Ashford Place

Two ponds and two fountains are equipment

Fountains are the detail worth pausing on, because a fountain is not scenery — it is machinery, and machinery has a running cost, a service schedule and a replacement date.

A pond fountain is typically an aerator: a submersible pump on a float, with a power feed run out to it, a control panel and often lighting. It runs on the association's electricity through the warm months, needs to come out before ice and go back in each spring, and has a service life measured in years rather than decades. Two of them doubles all of that.

None of which is an argument against them — aeration genuinely helps a pond, discouraging the algae and stagnation that make a small pond unpleasant in August, and that is much of why they are there. It is an argument for finding the line in the budget.

The ponds themselves carry the ordinary obligations. They silt, they weed, and dredging is expensive and easy to defer. Any outlet structure carries its own inspection duties. And where a pond in a development of this period does stormwater duty as well as amenity duty — most did — its condition is functional rather than cosmetic, and levels are designed to fluctuate, which surprises people expecting a constant ornamental pond in a dry August.

The planted gardens described here are a labor line rather than a capital one, but it is a recurring labor line, and a well-planted community costs more to keep than a mown one. That is a legitimate choice the owners have made; it belongs in the arithmetic rather than in the surprise.

A 1990s build, and where the era question lands

A community built in the 1990s sits astride the single most consequential era boundary in this region's housing, which makes the specific year a first-order question rather than a detail.

A unit from 1990 may well have it; one from 1997 almost certainly does not. The material is identified by looking during the inspection, not by inferring from the community, and where it has been replaced that is a documented selling point worth stating.

In a condominium there is a further wrinkle a house does not have: whether supply piping is unit or common element varies with the master deed, and it decides who pays for a replacement. Where an association has already re-piped, that is a substantial thing to have behind you and it should appear in the minutes.

At around thirty to thirty-five years the first full replacement cycle has passed and the second is beginning to appear. Original roofs are well past a typical asphalt shingle service life, so a roof here should have been done at least once — ask when, and by whom, and whether the reserve is building toward the next. Original furnaces, air conditioning and water heaters are long beyond normal expectancy. Original double-glazed windows show seal failure as fogging between the panes.

Sixty-six units, and where that sits

Sixty-six is a workable size. It is large enough that fixed costs — insurance, management, the audit, the reserve study — divide reasonably, and small enough that owners can know how the place is run.

It is also large enough to produce a few sales a year, which gives a comparable analysis something to work with. That is worth using: within a community of 66, comparables should be matched on floor plan, on story count, on whether the lower level is finished and on what the unit faces, because a pond outlook and an interior outlook are not the same product.

Two-car attached garages across the community is worth noting as a consistent feature rather than a variable, and in a Michigan winter an attached garage is a daily difference rather than a specification line. Visitor parking is described as plentiful, which is a more common friction point in condominium communities than almost anything else.

Walk-out, daylight, or neither

Walk-out and daylight lower levels are not the same thing, and most listings blur them.

A true walk-out has a door at grade on the downhill side, which makes the lower level a genuine story with its own entrance and full-height glazing. A daylight lower level has above-grade windows but no door: better than a standard basement, and materially less than a walk-out. A standard lower level has neither.

Those are three different products at three different values, and which one a unit has is settled by looking rather than by reading. It depends on where the unit sits on the site, so within one community some units will have it and others will not.

Wherever a lower level is finished and partly below grade, water is the thing to check: grade falling away from the building, gutters and downspouts discharging well clear, no staining at the base of finished walls. Ask directly whether there has ever been water, whether there is a sump pump and whether it has a battery backup — a pump without one is useless in the storm that causes the power cut.

And in a condominium, ask whether the lower level walls and floor are unit or common element. The master deed says, and it decides who pays.

What the association documents decide

Buying a condominium unit means buying into a corporation as well as a home, and the corporation's condition is not visible at a showing. Four documents settle it: the master deed and its exhibits, the bylaws, the current budget and the reserve study.

The master deed defines what the unit actually is — where the boundary runs between unit and common elements, and what limited common elements are assigned to its sole use. That is the most misunderstood part of condominium ownership, and it decides who pays for a great many things.

The bylaws set the rules that govern daily life: what may be altered, what may be parked, whether units may be leased and how many at once, and how the board is elected.

The budget and the reserve study together answer whether the association is solvent. An association with thin reserves and a large component near the end of its life is not cheaper — it is a deferred bill with an unknown date, and it arrives as a special assessment.

Board minutes are where a coming expense, a dispute or a construction defect claim surfaces first, and they are the most informative document nobody reads. I go through the recent ones as a matter of course.

One Michigan detail worth knowing: condominium documents are amended by recorded instrument, so what is recorded governs regardless of what any summary says.

Four tiers of protected open space

Where open ground adjoins a property, ownership is the first thing that decides whether it stays open — but not the only one.

Land held by a public body is generally the most durable, though a public body can still sell or repurpose land. Land under a recorded conservation easement is next — an easement runs with the land, surviving a change of owner and of local board. Association common area is real protection that the owners themselves pay for. Unbuilt private land carries the least protection of the four, but that is not the same as none: zoning, recorded deed restrictions and state wetland regulation can each constrain what may be built, filled or cleared, and EGLE requires authorization for specified activities affecting regulated wetland.

From a window all four look identical, which is why it is worth checking the record rather than the view: ownership, any recorded easement or restriction, the zoning, whether wetland is mapped, and whether a development application has already been approved.

Schools

This community is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools. District boundaries are redrawn from time to time.

Assignment is set by address rather than by neighborhood name, and district boundaries in this county cross municipal and postal lines routinely. District is one of the larger drivers of price difference between otherwise comparable properties, so comparables should be matched on it as well as on municipality.

Buying or selling here

The year and the ponds are the two things this community turns on.

For a seller, the assessor's year built and — where it applies — documentation that the supply piping has been replaced answer the largest question a 1990s community raises. A reserve study naming the ponds and the fountains as their own lines is the second.