Links at Fellows Creek

The course, and how the deal worked

Canton bought Fellows Creek Golf Club in 1978. The course was not new even then: it had opened in 1961, designed by Bruce Matthews and Jerry Matthews, of the family that laid out a great many of Michigan's public courses. What the township acquired seventeen years later was an eighteen-hole course, a house serving as the clubhouse, and a small maintenance building — a modest operation by any measure.

The decades since have been a continuous rebuild. Greens and tees were improved, cart paths added, a new clubhouse and maintenance building constructed, the parking lot expanded, and nine additional holes laid out. Then in the spring of 2005, two new holes replaced two that had been poorly designed — and those two were constructed by Robertson Brothers Builders as part of the Links of Fellows Creek condominium project.

That is an unusually direct arrangement, and it is worth knowing. This is not a development that happened to be built beside a golf course; the course was reshaped as part of the same undertaking. The club today is owned by Canton Township and operated under a private contract.

The creek the course is named for

Fellows Creek is one of the significant tributaries of the upper branch of the Rouge River, and its history is the history of this ground. It once ran through a wide floodplain on a meandering bed, with banks of forested wetland and open prairie.

Farming changed that. Drainage works straightened the channel to make the land workable, and the consequences ran downstream: reduced plant and animal diversity along the creek, and degraded water quality in the lower Rouge and ultimately the Detroit River. It is the same watershed, and the same story, as the channelized stretches of the Rouge over in Dearborn.

Canton has been undoing some of it. The Fellows Creek Wetland project works to re-create a more natural stream system — managing stormwater, stabilizing the banks against erosion, holding back pollutants before they reach the Rouge, and restoring fish and wildlife habitat. The Fellows Creek Wetland Nature Trail runs through it and connects into the township's wider trail network.

For a buyer that is worth more than scenery. Restored wetland alongside a residential community is functioning stormwater infrastructure, and it is also land that is very unlikely to be built on.

What township ownership does and does not guarantee

Municipal ownership is the durable part. A course held by a township is not a private business that can close and be sold for redevelopment, and there is a community nearby where precisely that happened, ending in a decade of litigation. Public ownership is not an absolute — municipalities do reconsider land uses — but it is a different order of certainty from a privately held course.

The operating contract is the part that can change. A course owned by the township but run under a private contract can change operators, and with an operator can come changes to rates, hours, programming and how the grounds are kept. Ownership and operation are two separate questions, and only one of them is settled here.

For a unit on the course, the ordinary trade-offs apply: errant balls, early-morning maintenance equipment and turf spraying schedules arrive with the open view. A buyer who wants the frontage should know what else comes with it, and a seller with a course-facing unit should expect the question.

Today the club plays as twenty-seven holes at 2936 South Lotz Road, each nine measuring over 3,200 yards from the back tees, with a bar and grill and a year-round banquet facility alongside it.

These are condominiums

Ownership here is condominium ownership, which is a different instrument from a fee-simple lot. The owner holds a unit plus an undivided interest in the common elements, and the master deed and bylaws — not a zoning ordinance alone — govern what may be changed outside.

The documents to have in hand are the master deed, the bylaws, the current budget, any reserve study, the certificate of insurance and the most recent meeting minutes. Minutes are the most informative of the set and the most often skipped — a pending special assessment or a long-running maintenance argument surfaces there first, usually well before it reaches a listing.

The amenities, and what they cost to keep

The community carries a clubhouse, a fitness center, a billiards room and an outdoor pool. Those are genuine amenities and they are also line items: an association must insure, maintain and eventually replace each of them.

A pool in particular is a capital item with a finite life and a substantial replacement cost, and the useful question is not whether it is pleasant but whether it is funded. That is a reserve study question, and an association with a current study and a funded plan sits in a materially different position from one without.

Beyond the community's own facilities, Canton's public recreation is close at hand: Heritage Park runs to 105 acres on Canton Center Road, and the Summit on the Park beside it is a 95,000-square-foot recreation and cultural center opened in January 1996, with indoor swimming, a gymnasium, a fitness area, dance studios and a senior center.

Twenty-year-old construction

Units completed around 2005 are now about twenty years old, which is a particular and often underestimated point in the cycle. The original roofs are at or approaching the end of a typical asphalt shingle life. Original furnaces, air conditioning and water heaters are all past or nearing their expected service lives. Exterior finishes are due for attention.

In a condominium, most of that sits on the association rather than on the individual owner — which is exactly why the reserve position matters more here than the age of any one unit does. A twenty-year-old condominium project with a thin reserve is looking at special assessments; one with a funded plan is looking at scheduled work.

Inside the unit, the usual questions apply: the age and condition of the mechanicals the owner is responsible for, whether the kitchen and baths are original, and what the association's documents say about who repairs what. That last division is written down and is worth reading rather than assuming.

A township that owns two golf courses

Fellows Creek was the first, bought in 1978. The second is Pheasant Run, opened in 1995 at 46500 Summit Parkway — twenty-seven holes laid out by Arthur Hills across more than three hundred acres of turf, wetlands, woodland and native grasses, playing as three separate nines.

Canton has invested in public recreation more broadly since its growth began. The Lower Rouge River Recreation Trail, started in 2007, runs from Canton Center Road out to the I-275 Metro Trail. For a township that was farmland within living memory and did most of its building after 1977, that is a considerable amount of municipally held recreational land assembled inside a single generation.

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 community and size.

Buying or selling here

The comparable set is narrow and specific: units in this community, matched on floor plan and on position relative to the course. That is an advantage rather than a limitation, because it makes pricing more legible than it is in a large mixed subdivision.

For a seller, the association document package is part of the product. For a buyer, the two questions that decide the most are the reserve position and the school district for the specific unit — both answerable before an offer, and both harder to do anything about afterward.