Gallery at The Polo Fields

Three phases, and this is the last one

The Polo Fields comprises three distinct phases — The Fairways, The Preserves and The Gallery — and this is the final one. That sequence carries real consequences for anyone buying or selling here.

Recorded restrictions attach to plats, not to marketing names, and where a development is built in phases each is generally its own recorded instrument. The restrictions, the association's authority and any assessment can differ between them, and nothing requires them to match. Later phases frequently record different terms — sometimes tightened after experience with the first, sometimes adjusted to suit a changed market.

The phases also differ in build year, which matters because build year sets the inspection agenda. A house from the first phase and one from the last can be a decade or more apart, with different code, different materials and a different amount of accumulated wear.

Being the final phase carries one specific characteristic: the last houses in a development are generally the newest, were sold into a market that already knew what the community was, and often sit on the lots that were left — which may be the best or the least conventional, depending on how the plat was laid out. Neither is automatic, and the recorded plat shows which.

So establish which phase a specific address sits in, obtain the restrictions recorded against that parcel from the Washtenaw County Register of Deeds, and match comparables on phase as well as on form and size.

What a social membership is, and what it is not

Each homeowner here is offered the opportunity for a social membership at the club, and that phrase does specific work that is easy to misread — expensively.

A social membership at a golf and country club is generally not golf privileges. It typically provides access to the clubhouse, dining, social events and often the pool and tennis facilities, while golf remains a separate and considerably more expensive category of membership. The exact terms vary between clubs and change over time, so the club's own current schedule is the only reliable source.

The second thing the phrase does is describe an opportunity rather than an entitlement. Being offered the opportunity is not the same as having a membership included with the house, and it is not the same as automatic acceptance. Ask whether membership is a requirement of ownership, whether it is optional, whether there is an initiation fee separate from dues, and whether there is a waiting list.

This matters because a listing that mentions a country club invites a buyer to price the club into the house. The honest version is that the house is near a club a resident may join at their own cost, on terms the club sets — which is a real amenity and a different one.

And the durability question applies as it does to every private facility around here. A private golf club is a business. Businesses can close, and land can be sold and redeveloped; there is a community nearby where exactly that happened and ended in a decade of litigation over what could be built afterward. That is not a prediction about this club, which opened in 1995 and appears well established — it is a reason to understand that a private course is a different kind of neighbor from public parkland or a recorded conservation easement, and to price the outlook accordingly.

A house on or near a course

Course frontage is a pricing factor and a disclosure topic at once, and both halves deserve stating.

What it buys is open ground, long views and a maintained landscape that no individual owner has to pay for directly — which is a genuine and unusual amenity.

What comes with it is errant balls, early-morning maintenance equipment starting well before most households do, and turf management schedules including spraying. Those are ordinary features of living on a golf course rather than complaints, and a buyer who wants the view should understand what else arrives with it.

The practical questions for a specific house: which hole it sits on and where relative to the line of play, because the ball risk varies enormously between a fairway flank and a position behind a green; whether the course's maintenance access route passes nearby; and whether any recorded easement gives the club rights over part of the lot.

William Newcomb, who designed this course, is a Michigan golf architect with a substantial body of work in the state, and a course by a known designer generally means a considered routing rather than an afterthought — which is worth something to a golfer and nothing at all to a household that does not play. Be clear which you are.

Ann Arbor address, Scio Township government

This is the most common and most expensive confusion on Ann Arbor's west side, and it is worth stating plainly.

Scio Township surrounds the City of Ann Arbor on the west and is a separate government with its own board, its own tax rate, its own services, its own zoning and its own assessor. A great many Scio Township mailing addresses read Ann Arbor, because a mailing address is a delivery route rather than a jurisdiction.

The differences are concrete. The tax rate differs, sometimes substantially, for otherwise identical houses.

School assignment follows a third line again. Ann Arbor Public Schools reaches beyond the city limits into surrounding townships in places, and Dexter Community Schools reaches into others — so a township property can carry either, and the boundary follows neither municipal nor postal lines.

A city sale and a township sale are not interchangeable without adjustment.

A house of this era on the west side

The club opened in 1995 and the development followed in phases, so a Gallery house is likely to be the newest of the three.

The window across the whole development straddles the polybutylene transition. That piping was in wide residential use from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, so earlier phases may have it and later ones almost certainly do not. It should be identified by material during the inspection rather than inferred from a year — which is exactly the right instruction for a phased development.

Exterior cladding of this period includes hardboard and early composite products whose performance depends on how ends and edges were sealed and how the ground drains away. Twenty-five years and more is long enough for careless detailing to have declared itself: the bottom courses and anywhere a deck or porch meets a wall are the places to look.

Original roofs are at or past the end of a typical asphalt shingle service life, and original furnaces, air conditioning and water heaters are at or beyond normal expectancy. Original double-glazed windows show seal failure as fogging between the panes.

The agenda is components and maintenance history, not fundamentals.

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.

Buying or selling here

The phase, the township and the club terms are the three things to establish, and all three are quick.

For a seller, being precise about what the club membership actually offers — social rather than golf, at the member's own cost, on the club's terms — sets a buyer's expectations correctly and prevents a discovery that otherwise arrives late and sours a transaction.

Not to be confused with

• Polo Fields · Ann Arbor
• The Gallery · Ann Arbor
• Gallery Park · Ann Arbor