Weatherstone

1990 sits inside the polybutylene window

Polybutylene supply piping was used in American homes from roughly the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, which places a 1990 build in the middle of the period rather than at either edge. That does not mean a given unit has it — plenty from those years were plumbed in copper — but it means the question is live and must be answered by looking.

The pipe is gray, flexible, and usually marked PB followed by a number. It is found at the water heater, at the main shut-off, and at fixture stubs where it comes through a wall. Checking takes about a minute and needs no expertise; an inspector will confirm it.

It matters because it affects insurability, financing and the cost of a foreseeable repair rather than being a matter of preference. Where it is present, the questions are what has already been replaced, whether any fittings have been changed, and whether the insurer has been told. Where it has been replaced, the documentation of that work is worth real money at resale and is routinely lost because nobody kept the invoice.

In a condominium there is a further layer that matters more than in a house: the master deed decides whether the piping inside a wall is unit or common element. That is the difference between an owner's bill and a special assessment across the whole community, and it is settled by the document rather than by custom. It is also the question to put to the board directly — an association that has already dealt with it community-wide is in a completely different position from one that has not, and the answer will be in the minutes.

What must never happen is an inference from the year in either direction.

Thirty-five years, and what has already happened

At thirty-five years the first replacement cycle has largely happened and the second is beginning on the shortest-lived components, which changes the questions from predictive to historical.

Original water heaters are long past normal expectancy and have been replaced at least once, probably twice. Original furnaces and air conditioning are past expectancy and have almost certainly been replaced. Original roofs are at or beyond the end of a typical asphalt shingle service life, so the useful question is not whether they are due but when they were done and how the work was funded.

Original glazing units are well into the period where seal failure shows as fogging between the panes, and in a condominium the windows are usually common or limited common element, so replacement is a building decision rather than an owner's.

Exterior cladding of this period performs according to how its ends, edges and penetrations were sealed and how the ground drains away. The bottom courses, and anywhere a deck or porch meets a wall, are where the original detailing shows after thirty-five years.

So the single most useful question to ask this board is what has already been done and when. An association that has re-roofed, replaced piping where needed, resurfaced its drives and rebuilt its reserve afterward is in a materially different position from one approaching all of that for the first time — and a well-run board will answer gladly and in detail.

The advantage of a community this age is that it has a track record rather than a projection. The minutes, the budgets and the assessment history are all on paper and available to a buyer who asks, and a community whose assessment has risen steadily over thirty-five years is usually one that has been funding its reserve.

The arithmetic of a shared facility

A clubhouse, a pool, a court or a play area is a genuine amenity and it is also a line in the budget, which is the part that rarely gets said out loud.

A building has a roof, heating, plumbing, insurance and a service life of its own, and every part of it is funded by the owners through the assessment. There is no third party paying for it.

The arithmetic bears hardest where the units are compact, because a facility costs what it costs regardless of how large the units beneath it are. So the facility cost per household is proportionally larger in a community of small units than in a community of large ones. That is a fair trade for having it, and it is a reason to look at how it is funded rather than to assume it is free.

How a special assessment would be split matters just as much. Where an assessment is allocated equally per unit rather than by percentage of value, every unit pays the same share of a roof or a pool rebuild whatever its size — which lands hardest on the smallest units. The master deed sets the allocation and it is worth reading before anything else.

The useful question is not whether the amenity is nice but whether the reserve study names it, carries a realistic replacement cost, and is funded toward it. An amenity in good condition with money set aside is an asset. The same amenity with nothing set aside is a bill with an unknown date.

Insurance and liability sit alongside it, and a board should be able to say without hesitation how each facility is covered.

Landscaped ponds are usually detention basins

A community required to manage the stormwater running off its own roofs, roads and drives does it with a detention or retention basin. Landscaped, with a path around it, that basin is what gets described as a pond.

This is not a criticism — a naturalized basin is genuinely better than a bare concrete structure — but knowing what it is changes three things.

It explains the behavior. A detention basin is designed to fill during a storm and empty over the following day or two, so a fluctuating water level is the system working rather than a problem. A retention basin holds a permanent pool.

It is a maintenance obligation with a schedule and a cost. Basins silt up, and a basin that has silted loses capacity — which is when water starts appearing where it did not before. Outlet structures block. Banks erode. Where a basin falls under a county drain or a recorded maintenance agreement, there is an enforceable standard the association has to meet. Those costs belong in the reserve study as named lines, and they are among the items most often missing from one.

And it explains the mosquito and algae questions residents actually ask, which come down to how the basin was designed and how it is maintained rather than to whether it exists.

The Washtenaw County Water Resources Commissioner is the authority for drainage across the county and can say whether a basin falls under a county drain. Flood plain status is a separate, parcel-specific question.

Three forms in a 39 percent range

Ranches, two-story homes and attached units are three products competing for three buyer pools even where their areas overlap, and 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, and a step at the entrance is enough to matter to some of that pool.

A two-story home is the reference product with the deepest comparable data. An attached unit is the broadest category, and the specifics that matter are 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. The recorded instrument settles it.

In a 39 percent range with three forms, form and position do most of the pricing work rather than area — and those are precisely the adjustments an automated valuation handles worst.

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.

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 occur around the city — 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.

Michigan taxable value generally uncaps in the calendar year after a qualifying transfer, and some transfers are exempt, so the tax a current owner pays is often not the tax a new owner will pay.

Buying or selling here

One minute at the water heater, and one question to the board about the piping community-wide.

For a seller, documentation that the supply piping has been checked and, if it was polybutylene, replaced — at the unit or across the community — is worth real money and is routinely lost. A reserve study naming the clubhouse and the basin with realistic figures is the second thing, because both read as amenities and both are costs.