Stadium Commons

Twenty-two hundred square feet and two bedrooms

The bedroom count here is one to two across a size range topping out at 2,250 square feet, and that is worth stopping on. Most housing of that size carries three or four bedrooms. A 2,250 square foot home with two is spending its area on something other than bedrooms.

Where a home of that size carries two bedrooms, the area has gone into great rooms, generous primary suites, and dens or studies that were never called bedrooms because they lack a closet or an egress window. That is a real product and an under-served one: buyers who want space without rooms they will not use, and who are not shopping for a household of five.

That changes the pricing rather than merely describing it. Bedroom count is one of the strongest drivers in any automated valuation, so a large home with two bedrooms will be valued as though it were a small one — the model splits the difference between its area and its room count and lands below both. That is a systematic, repeatable error, and it works against a seller every time.

The counter to it is documentation rather than argument. A floor plan with dimensions, an accurate measured area and an explicit note about what each room actually is gives an appraiser something to work from that a bedroom count alone destroys. It is one of the few cases where a seller can materially improve an outcome with an afternoon's work.

For a buyer, the same feature is an opportunity, and the question to ask is what would be needed to make a den a legal bedroom. Egress is the item that matters, and the building department holds the record at no cost.

Three forms inside a 50 percent range

From 1,500 to 2,250 square feet is a spread of about 50 percent, and the community holds ranches, two-story homes and attached units — three products for three buyer pools.

The ranch is the one to separate first. Single-level living with no internal stairs reaches a persistent and geographically wide buyer pool: people for whom it is a requirement rather than a preference, and who will consider nothing else. There are always more of those buyers than there are single-level homes, which is why ranches routinely outperform what their measured area suggests and why the gap tends to widen rather than narrow.

That holds only if the unit itself is reached without stairs, which is the question people forget to ask. A single-level unit up a flight of stairs excludes exactly the pool the form is otherwise made for.

A ranch at the top of this size range is a scarce product on its own account — a large single-level home is expensive to build per square foot because it needs more roof and more foundation for the same area, so relatively few get built.

A two-story home is the reference product with the deepest comparable data. An attached unit is the broadest category and the one most in need of specifics: how many walls are shared, and whether anything sits above or below.

There is also a Michigan question worth settling: a detached home here may be a platted lot or a site condominium, which is invisible from the curb and material for pricing, since a subdivision sale needs adjustment before it can stand as a comparable for a site condominium or the reverse. The recorded instrument settles it.

Main Street, the stadium and eight Saturdays

South Main Street runs past the University of Michigan's athletic campus, and Michigan Stadium is the largest stadium in the United States, seating well over a hundred thousand. On a home football Saturday the crowd it draws is comparable to the population of the city itself.

That is worth naming plainly rather than leaving as a surprise, because it is a real feature of living anywhere along this corridor and it cuts both ways.

There are roughly seven or eight home football Saturdays a year, plus other events. On those days traffic on the surrounding streets is unlike any other day, parking is restricted, and getting in or out on a schedule takes planning. Residential parking permit arrangements exist in parts of the city for exactly this reason, and whether a particular address is inside one is a question for the city rather than a matter of inference.

The other side is that the same proximity is what a large number of people want, and it supports an established pattern of nearby residents renting out parking on game days — which in a condominium is an association question rather than an owner's decision. The bylaws will say whether it is permitted, and boards do restrict it.

Athletic campus land is also institutional land, and institutional land is the most durable kind of neighbor: held for the institution's own long-term purposes rather than as a business that can be sold. The character of a boundary like that changes far more slowly than a commercial one.

The everyday consideration is the corridor itself. Main Street carries real traffic every day of the year, and how much reaches a particular unit depends on distance, orientation, glazing and what stands between. A weekday rush hour visit with the windows open settles it far better than any description, and — for the other half of the picture — a home Saturday in the fall settles the rest.

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.

The wall between two households

In any attached housing, the wall or floor between two households is the variable that most affects daily life and appears in no listing.

What matters is the assembly rather than the finish: a genuine double stud wall with an air gap performs far better than a single framed wall with insulation, because sound travels through structure as readily as through air. Where a floor separates two households, footfall carries downward and carpet helps without solving it.

An end unit has one shared wall instead of two, which is a real and priceable difference that square footage ignores entirely.

The reliable test is the simplest: visit at an hour when people are home — an evening or a weekend — rather than mid-morning when the building is empty.

What to look up before a showing

They also carry the room counts.

The Washtenaw County Register of Deeds holds the recorded master deed: the unit count, the exhibit drawings showing every limited common element assignment, the original documents and the date.

The year built sets the entire inspection agenda, and in a condominium it also determines who carries which question. The 1960s and early 1970s raise aluminum branch circuit wiring, whose concern is the connections rather than the wire, and galvanized steel supply piping. Anything before 1978 carries a lead-based paint disclosure requirement. The late 1970s to the mid-1990s raise polybutylene supply piping — the single most consequential era question in this region, identified by looking rather than by inference. From the late 1990s onward none of those apply, and the ordinary arc of first-generation components arrives instead.

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.

Schools

Stadium Commons is served by Ann Arbor Public Schools. District boundaries are redrawn from time to time.

Buying or selling here

The bedroom count is the transaction here, because it is the single field most likely to be misvaluing these homes.

For a seller, documenting the plan room by room with dimensions is the highest-return work available. A large home recorded with two bedrooms gets valued below both its area and its room count unless somebody supplies the missing information.