Maple Ridge

A 1980 build sits inside the polybutylene window

This is the single most consequential era question in this region's housing, and 1980 sits inside it.

It was inexpensive and easy to install, and it developed a reputation for failing at fittings and joints. Some of it has performed for decades; some has not. What matters is that a building of this age may have it, and the only way to know is to have the piping identified by material during the inspection rather than inferred.

In a condominium there is a wrinkle a house does not have, and it is a large one. Whether supply piping is unit or common element varies with the master deed, and that decides who pays for a replacement and who decides when it happens. Where an association has already re-piped, that is a substantial thing to have behind you and it will appear in the minutes and the reserve history — and it is worth asking about directly rather than hoping.

At forty-five years the first replacement cycle is long past and the second is well under way. Roofs should have been done at least once and probably twice. Furnaces, air conditioning and water heaters have been replaced more than once. Original windows have generally been changed. So the questions are when, by whom and with what — and in a condominium, which of those were the association's responsibility and whether they were funded from reserves or from a special assessment.

Exterior cladding of this era is the other item. Hardboard and early composite products perform according to how their ends, edges and penetrations were sealed and how the ground drains away, and forty-five years is long enough for careless detailing to have declared itself.

At forty-five years the association is most of the purchase

Buying a condominium unit means buying into a corporation as well as a home, and in a community this age the corporation's condition is the larger part of the transaction.

The master deed defines what the unit actually is — where the boundary runs between unit and common elements, and what limited common elements are assigned to its sole use. In an older community this is decisive, because the components now needing replacement are exactly the ones whose ownership people assume rather than check.

The budget and reserve study answer whether the association can pay for what is coming. At this age, roofs, siding, driveways, parking areas and any private roads are all within their replacement horizons, and original plumbing and wiring may still be in place. An association with thin reserves and several of those approaching at once is not cheaper — it is a deferred bill with an unknown date, and it arrives as a special assessment.

The most useful question to ask a board of a forty-five-year-old community is simply what has already been done and when. An association that has replaced roofs, re-piped, resurfaced drives and rebuilt its reserve afterward is in a materially better position than one approaching all of that for the first time, and it will say so gladly.

Read the last two or three years of minutes. Minutes are where a coming expense, a dispute or a construction defect claim surfaces first, and they are the most informative document nobody reads.

Sound, and the party wall

In any attached housing, the wall or floor between two households is the variable that most affects daily life and appears in no listing.

What matters is the assembly. A genuine double stud wall with an air gap and no shared framing performs far better than a single framed wall with insulation, because sound travels through structure as readily as through air. Where a floor separates two households, footfall carries downward through the structure, and carpet helps without solving it.

Construction of 1980 reflects the standards of its period rather than current ones, which is worth knowing rather than worrying about — plenty of it performs well, and the variation between buildings is larger than the variation between decades.

It is also worth establishing exactly what is above, below and either side of a specific unit rather than assuming from the community. An end unit has one shared wall instead of two, which is a real and priceable difference that square footage ignores entirely.

The reliable test is the simplest one: visit at an hour when people are home — an evening or a weekend — rather than at eleven on a Tuesday morning when the building is empty.

Just north of downtown Saline

A position close to the center of Saline is a durable one, and worth distinguishing from the township locations that make up much of the area.

Being genuinely inside the City of Saline means the city's tax rate and services, municipal water and sanitary sewer rather than the well-and-septic question township parcels raise, city refuse and snow service, and the city's own zoning and ordinances. It also means proximity to the downtown on foot, which is a real and permanent advantage that does not depend on anyone continuing to maintain anything.

Michigan Avenue through Saline is US-12, which follows the line of the Sauk Trail and became the Detroit and Chicago Road — surveyed in the 1820s, built between 1829 and 1833, and laid out by Orange Risdon, who founded Saline. The route through the town has been designated a Michigan Historic Heritage Route. By 1875 Saline was the principal agricultural shipping point in this part of the state.

School assignment is set by address rather than by city boundary.

A Saline address is not necessarily the City of Saline

The City of Saline is a municipality in its own right, and it is ringed by townships — Saline, York, Lodi, Pittsfield and Bridgewater among them — whose mailing addresses read Saline. A mailing address is a delivery route rather than a jurisdiction, and it settles nothing.

Each township is a separate government with its own board, tax rate, services, zoning and assessor. The rate difference between a city parcel and a township one is real and recurring, which is why comparable sales must be matched on municipality. Rates and taxable values both change, so compare the current millage and the parcel's own taxable value rather than a remembered difference; a tax bill arrives on the local schedule, and a lender collects an estimated share of it monthly.

School assignment follows a third line again. There is a clear example a few miles away: a subdivision whose addresses read Ann Arbor, whose taxes go to Pittsfield Township, and whose children attend Saline schools — three different answers, all three correct, none derivable from the others. Match comparable sales on district.

Four tiers of protected open space, and a Michigan fifth

Where open ground adjoins a property, ownership is the first thing that decides whether it stays open — but not the only one.

Land held by a public body is generally the most durable, though a public body can still sell or repurpose land. Land under a recorded conservation easement is next — an easement runs with the land, surviving a change of owner and of local board. Association common area is real protection that the owners themselves pay for. Unbuilt private land carries the least protection of the four, but that is not the same as none: zoning, recorded deed restrictions and state wetland regulation can each constrain what may be built, filled or cleared, and EGLE requires authorization for specified activities affecting regulated wetland.

From a window all four look identical, which is why it is worth checking the record rather than the view: ownership, any recorded easement or restriction, the zoning, whether wetland is mapped, and whether a development application has already been approved.

Buying or selling here

The piping and the reserve position are the two things that decide this purchase.

For a seller, documentation of what the association has already replaced — roofs, piping, drives — and a current reserve study are worth more than any improvement inside a unit, because they answer the question a well-advised buyer of a forty-five-year-old community will ask first.