Lohr Woods

Fifty lots, and what backs onto what

In a subdivision of fifty lots where some back onto woodland or water and others do not, that difference is the single largest variable in price — larger than square footage, and larger than most of what a listing leads with.

It is also the variable most worth verifying rather than assuming. Land that a lot backs onto falls into categories with very different durability. Common area held by the association is protected as long as the association holds it. A recorded conservation easement is protected permanently and survives a change of ownership and a change of township board. Land that simply has not been built on yet is protected only by whatever zoning and wetland rules apply.

So the questions are what the ground behind a specific lot actually is, who owns it, and what document establishes its status. Where the answer is common area or an easement, the view is worth paying for. Where it is an undeveloped parcel in separate ownership, it is worth considerably less, and both sides of a transaction ought to know which they are dealing with.

Where the water is a pond rather than a natural feature, one further point applies: ponds in residential developments are frequently stormwater detention doing a job as well as looking well, and dredging one is a capital expense associations often have not reserved for.

Two subdivisions on one road

Lohr Woods and Lohr Lake Village sit on the same road in the same township and are commonly mentioned together, which is exactly the circumstance in which comparable sales go wrong.

They were platted separately. That means potentially separate recorded restrictions, separate associations and separate assessments, and it means a sale in one is evidence about the other only after the differences have been accounted for rather than before. Lohr Lake Village is the larger and later of the two, built by a single builder in a three-year window around a designed water feature; Lohr Woods is the smaller.

Establish which subdivision a house is actually in and get the documents that attach to it. It is free to do and it prevents a buyer discovering after closing that the rules they were shown govern the neighborhood down the road.

Pittsfield Township, with Saline schools

This corner of Pittsfield Township is one of the places where the three facts on a listing pull in different directions, and it is worth reading them separately.

The municipality is Pittsfield Township, which is what drives the tax rate and the services — township millage rather than the City of Ann Arbor's, which is a meaningful monthly difference and one of the real reasons people look on this side of the line.

The school district is Saline Area Schools. That does not follow from the township, and it does not follow from a mailing address either; district boundaries in this county match neither municipal nor postal lines.

Three different utility arrangements within a few miles

Saline is a useful place to understand what a listing's water and sewer line actually means, because within a short drive there are three genuinely different arrangements and they are not interchangeable.

The first is municipal water and sewer — city mains, city billing, a utility standing behind the system. Some subdivisions carry it even while sitting in a township, which surprises buyers who assume the two go together. The owner's obligation ends at the property line.

The second is a private well and a private septic field, one per house — the common arrangement on larger township lots. The owner owns the whole system: the well, the pump, the pressure tank, the septic tank and the drain field, along with inspection, pumping and eventual replacement. A drain field has a finite service life, and whether there is room for a replacement field is a question worth asking.

The third is the one people most often get wrong: a community well and a community septic system serving a whole neighborhood, with each house feeding in through its own grinder pump. Saline Valley Farms works this way. It is neither public sewer nor an individual field — the shared components are funded and maintained collectively, which makes the association's reserve position a live question, and the grinder pump is owner equipment running on household power with a service life measured in years.

All three appear on a listing as a line of text. What differs is who is responsible for what, and what it costs when something fails.

Saline is a city and four townships

A Saline address can mean the City of Saline itself or any of the townships around it. Pittsfield, Lodi, York and Saline Township all carry Saline mailing addresses in places, at different millage rates and with different services, and a Saline address does not distinguish between them.

Saline Area Schools crosses those lines without matching any of them, which produces situations in both directions: properties with Ann Arbor mailing addresses served by Saline schools, and properties with Saline addresses served by Ann Arbor's district.

The rule that follows is simple.

Why the town is called Saline

The name is geological. Between roughly 600 and 230 million years ago the Lower Peninsula sat under sea water, and when the sea receded it left salt and other minerals behind. Springs here carried it to the surface. Mastodon bones and the remains of other ancient animals have been found near those springs, and Native peoples kept a village at one of them, hunting the animals the salt attracted and producing salt themselves by evaporation.

Eighteenth-century mapmakers recording the area named the river Saline, from the French for salt marsh, and the settlement took its name from the river. Joseph Francis surveyed the ground in 1819; early county histories put Leonard Miller here in 1826 as the first Euro-American settler. The community was officially Saline by 1832, became a village in 1866 and a city in 1931. The springs are still commemorated in the city's Salt Springs Park.

The city a few minutes away

Downtown Saline is centered on the junction of Ann Arbor Street and Michigan Avenue, and the road it sits on is older than the town. It was laid out as a military road in the 1830s, was known for most of the nineteenth century as the Chicago Road, and had become Michigan Avenue by 1915 — the same route that runs east through Ypsilanti and Dearborn to Detroit.

The East Michigan Avenue Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1985, covers a residential stretch at 300 to 321 East Michigan Avenue along with addresses on Maple Street and East Henry. The Depot was built in 1870 for the Detroit, Hillsdale and Indiana Railroad and reopened as the Saline Railroad Depot Museum on July 4, 1995, the hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the day it first opened.

The Saline Community Fair has run since 1936 and remains the town's largest annual event, which for a place with this much agricultural history is fitting rather than nostalgic.

For a township property, the city is the practical center — schools, shops, services and the fair — without the city tax rate. That is the trade being made, and it is worth stating as a trade rather than as an unqualified advantage.

Buying or selling here

Fifty lots produces few sales in a year, and the ones that occur vary by position more than by house. That makes pricing a matter of establishing what a specific lot backs onto and what protects it, then adjusting comparables drawn from a wider area.

For a seller, the recorded status of the ground behind the lot is the strongest single piece of evidence available and it is checkable — which is more than most listings in this price range offer.