Maple Park

An average build year is not a build year

Build year sets the inspection agenda, and units of different years should not sit in one comparable set without adjustment. That is public, free, and takes minutes.

From 1,400 to over 2,400 square feet is a wide spread for attached housing, and a spread that wide is a reasonable indication of phased construction.

Newer attached housing has a different agenda

A building from the mid-2000s raises a different set of questions from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s stock that fills much of the area, and knowing which questions do not apply is as useful as knowing which do.

What is on the list is the ordinary arc of a twenty-year-old building. Original furnaces, air conditioning and water heaters are approaching or at the end of typical service life — the first replacement cycle is arriving now rather than long past. Original roofs are approaching a first replacement, which in a condominium is the association's expense and therefore a reserve question. Original double-glazed windows begin to show seal failure as fogging between the panes.

The specific item for mid-2000s construction is exterior cladding and how water is managed at its edges. Composite and hardboard products of the period perform well where ends, edges and penetrations were properly sealed and poorly where they were not, and twenty years is long enough for the difference to have shown itself. The bottom courses and anywhere a deck, balcony or porch meets a wall are the places to look.

A young association reaching its first big cycle

This is the most consequential thing about a condominium of this age, and it is easy to miss because everything still looks new.

An association twenty years old has generally not yet replaced its roofs, its drives or its siding. That means it has spent two decades collecting assessments against expenses that have not yet arrived — and whether it actually set that money aside, rather than keeping assessments low and deferring, is the whole question.

A low assessment in a young association is not the reassurance it appears to be. It can equally mean reserves have been underfunded while the buildings were new enough not to need anything, with the reckoning arriving as a special assessment the first time a major cycle comes due. That reckoning is now approaching for a community built in the mid-2000s.

So the reserve study is the document, and the specific question is whether the funded percentage is adequate against the schedule of upcoming replacements — not whether the assessment is comfortable. Ask what the assessment has done over five years and read the minutes for any discussion of roofs, drives or siding. An association that has been planning for this openly is in a materially different position from one that has not started.

The documents that decide the cost of ownership

In a condominium, the roofs, drives, siding and shared drainage belong to the association rather than to the individual owner, so their age lands on the association's budget. That makes the reserve study the most consequential document in the transaction — more so than the inspection of the unit itself.

Ask what the assessment has done over the past five years rather than only what it is today. A single-level unit assessment against ageing common elements is a question, not a reassurance, and a special assessment is what arrives when reserves fall short of a replacement that could not wait.

Then read the master deed's division of responsibility, which decides whether the windows, the deck, the garage door and the basement belong to the owner or the association. That division varies between associations and should never be assumed from experience of another one.

Then the minutes, which is where a pending assessment or a long-running maintenance dispute surfaces before it reaches a disclosure.

A wide size range in one community

From 1,400 to over 2,400 square feet is a spread of more than seventy percent, which means this community contains genuinely different products rather than variations on one.

The two ends draw different buyers and compete against different alternatives. At the upper end, a 2,400-square-foot attached unit competes with detached houses rather than only with condominiums, and the buyer weighing the two is weighing the maintenance trade rather than the space. At the lower end the competition is other attached housing.

So comparables have to be matched on measured area as well as on the community name, and where the community was built in phases, on the phase and year too. A community average across that range describes no actual unit in it.

Everything here drains to the Rouge

Canton sits entirely within the Rouge River watershed: every creek and stream in the township leads eventually to the same river, and the Lower Rouge itself runs through the township's southern portion.

The scale is larger than most people picture. The Rouge and its tributaries run roughly 570 miles through Wayne, Washtenaw and Oakland Counties and drain about 466 square miles of southeast Michigan, taking in nearly fifty communities. The lower branch rises in Superior Township in Washtenaw County and flows east into Wayne County through Canton, then on through Wayne, Westland, Inkster, Dearborn Heights and Dearborn.

For a buyer the consequences are practical rather than scenic. Ask whether any part of the parcel sits within a mapped flood plain, because that determines whether flood insurance is required and at what cost, and the answer belongs to the current maps rather than to anyone's recollection. Ask whether a county drain or drainage easement crosses the ground, because an easement constrains what can be built over it.

Canton's terrain is flat, which is a drainage disadvantage rather than an advantage: water leaves slowly, and ground that sheds correctly depends on grade that has been maintained.

Three high schools on one campus

Plymouth-Canton Community Schools runs an arrangement that is unusual enough to be worth explaining, because it is the thing about the district that most surprises people arriving from elsewhere.

Canton, Plymouth and Salem High Schools are not three schools in three parts of the district. They sit together on a single 305-acre campus in western Wayne County known as the Plymouth-Canton Educational Park, or locally just as the Park, and it educates roughly six thousand students on a school day. Canton occupies the northern section, Salem the center alongside the administrative buildings, and Plymouth the south, with paved walkways and a forested trail system linking them — so students move between buildings rather than down hallways. Which of the three a student attends is not decided by address: the district assigns high school students randomly across all three, so a house cannot be chosen for one of them the way it can for an elementary school.

The schools share a joint academic program while keeping separate identities and, for most sports, separate teams. Some activities are combined across all three: choir, orchestra, the Plymouth-Canton Marching Band, the FIRST Robotics team and some cheerleading.

It grew rather than being designed all at once. Salem came first, and the district's land holding allowed a second school, Canton, to be built beside it. By the late 1990s enrolment across the two was approaching 5,000, and a third building followed.

None of this settles which district a particular address belongs to — Canton has three.

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.

That makes assignment an address-level question rather than a township-level one. Match comparable sales on district as well as on subdivision and size.

The question buyers skip

Sound transmission is the attached-housing question people most often leave until after they move in.

It varies enormously with how the party walls and floors were built — whether a wall runs all the way to the roof deck or stops at a ceiling, what the floor assembly is, and how mechanical chases were framed. Two buildings of the same age by the same builder can perform quite differently.

There is no document that answers it. The only method is to stand in a unit at an hour when neighbors are home, which means an evening or a weekend rather than a midday showing of an empty building.

Buying or selling here

Two things to establish before anything else: the actual year built for the specific unit, and how well the association has reserved for the cycle now arriving.

For a seller, an association with a funded reserve study is a genuine selling point at this age, and one worth putting in front of a buyer rather than waiting to be asked. It is the difference between a comfortable assessment that means something and one that does not.