Madison Place

Sixty units of one type is genuinely useful

A community of sixty townhouses built in a single year to a consistent design is one of the more tractable things to price in this county, and that is worth using deliberately.

Sixty units produces real turnover year after year on a consistent product, which means in-community comparable sales exist and recur. Most communities around here cannot offer that — they are either too small to generate sales or too varied for the sales they generate to be comparable.

The size range reinforces it. From 1,250 to 1,625 square feet is a thirty percent spread, narrow enough that the units genuinely are comparable to one another once form and position are accounted for.

So the variables that do the work here are position — what a unit faces, whether it is an end unit — and condition. Those are precisely the adjustments an automated valuation makes badly or not at all, which means a same-type comparable plus a considered adjustment beats a model comfortably.

An end unit has one shared wall instead of two, which is a real and priceable difference that square footage ignores entirely — and in a community where the units are otherwise consistent, differences like that are most of what separates two sales.

Brownstone-style townhouses, and what masonry asks

Brick and brownstone-style detailing is a durable exterior and one of the lower-maintenance choices available, but masonry has its own agenda — slower and larger than painted timber.

Repointing is the main item. Mortar joints weather and eventually need raking out and refilling, and it is skilled work done on a cycle measured in decades. The critical technical point is that the mortar must be appropriate to the masonry: a mortar harder than the brick drives failure into the brick itself instead of the joint, which turns a maintenance item into a replacement one. On a building of this age the original mortar is generally still sound, but the specification matters whenever work is done.

Lintels and shelf angles are the second item. Steel supporting masonry over openings corrodes over time and expands as it does, which cracks the masonry above — a well-known failure mode with a well-known repair, showing itself as stepped cracking near window heads.

Weep holes and the drainage cavity are the third. Modern masonry is a drained system rather than a solid one: water gets behind the outer leaf and is meant to run out through weep holes at the base. Blocked or absent weeps mean the water stays in, and the consequences appear inside.

Where the brownstone appearance is achieved with a cast or manufactured product rather than real stone, the maintenance future is different again — a manufactured product has a service life and a replacement cycle rather than a repointing one, and its detailing at flashings and terminations determines how it performs. The question worth asking at close range is what the materials actually are.

In a condominium the exterior is almost certainly common element, so all of this is the association's responsibility and the owners' cost — which puts it squarely in the reserve study. Ask when the masonry was last surveyed.

A 2001 build at around twenty-five years

These are modern-code buildings with modern insulation, modern electrical service and modern egress.

What twenty-five years brings is the first full replacement cycle, arriving across the community at once because it was built in a single year. Original roofs are at or past the end of a typical asphalt shingle service life. 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.

Because everything came due together, the question is not whether the roofs are due but whether the money is there. Ask the reserve balance, when the roofs were last done or are scheduled, and whether the study is current.

Attic ventilation is worth a specific look at this age, since poor ventilation shortens shingle life measurably and the difference is exactly what starts to show now.

And in any attached housing, the wall between two households is the variable that most affects daily life and appears in no listing. Sound travels through structure as readily as through air. Visit at an hour when people are home rather than mid-morning.

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.

An Ann Arbor address is not necessarily the City of Ann Arbor

The City of Ann Arbor is ringed by townships — Scio, Pittsfield, Ann Arbor, Superior and Lodi among them — whose mailing addresses read Ann Arbor. A mailing address is a delivery route rather than a jurisdiction.

Each township is a separate government with its own board, tax rate, services, zoning and assessor. The rate difference between a city parcel and a township one is real and recurring, which is why comparable sales must be matched on municipality. Rates and taxable values both change, so compare the current millage and the parcel's own taxable value rather than a remembered difference; a tax bill arrives on the local schedule, and a lender collects an estimated share of it monthly.

School assignment follows a third line again. Three distinct versions of the split exist around here — Ann Arbor addresses with Pittsfield taxes and Saline schools; Pittsfield taxes with Ann Arbor schools; and a Ypsilanti address with Pittsfield taxes and Ann Arbor schools — which together show that no direction of inference works.

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

Madison Place is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools. District boundaries are redrawn from time to time.

Buying or selling here

The reserve position is the thing to settle.