Preserve of Dexter

Two townships, and Dexter schools

The Preserve spans Scio Township and Webster Township, and is served by Dexter Community Schools. The mailing address reads Dexter, but the City of Dexter is a separate municipality and the community is not in it.

The townships are taxed well below the city. On 2023 figures a principal residence in the City of Dexter carried about 48.9 mills; Scio Township within the Dexter school district about 34.2, and Webster about 35.6 — a gap of roughly fourteen and a half mills, close to a third.

Because the community straddles the line, two houses inside the same gates, on the same drive and sharing the same lakes, can sit in different townships and carry different bills. Nothing about the boundary or the address shows which side a lot falls on.

A township address inside this district is the ordinary case rather than an exception. Dexter Community Schools covers the City of Dexter along with parts of eight townships — Dexter, Webster, Scio, Northfield, Hamburg, Lima, Freedom and Lodi — and the city itself holds only about four thousand people.

Rates are set annually, and Michigan taxable value resets when a property changes hands, so the tax a current owner pays is not the tax that follows a sale.

Custom houses, which changes how they price

Norfolk Homes developed the ground and sold homesites; buyers built with their own builder from a recommended list, under design guidelines administered by the association. This is a lot-and-custom-build community rather than a production subdivision, and that single fact explains most of what looks strange in the data.

It explains the size range above all. Roughly 2,100 to nearly 8,000 square feet is a spread of about 270 percent, the widest in this entire directory, and in a production subdivision that would signal a data problem. Here it is simply what happened: ninety-two households each built the house they wanted.

It also removes the shortcut that makes most new-subdivision analysis easy. In a builder community the homes are repetitions of a small number of catalog plans, so a same-plan comparable exists and can be found. Here there is no catalog and no repetition. Every house is its own product, and a sale two doors down may be genuinely uninformative about the one next to it.

So valuation here rests on the individual house — the plan, the level of finish, the site, the lake frontage or lack of it — rather than on a neighborhood figure. That is exactly the situation automated valuations handle worst, because a model has area and bedroom count and no way to see any of the rest. On a street where houses differ by a factor of four, that produces wide and unreliable numbers.

The design guidelines are the counterweight, and they are why the community reads as coherent despite the variety. They are administered by the association, and they apply to what an owner wants to change as much as to what the original builder did.

The lakes, the trails and Dunstan Park

Glacier and Crystal are spring-fed and about fifteen acres each — roughly thirty acres of water inside a community of ninety-two lots. That ratio is what makes the setting, and it is a different thing from a stormwater basin dressed up with landscaping, which is what most communities around here mean when they say pond.

Spring-fed means the water is supplied by groundwater rather than by runoff, which generally makes for clearer water and a more stable level through a dry summer.

Lake frontage is the largest single variable between one lot here and another, and it is not evenly distributed across ninety-two sites. A lot on the water, a lot with a view across it, and an interior lot are three different products at three different prices, and that difference will outweigh several hundred square feet of house.

The lakes, the paths and Dunstan Park are common elements under the master deed, which means the association maintains them and the owners fund that through the assessment. That is the ordinary arrangement and it works; it is also why the association's budget is worth looking at rather than assuming — thirty acres of water and a network of trails is more to look after than a mown verge.

What is actually preserved here

Names like this one usually invite a shrug, because Preserve is the strongest word a developer can borrow and it commits them to nothing. In this case the surrounding township has put unusual substance behind it, which is worth knowing about because it is what makes the setting durable rather than merely pleasant.

Scio Township runs a land preservation program funded by a dedicated millage, first passed by voters in 2004 and renewed twice since, both times by wide margins. The program has been involved in protecting more than 1,700 acres, and it has drawn over twelve million dollars in outside matching funds — better than a dollar and a half of other money for every dollar of the township's own.

It works largely through conservation easements, which is the strongest form of protection short of outright public ownership: an easement runs with the land, so it survives a change of owner and a change of township board and cannot be undone by a later planning decision. Several of the properties the program has protected sit on and near Zeeb Road, including a farm easement on the east side of it.

That is a different order of assurance from a developer's brochure. It is a twenty-year-old, voter-renewed public commitment with a funding source attached, and it is the reason the rural character on this side of the township is likely to hold.

Webster Township, on the other side of the community's line, is also substantially agricultural and rural in character.

None of that guarantees any particular view from any particular window — private land next door is still private land. But it does mean the broader setting is protected by something more durable than hope, and that is a fair and specific thing for this community to claim.

Houses built from 2001 onward

A build that started in 2001 and continued for years sits built past every era question that matters in this region. Polybutylene supply piping, aluminum branch circuit wiring, galvanized steel piping and lead-based paint all belong to earlier decades. These are modern-code houses with modern insulation, modern electrical service and modern egress.

What the earliest houses are reaching now, at about twenty-five years, is the first replacement cycle. Original water heaters are past their expectancy, air conditioning is at or past it, furnaces are near the end of theirs, and original roofs are late in a typical asphalt shingle life. On a house of five or six thousand square feet those are large numbers rather than routine ones, simply because there is more of everything.

Because the community built out over a long period rather than all at once, houses here are at genuinely different points in that cycle — which is another reason a neighborhood average means little and the individual house means everything.

On acreage in a township, water and septic arrangements vary by parcel. Where a house is on a well and a septic system, the questions that matter are the age and condition of the system, when it was last inspected, and whether there is room for a replacement drain field — the last being the one most often overlooked.

Walk-out lower levels are common here, which the terrain allows. A walk-out has a door at grade on the downhill side, which makes the lower level a genuine story of the house; it is also worth knowing that appraisers do not credit below-grade finished area the same way as above-grade, so a stated total square footage and an appraised one can differ on a house with a large finished lower level.

Getting there

Downtown Ann Arbor is roughly eight minutes away along Huron River Drive, which is one of the better drives in the county rather than a commute through traffic. Downtown Dexter is a few minutes in the other direction.

The Huron River corridor here holds an unusual concentration of public land. Hudson Mills Metropark runs to about 1,550 acres and Dexter-Huron Metropark to about 120, both held by the regional Huron-Clinton Metroparks authority, and Washtenaw County's Border to Border Trail links them toward town as part of Michigan's Iron Belle Trail. Regional public ownership is the most durable form there is — not a business that can be sold, and not dependent on any association continuing to fund it.

I-94 and M-14 are both a short run, which puts Detroit Metro and the wider region within reasonable reach without going through Ann Arbor.

Buying or selling here

The two things that move a number here are which township a lot sits in and where it sits relative to the water. Neither shows up in a price per square foot, and both are settled before I put a price on anything.

For a seller, the case worth making is the combination: township taxes, Dexter schools, an acre or more, and a lake community of ninety-two houses rather than a subdivision of four hundred. Most listings out here say Dexter and leave the rest for a buyer to work out, which gives away the strongest part of the story.

For a buyer, what matters is that this is a custom-house community, so the comparison is house to house rather than plan to plan, and the assessment covers real assets — thirty acres of water, the trails, the park — rather than a strip of lawn. I would rather walk two or three of these with you than send you a spreadsheet; the differences here are the kind you see standing on the lot.