Bouma says the city acted reasonably quickly on plans to build a driveway for the formerly landlocked properties—but Michigan Department of Transportation took a full year to approve its access to Washtenaw Ave. | Photo by Mark Bialek
His Bouma Group, Realtors had listed a very rare commodity: two nearly one-acre house lots at 2751 and 2731 Washtenaw Ave., just east of the Stadium fork. “But getting access to the land was the problem,” he says. “We found out that no buyer wanted to move forward on that property because they didn’t have access to it.”
Across from County Farm Park and an easy walk to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, the location is highly desirable. Though most nearby lots were developed in the 1950s, until this summer these were covered entirely by dense trees behind a fenced bike path. The fence was needed, Bouma emails, because there was “a deep gully on the other side … and they wanted to prevent pedestrians from falling into it.”
The path and fence belong to the city, so the owner—who Bouma says wants to remain anonymous—needed its permission to cross them. Once they submitted the required drawings, he says, “we got city approval relatively fast.”
But to connect the driveway to the street, they needed permission from the state. “Dealing with MDOT was quite a nightmare,” Bouma says. When he first contacted the agency last June, “they told us that the person we should be talking with was out for about six or seven weeks. Nobody was checking email. Nobody was following up. I had to follow up religiously. And so that was the big problem. It was the bureaucracy at MDOT.” Permission finally came through this June.
The properties are zoned R1, for single-family residential. In August, the owners began excavating and removing trees to build a shared driveway for both sites.
Each was previously listed for sale at $249,900, but Bouma says he’ll be relisting them soon at a price that includes the cost of adding access. He anticipates no problem selling them, since “quite a few people that have expressed interest in the property. … Some of those lots have gone for four, five hundred thousand. Land has become very valuable simply because there is no more of it.”
In case buyers need some inspiration, he emails, his firm “had Main Street Homes provide us with a sample of what could be built” at 2751: a 3,000-square-foot, three-bedroom, three-bathroom “craftsman ranch.” The estimated price: $1,649,000.
