Earhart Village

Seven plans, and why that helps

Seven floor plans across 174 units is an unusually good ratio for pricing, and worth recognizing as one.

Where a community was built to a defined set of plans, comparable sales of the identical model exist — which is the tightest form of comparable there is. Most neighborhoods around here produce a handful of mixed sales a year and force an analysis to widen and adjust. Here, with 174 units and only seven plans, finding a recent sale of the same model is realistic.

The discipline that makes it work is identifying the plan. A ranch plan and a two-story plan of similar measured area are different products with different buyers, and a two-bedroom and a four-bedroom are different again. A listing does not always say which model a unit is; asking is worth it, and on a community of this size and vintage someone will know.

The variables that then do the work are position within the twenty-five acres, what the unit looks onto, whether the lower level is a walk-out, and condition.

That walk-out distinction is a real one rather than a detail. A walk-out lower level has full-height windows and a door to grade, which makes it usable living space; a below-grade lower level with small windows is storage and utility. Two units of identical measured area can differ substantially on that alone, and it is exactly the sort of thing a square-footage comparison erases.

Detached garages, which is a Michigan question

Parking here is detached garage rather than attached, and in this climate that is a material difference rather than a preference.

An attached garage means going from car to house without going outside. A detached one means a walk — in January, with groceries, in whatever the weather is doing. Over a Michigan winter that is felt daily, and it is a genuine consideration for anyone thinking about a long stay or about mobility changing.

It also raises a document question specific to condominiums. Establish whether the garage is deeded to the unit, assigned to it as a limited common element, or merely licensed by the association and reassignable. Those three are legally different and worth different money — and in a community of 174 units the answer decides whether a particular garage travels with the unit at resale.

Ask also how far the garage is from the unit, because in a twenty-five-acre community that distance varies, and whether the association maintains the garage structure and its roof. In most arrangements it does, which puts those roofs into the reserve study alongside the residential ones.

The counterweight is honest: a detached garage keeps vehicle fumes, noise and cold out of the living space, and it is generally a larger and more useful structure than an attached bay of the same era.

Twenty-five acres, and what the association maintains

One hundred and seventy-four units on twenty-five acres is a genuinely low density for attached housing, and the ground between the buildings is much of what the community offers: rolling terrain, a pond with a fountain, and wooded areas.

All of that is almost certainly association common area, which places it at the third of the four tiers of protected open space — protected while the association holds it and its documents say so, but funded by the owners and maintained at their cost.

That makes it a budget as much as an amenity. Twenty-five acres of grounds are mown, planted and renewed. Mature trees near buildings need periodic inspection, pruning and eventually removal, all of it expensive and all of it the association's. And the pond is the item most often underestimated: ponds silt, weed and occasionally need dredging, and a fountain is a pump with a service life and a power supply.

So the reserve study should name grounds, tree work and pond maintenance as line items, and the minutes will show whether any of them has been a recurring subject. An attractive twenty-five-acre setting with no budget behind it is a liability the association has not yet priced.

Across 174 units, though, the arithmetic is favorable: a major program divides into a manageable per-unit figure in a way it simply does not in the small downtown buildings elsewhere in the area.

A 1970s condominium at fifty years

Built in the 1970s, the common elements here are around fifty years old, and in a condominium that age lands on the association rather than on the individual owner.

Roofs, drives, siding and any shared drainage have been replaced at least once and are due again on a rolling basis. Fifty years is long enough that the association has been through this cycle before, and how it handled it is a matter of record in the minutes — which makes those minutes more informative here than in a younger community.

The reserve study is therefore the most consequential document in the transaction, ahead of the inspection of the unit itself. Ask what the assessment has done over the past five years rather than only what it is today; a flat assessment against fifty-year-old common elements is a question rather than a reassurance.

Inside the unit, the era sets a specific agenda. Aluminum branch circuit wiring belongs to roughly the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, so an early-1970s unit sits inside that window and it must be identified by an electrician rather than assumed. Galvanized steel supply piping corrodes from the inside and shows as falling pressure long before it shows as a leak. Original electrical service was sized for the appliance loads of the time, and insulation levels are well below current practice — though partly moderated in attached housing by shared walls.

Lead-based paint disclosure applies to anything built before 1978, which covers this community.

The question buyers skip

Sound transmission is the attached-housing question people most often leave until after they move in. It varies enormously with how the party walls and floors were built — whether a wall runs to the roof deck or stops at a ceiling, and how the floor assembly is made — and two buildings of the same age by the same builder can perform quite differently.

In a community with lower levels, there is a further dimension: sound travels between levels within a unit as well as between units, and a walk-out lower level used as living space has a different acoustic relationship to the floor above than one used for storage.

There is no document that answers any of it. The only method is to stand in a unit at an hour when neighbors are home — an evening or a weekend rather than a midday showing of an empty building.

Schools

Ann Arbor Public Schools serves Earhart Village. Specific school assignments are set by address.

Buying or selling here

The plan and the position are the two variables, and both are things a listing tends to state loosely.

For a seller, naming which of the seven plans a unit is, whether the lower level is a walk-out, and what the unit looks onto gives an appraiser the right comparables and gives a buyer the three things they actually want to know.