A star builder’a prototype sells for $1.25M: In 2004, up-and-coming developer-architect Tom Fitzsimmons bought a pre-WWII house at 637 N. Fourth Ave. for $299,000 and demolished it. In its place, he put up a two-unit, two-story Colonial-style duplex with ground-floor parking and garage elevators to each spacious, full-floor condo. He’d go on to do similar infill projects twenty times, all on near-downtown plots where he built or modified houses to look authentically historic. Eventually, he moved on to much bigger projects; his latest is the $1 million–apiece ten-condo River North development overlooking Argo Nature Area. One of those original units remained in his family all this time: his mother and then his brother and sister-in-law owned it before selling it last month for $1.25 million.
Related: Scaling Up 2015
Not quite a broken record but…: Before the $12.5 million sale of the Ferris estate in Superior Twp. in August became the most expensive piece of residential real estate ever sold in our area, the high was a mansion on Belmont Rd. in Ann Arbor Hills that went for $3.59 million in 2022. This month the 5-bedroom, 5.2-bath, 9,113-square-foot, three-acre spread at 307 Windy Crest Dr. built in 2014 went for $4 million. Its description calls it a “custom-built Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired Prairie Modern style home” with “multiple outdoor living spaces, extensive landscaping, soothing water sculpture, and [an] entry water feature with [a] walk-over bridge.”
Related: What $12.5 Million Buys
Another student-built home sells: 319 Sedgewood Ln., the outcome of AAPS’s much-vaunted Student Building Industry Program 2024–25 school year, is on the map this month after selling for $695,000. It’s a 5-bedroom, 3.1-bath, 3,729-square-foot farmhouse-contemporary home in Scio Twp. Its sales price is just shy of last year’s record-setting $700,000 sale of the home built in the 2023–24 school year up the block at 399 Sedgewood Ln., which has identical dimensions. The proceeds are reinvested in the program and used to procure future plots.
These Old Houses of the Month: Fifty years after his death, the prolific U-M-educated mid-century modern architect James Livingston is having a moment. His light-filled 3-bedroom, 2-bath, 2,918-square-foot Arbor Hills house, built in 1956 for William and Mary Bandemer, sold for $1.4 million just seven years after the sellers won an Ann Arbor Historic Preservation award for rehabbing it. Weeks later, another MCM Livingston gem at 4081 Thornoaks Dr. in Ann Arbor Twp., which boasts views of either the Huron River or a nearby pond from every room, sold for $825,000. A third Livingston creation, 805 Mount Pleasant on the Old West Side, sold in September 2024 for $870,000, an impressive $140,000 over asking.
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This article has been edited since it was published in the December 2025 Ann Arbor Observer. The headline on the 639 N. Fourth Ave. item has been corrected.