Webster Hills
Large custom houses built between 1990 and 2001 north of Dexter, by a builder still working in the area
An email on days a home here lists, changes price, goes pending or sells.
Era notes describe what a build date makes likely across houses of that period. A year built is not proof of what any one property contains: materials, alterations and equipment are established from the records and an appropriate inspection.
School assignments can shift over time. Confirm the assignment for a specific address — the district and the individual school — with the school district.
From MichRIC listing data inside the boundary on the map, homes for sale and sales from the last six months together, refreshed with the feed (Oct 9). Below five sales a row gives the range rather than a median.
About Webster Hills
Webster Hills lies north of Dexter between Huron River Road and Mast Road, about twenty minutes from Ann Arbor. The houses were built between 1990 and 2001 by Christian Tennant, working with architects, and they run from roughly 2,200 to 5,300 square feet with three to six bedrooms and three to six baths.
That range inside a single subdivision is the defining fact about it. This was not a production build with three elevations and a color package, and the pricing behaves accordingly.
- —Custom houses built between 1990 and 2001, from about 2,200 to 5,300 square feet
- —Built by Christian Tennant, a builder still operating in Ann Arbor
- —No single price point — a per-square-foot figure across the subdivision will mislead
- —Twenty-five to thirty-five year old systems, with 1990s windows the commonest deferred item
- —Between Huron River Road and Mast Road, inside the river corridor north of Dexter
- —Dexter Community Schools, in a township rather than the city
- —Webster Township buys development rights outright, so the surrounding farmland tends to stay farmland
A custom-built subdivision prices differently
When houses are built to individual designs rather than from a plan book, square footage becomes a much weaker predictor of value than buyers and sellers expect. Two houses of 3,500 square feet in this subdivision can differ substantially in specification, materials and finish, and the difference will not show up in the headline numbers on a listing.
A range from 2,200 to 5,300 square feet within one subdivision is wide enough that there is no single price point here. The neighborhood does not have a market rate in the way a 300-house production subdivision does; it has a set of individual properties that happen to share a plat.
The practical consequence is that a price per square foot drawn across the subdivision is close to meaningless, and that comparable sales need matching on what is actually in the house. That takes more work than reading a spreadsheet, and it is the work that gets pricing right on a street like this.
A named builder is a researchable fact
Christian Tennant Custom Homes operates out of Ann Arbor and works across Ann Arbor, Barton Hills and Dexter. A builder still in business a quarter-century after finishing a subdivision is genuinely useful to a buyer, and it is a rarer situation than it sounds.
It means the original plans and specifications may be traceable, that questions about how a particular house was built can sometimes be answered by the people who built it, and that the quality claim in a listing is checkable rather than decorative. Where a seller has the original documentation, it is worth including; where a buyer wants to know what is behind a wall, there may be somebody to ask.
It is also a reasonable prompt for the questions that matter on custom work of this vintage: what was specified for windows, roofing and mechanicals originally, and what has been replaced since.
Houses at twenty-five to thirty-five years
Construction from 1990 to 2001 puts this stock at a point where the original systems have generally had one round of attention and are due another. Roofs are commonly on a second covering. Furnaces and air conditioning installed at build are well past typical service life, and the replacements put in during the 2010s are themselves middle-aged now.
Windows are the item that most often gets deferred. Double-glazed units from the 1990s fail at the seal, showing as permanent fogging between the panes, and on a house of four or five thousand square feet a whole-house replacement is a serious number rather than a repair.
On larger custom houses there is usually more of everything to maintain — more roof, more mechanical capacity, sometimes multiple furnace and air conditioning zones, and finishes that cost more to match than to replace outright. None of that is a defect; it is simply the operating cost of the product, and it is worth understanding before rather than after.
Between two roads, and what that means
Sitting between Huron River Road and Mast Road puts the subdivision inside the river corridor north of Dexter without putting it on the water. Huron River Road follows the river valley and is one of the more scenic drives in the county; Mast Road runs north out of Dexter toward Hudson Mills.
Three metroparks sit along this stretch of the Huron — 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 connects downtown Dexter to Dexter-Huron and Delhi through riverfront, woodland and prairie, and the Huron River Water Trail runs the same stretch for paddlers.
That is publicly funded recreational infrastructure rather than association amenities, which means it is maintained without an assessment and is not going to be sold.
Webster Township, and a township that decided not to grow
Webster Township sits in northeastern Washtenaw County and was established in 1833, among the earlier rural townships in the area. Thomas Alexander settled here in May 1826, with others following the same year.
Its oldest institution is still standing and still in use. Itinerant preachers were holding services in local homes by 1826, and in 1832 the first Congregational Society began planning a building. Moses and Hannah Kingsley donated land at the southeast corner of Webster Church and Farrell roads, and in the spring of 1834 whitewood logs were hauled from Plymouth, taken to Foster's Mill at Scio to be sawn into lumber, and raised — a hundred-dollar contribution from Daniel Webster covering what was needed to finish the work. Webster Church has been in continuous use ever since and is the oldest continuously occupied church in Washtenaw County.
The more consequential fact for anyone buying here is recent. Webster has deliberately limited development, holding to low-density agricultural and residential zoning, and in 2005 sixty-nine percent of its voters authorized a Purchase of Development Rights program. A five-member Farmland and Open Space Preservation Board, appointed by the township board, buys development rights from willing farmland owners, permanently removing that ground from future building.
That is the difference between a rural setting and a rural setting likely to stay rural. Zoning can be amended by a future board; a purchased and recorded development right cannot. A subdivision surrounded by land under that program is in a materially different position from one surrounded by farmland that merely has not been sold yet.
It is worth knowing that the township is also one of the two that jointly operate the Loch Alpine Sanitary Authority, a public water and sewer utility — but that authority serves only Loch Alpine, Glen Devon and North Delhi Hills, over on the Scio side. Being in Webster Township does not put a property on it.
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 an eight-year process — the Village of Dexter became the City of Dexter, its voter-approved charter filed with the state.
Those inside the new city stopped being residents and taxpayers of the townships the village had straddled, so a property in the city and one just outside it now answer to different taxing authorities. 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.
Webster Hills sits outside the city, north of it. Two listings both saying Dexter can differ in municipality, in tax rate and in school assignment, which is why the three deserve to be read as three separate facts rather than one.
Schools
Webster Hills 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
The mistake to avoid on both sides is treating this as a subdivision with a going rate. It does not have one. A seller who lets an automated valuation set expectations will be wrong, usually in whichever direction is least convenient, and a buyer who assumes the neighborhood's last sale establishes the market will be wrong the same way.
For a seller, the evidence that carries weight is the specification: what was originally built into the house, what has been replaced and when, and any original documentation from the builder. For a buyer, the equivalent work is establishing the same things independently, and treating each house as an individual property rather than a unit of a subdivision.
That is more effort than a production neighborhood requires. It is also where the value is found on a street of custom houses, in both directions.
Community details reflect public records and local knowledge and can change — always verify what matters to your purchase. Explore more of Dexter's neighborhoods, or browse active listings.