Glen Devon

The golf course is closed

This is the first thing to correct, because it appears in current listings and neighborhood descriptions. The course that ran beside Loch Alpine is not operating.

Its roughly 125 acres were bought by an investor in a lender-forced sale for $2.6 million. When he was refused permission to build on the land he sued, and the litigation ran for about a decade before ending in 2026 with a deed restriction from 1975 upheld: no residential development on that ground, ever.

So the honest description is not golf-course adjacency. It is adjacency to 125 acres of barred from residential development open land — which for most buyers is the stronger fact of the two, because it is durable in a way an operating private course never is. A course can close and be sold. A court-affirmed deed restriction is a different order of certainty. What the land will be used for going forward is a question for the association that controls it, and worth asking before an offer.

A public utility, in a township that mostly is not

Glen Devon is served by the Loch Alpine Sanitary Authority, a public utility jointly operated by Scio and Webster townships that also serves Loch Alpine and North Delhi Hills. Its board seats seven — three appointed by each township board and one representing the Loch Alpine Improvement Association — and it is an entity independent of that association.

That is unusual for a township address in Washtenaw County, where individual wells and drain fields are the norm. Water and sewer here are billed by a public authority rather than handled lot by lot, which removes the private-system questions that dominate diligence in comparable subdivisions a few miles away.

It also means an owner here carries two separate obligations that are easy to confuse: whatever the subdivision's own association charges, and the utility's charges. They are different bodies with different budgets.

Loch Alpine, next door and not the same thing

The community adjoining Glen Devon has an unusual history. Ward Blakely bought 470 acres in 1925 and in 1926 launched three projects at once: two dams across Boyden Creek to form Bridgeway and Greenook lakes, the front nine of a golf course, and the roads plus a water and sewerage system. The name was romantic invention — loch, the Scottish word for lake, joined to alpine for the rolling wooded ground.

Glen Devon's street names continue that theme, which is why Scots Way and Cameron Circle sit next to a subdivision built seventy years later. It is worth being clear, though, that the two are separate communities with separate governance. They share a utility and a naming convention; they do not necessarily share restrictions, dues or common land.

For a buyer that means establishing which association's recorded documents actually apply to the specific property, and reading those rather than the neighboring community's. It is an easy thing to get wrong when the two sit against each other and sound alike.

The houses

Construction ran from 1993 to 2000 on lots of just under half an acre, producing houses of around 2,500 square feet with four or five bedrooms and full basements. That is a coherent build window and a fairly consistent product, which makes comparable sales here more legible than in the older community next door, where the housing spans seventy years of architecture.

At twenty-five to thirty years old, these houses sit at a specific point in the cycle. Roofs are commonly on a second covering. Original furnaces and air conditioning are past typical service life and many have been replaced once already. Water heaters and original windows are the next items due, and double-pane units from the 1990s fail at the seal, which shows as permanent fogging between the panes.

Full basements on lots of this size raise the usual drainage questions — grading away from the foundation, the state of any sump, and how the ground behaves in a wet spring. Those are worth looking at in season rather than reading about.

The river corridor

The subdivision sits inside the Huron River corridor between Ann Arbor and Dexter, which carries three metroparks: Delhi on the rapids about five miles west of Ann Arbor, Dexter-Huron upstream of it, and Hudson Mills at 8801 North Territorial Road.

The Border-to-Border Trail runs the corridor, connecting downtown Dexter to the Dexter-Huron and Delhi metroparks along the river through riverfront, woodland and prairie. The recreational infrastructure here is regional and publicly funded, which is a different proposition from amenities an association has to maintain and eventually replace.

Dexter is several different places

Samuel William Dexter arrived in 1824, thirteen years before Michigan became a state. The settlement was established as a village in 1830 and stayed one until November 20, 2014, when — after an eight-year process — the Village of Dexter became the City of Dexter, its voter-approved charter filed with the state.

City residents are no longer residents or taxpayers of the townships the village had straddled. Meanwhile a Dexter mailing address reaches across Scio, Webster, Dexter and Lima townships, and Dexter Community Schools crosses all of them while matching none of them exactly.

Two listings both saying Dexter can therefore differ in municipality, tax rate and school assignment. Glen Devon is in Webster Township, with a Dexter mailing address and Dexter schools.

Schools

Glen Devon is served by Dexter Community Schools.

Buying or selling here

The single most valuable thing a seller here can do is describe the neighboring land accurately. A listing advertising a golf course will be found out, and a buyer who discovers it themselves will discount everything else in the description. A listing that says 125 adjoining acres a court has confirmed cannot be built on is both true and stronger.

The consistency of the housing stock here means comparable sales will do real work once those questions are settled.