Island Hills Estates

Lima Township, and the fourth Dexter

Four townships carry Dexter mailing addresses — Scio, Webster, Dexter and Lima — and each sets its own millage and provides its own services. Lima sits west of Scio and south of Dexter Township, and it is the least built-up of the four.

That is the practical draw here and it is worth stating plainly rather than as an adjective: township tax rates rather than city rates, on acreage, minutes from a downtown and a school campus. It is the same trade that draws people to the other three townships, at a slightly different price.

It also means comparable sales have to respect the line. A property in Lima Township and one in the City of Dexter can sit two miles apart, share a mailing address and a school district, and carry materially different tax bills. Both facts appear on a listing; they are two facts rather than one.

Conservation land, and what the views are worth

The lots here were laid out to look onto conservation areas rather than onto other houses, and that is the specific thing being sold. It is also the thing most worth verifying for an individual lot.

Land held under a conservation easement or as dedicated open space is durably protected in a way that merely undeveloped land is not — a recorded easement survives a change of ownership and a change of township board, where zoning does not. The question for a buyer is which category the ground in front of a particular lot falls into, and what document establishes it.

Where the answer is a recorded easement or dedicated common land, the view is close to permanent and is genuinely worth paying for. Where the answer is that the neighboring parcel simply has not been built on, it is worth considerably less. That distinction is knowable before an offer and it moves price more than most buyers realize.

One builder, larger houses

Guenther Homes built this community, and the same builder is behind Saline Valley Farms over in York Township — a useful point of reference for anyone who knows one and is looking at the other.

A single builder working across a subdivision produces more consistency than a lot-by-lot custom development does, which makes comparable sales here more reliable than in the custom neighborhoods elsewhere in the area. The variation is in floor plan, lot position and condition rather than in construction standard.

What acreage asks of an owner

Lots of an acre and up carry obligations a suburban parcel does not, and they are worth pricing rather than discovering. Driveways of any length need resurfacing and, where they cross a ditch, a culvert that eventually fails. Tree work on a wooded lot is a recurring expense, and a large tree over a roof or a drive costs four figures to take down safely.

A drain field has a finite service life.

Drainage on a large lot is its own question, and how the ground behaves in a wet spring tells you more than any map. So does what the recorded restrictions permit — outbuildings, fencing, clearing — because on this much ground people tend to have plans.

The river corridor

The Huron between Ann Arbor and Dexter is one of the better-protected river corridors in southeast Michigan. Three metroparks sit along it — 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 through riverfront, woodland and prairie, and the Huron River Water Trail follows the same stretch for paddlers. The run from Hudson Mills down to Dexter-Huron is a standard trip.

That is publicly funded and permanent open space rather than association amenity. It requires no assessment, it is maintained without a special levy, and it is not going to be sold — which is a different proposition from open ground that simply has not been built on yet.

Dexter is several different places

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

That change matters more than it sounds. Those inside the new city stopped being residents or taxpayers of the townships the village had straddled, so a property in the city and one a mile outside now answer to different taxing authorities, and comparable sales from before 2014 predate the split.

A Dexter mailing address, meanwhile, reaches across Scio, Webster, Dexter and Lima townships, and Dexter Community Schools crosses all of them while matching none exactly. Two listings both saying Dexter can therefore differ in municipality, in tax rate and in school assignment.

The founder left a house behind. Samuel Dexter was born in Boston in 1792, the son of a politician who served as Secretary of War and of the Treasury under John Adams; he came to Michigan in 1824, became a land developer and civic leader, founded several towns, and named this village after his father when he established it in 1830. Gordon Hall, the Greek Revival house he built on a hilltop above the town between 1841 and 1843, was designed by Calvin T. Fillmore — brother of the president — with Sylvester Newkirk overseeing construction, and took two years largely because lumber was hard to get from Flint and Detroit. It carries a hexastyle Doric portico, runs about 2,500 square feet on each of its two main floors with unfinished attic and basement space above and below, and originally held 22 rooms, nine fireplaces and 55 windows. It became a Michigan State Historic Site in 1958, was listed on the National Register on November 9, 1972, and was bought by the Dexter Area Historical Society in 2006.

March 15, 2012

On the afternoon of March 15, 2012 an EF3 tornado cut a path of nearly eight miles through this part of Washtenaw County, with peak winds of 135 to 140 miles an hour. It damaged more than two hundred homes and businesses by the county's final assessment, brought down hundreds of trees, and left about twenty houses needing demolition. Total damage came to just under $10 million.

Nobody was injured, which given the strength of the storm and the hour of the day was remarkable. Most of what was damaged or destroyed has since been rebuilt, though some work continued for years afterward.

For a buyer this is a live diligence item rather than a historical note, and it is the Dexter equivalent of the flood question in Dearborn. A house in or near the path may have been repaired or substantially rebuilt in 2012 and 2013 — which is worth knowing, because it means newer roofing, siding, windows or framing than the build year suggests, and because the quality and permitting of that work varied.

Ask directly whether the specific property was affected and what was done. Where it was, the permits and the contractor records are the documentation that matters, and a seller who has them is in a materially stronger position than one who does not.

Schools

Island Hills Estates is served by Dexter Community Schools. The district crosses several townships and does not follow municipal boundaries, and assignment is set by address.

Buying or selling here

Around sixty houses by one builder on similar lots is a workable comparable set, provided the analysis accounts for what each lot actually looks onto. A conservation-facing lot and an interior lot are different products in a subdivision whose whole premise is the view.

For a seller, the evidence is the lot — what it faces, what protects that, and the recorded document that does the protecting — alongside current well and septic documentation, which a serious buyer will ask for regardless.

For a buyer, the order is the conservation status of the ground in view, then the private systems, then the house. On an acre lot, the questions that cost real money are rarely inside the building.