigation sense — it is an evidence submission.

Condo Status Finder is the direct channel. It lets an HOA, its management company, or an authorized advisor contact Fannie Mae to discuss the specific conditions flagged on their project. Fannie Mae says it has updated the status of more than 2,000 projects since 2022 after receiving documentation that issues were remedied.

Timing is the honest gap here. Fannie Mae does not publish a standard turnaround for a status change, and the real bottleneck is usually the underlying fix — binding new insurance, completing a repair, closing out an inspection. Ask what evidence will be accepted before you start, and do not promise a closing date around it. In the meantime, buyers who don’t want to wait for a status change often turn to non-warrantable condo financing, which includes portfolio and local-lender programs built for projects Fannie Mae won’t currently buy.

Why Florida shows up in every blacklist search

Florida is over-represented for reasons that are structural, not coincidental. State law let condo associations waive reserve funding by owner vote for decades, so many buildings entered the 2020s with reserves near zero.

After Surfside, Florida added milestone inspections and the Structural Integrity Reserve Study mandate. Those requirements put deferred structural problems into a signed engineering report — which is exactly the documented critical-repair finding that triggers an ineligible status.

Florida’s property insurance market does the rest. Insufficient master property insurance is one of the two most common ineligibility reasons nationally, and Florida associations face the hardest market in the country. Our Florida condo law breakdown walks through the deadlines and what boards owe owners.

The same pattern is spreading. California, Colorado, Hawaii, and Texas face versions of it, driven by wildfire, hail, and hurricane exposure. VA and FHA reviews apply their own restrictions on top.

Bottom line

Stop looking for a Fannie Mae approved condo list. There isn’t one, and anyone offering to sell you access to a searchable version is selling guesswork.

Buyers get the real answer from a loan officer running CPM. Boards get it from Condo Status Finder, and should run it before a problem shows up in a failed closing rather than after. Either way, the fix is the same: fund the reserves, carry the right master policy, and finish the repairs the inspection report already named.