Hamlet Toll Brothers

A house with no history is a different kind of unknown

On a fifty-year-old house the questions are all backward-looking: what has been replaced, when, and by whom. On a house built in 2022 there is nothing to look back at, and buyers frequently take that as meaning there is nothing to ask.

There is. The questions are simply forward-looking instead. What is the builder's warranty term, what does it actually cover, and — critically for anyone buying from the first owner rather than the builder — does any remaining coverage transfer? That depends on the specific document rather than on general practice, and it is worth reading rather than assuming.

The punch list is the second. Items identified at the original walkthrough are sometimes completed and sometimes quietly not, and the first owner's file will show which. Ask for it.

The third is what shows up in years three to ten on new construction, which is different from what shows up at thirty. Grading and drainage settle on disturbed ground and a grade that fell away from the foundation at handover may not any longer. Deck and porch attachments, flashing details and early water intrusion around windows are the classic early failures. And a first winter and a first wet spring reveal things a summer walkthrough will not.

Buying while the community is still being built

A development still under construction raises a set of questions a finished one does not, and all of them are answerable before an offer.

Control of the association usually rests with the developer until a defined proportion of lots is sold. Until then the developer holds the votes and effectively sets the budget. Ask whether the transition to owner control has happened and, if not, what the schedule is under the governing documents.

Completion is the second. Have the common areas — landscaping, walkways, entrance features, and any private drainage or stormwater detention infrastructure — been formally completed and turned over to the association, or do they remain the developer's obligation? Unfinished common elements are a future cost to somebody, and the documents decide who.

Reserves are the third and the most commonly overlooked. A young association with new infrastructure can carry a very low assessment simply by not yet funding the replacement of anything. That is not a bargain; it is a deferral. Ask for the reserve study.

And the fourth is what happens next door. On a street with lots still to be built, a buyer should establish what may be built there, to what standards, and over what period — because it will be built during their ownership, with the noise and traffic that involves.

Pricing new construction against resale

New construction and resale are two markets, and comparing across them without adjusting produces bad numbers in both directions.

A builder's price includes things a resale price does not: a warranty, current code compliance, new mechanicals with full service lives ahead of them, and the ability to choose finishes. A resale price frequently includes things a builder's base price does not: landscaping, window treatments, a finished lower level, a deck, and appliances.

For a buyer weighing a new house against an older one nearby, the honest comparison is the delivered cost of each — the base price plus the options and the site work on one side, the purchase price plus the immediate deferred maintenance on the other. That arithmetic is worth doing on paper rather than by impression.

And for anyone reselling a recently built house, the options package is the whole argument. Two identical models can differ by a large sum in what the original buyer selected, and none of it appears in the bedroom count. Keep the original documentation; it is the only evidence of it.

Three school districts, not one

Canton Township is served by three separate school districts: Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, which covers the substantial majority of the township, along with Van Buren Public Schools and Wayne-Westland Community Schools.

Match comparable sales on district as well as on subdivision and size.

Plymouth-Canton also runs an arrangement with no real parallel nearby: the Plymouth-Canton Educational Park puts three separate high schools on a single campus of about 305 acres — Salem, which opened in 1970, Canton, which opened in 1972, and Plymouth, which opened in 2002. Each has its own building, name, colors and mascot, students take classes across all three, and facilities are shared rather than triplicated. It is a structural fact about the district rather than a matter of opinion, and it regularly surprises people arriving from somewhere with a conventional single high school. Which of the three a student attends is not decided by address: the district assigns high school students randomly across all three.

The five hamlets, and the one that survived

Before the subdivisions, Canton was a scattering of crossroads settlements — five hamlets, of which Cherry Hill is the last to retain substantial historic fabric. Sheldon Corners was established in 1825 beside the Sauk Trail, now Michigan Avenue, and grew into a small village with a post office, general store, blacksmith, church and school.

Cherry Hill was settled the same year and was originally called Ridge, for the ridge shore of an ancient lake it sat on. It took its present name around 1865 after Abner Hitchcock built an inn he called the Cherry Hill House for the wild cherry trees growing there; that inn later served as a general store and a dance hall and was the social center of the community for generations. The first area church, Cherry Hill United Methodist, went up in 1834.

Dairying followed. The Ypsi Creamery and the Detroit Creamery, later Wilson Dairy, operated until 1940, when Henry Ford bought the dairy and folded it into his village industry program — which here provided work for veterans of the Second World War disabled by their service.

The Cherry Hill Historic District was added to the National Register in 2003. Eleven Canton houses built between 1825 and 1904 are listed under the Canton Township Multiple Property Submission, most of them added in 2000 and the rest in 2003. One of the eleven, the Sheldon Inn of 1825 on Michigan Avenue, was demolished in 2021 and no longer stands.

How Canton got this big

Canton became a Michigan township on March 7, 1834 and was named, like the neighboring Nankin and Peking townships, after a city in China — Canton is the only one of the three still carrying the name. New England settlers arrived after the Erie Canal opened in 1825 and farmed the flat ground for well over a century; from 1925 to 1970 the township was known as the Sweet Corn Capital of Michigan.

It counted about 5,300 residents in 1961. What changed it was I-275, completed in 1977: once the freeway was in, a township of farms sat within an hour of anywhere in metropolitan Detroit. The population approached 50,000 by the 1980 census and reached 98,659 by 2020, making Canton the second most-populated township in Michigan. At the peak, construction here sometimes exceeded two thousand homes a year.

The township has put an unusual amount of land into public recreation since. It owns two golf courses — Fellows Creek, bought in 1978, and Pheasant Run, opened in 1995 with 27 holes by Arthur Hills across more than three hundred acres. Heritage Park runs to 105 acres on Canton Center Road, the Summit on the Park beside it is a 95,000-square-foot recreation and cultural center opened in January 1996, and the Lower Rouge River Recreation Trail, begun in 2007, runs out to the I-275 Metro Trail.

Buying or selling here

The newest housing in the directory needs the most forward-looking diligence, which is the opposite of most buyers' instinct.

For a seller of a recently built house, the documentation is the argument: the builder's warranty and whether it transfers, the original options list, the punch-list record, and the association's transition and reserve status. Those four answer nearly everything a serious buyer will ask.

For a buyer, the order is the warranty and its transferability, the association's control and completion status, the reserve schedule, what may still be built nearby, and then the house — seen, if at all possible, after a wet spring rather than only in a dry summer.