When Julie Welch sold 730 S. Division St. for $1.5 million in August, the U-M completed site acquisition for its next planned dormitory. A week earlier, the other remaining holdout, William Cosnowski, accepted $1.1 million for his rental house at 338 John St. | Photo by Mark Bialek
In the end, even Julie Welch accepted the inevitable. Back in June 2023, she defiantly told MLive that she hoped never to sell 730 S. Division St., a 1,064-square-foot Cape Cod built in 1901. Her parents bought it in 1962 as a student rental, and she said, as far as she was concerned, “Build around me, and let’s coexist in peace.”
That was never going to work for the university, of course. On August 29, U-M closed on its purchase of the Division St. house for $1.5 million. With that final fallen domino, the university now owns every square inch between E. Madison and Hill streets between S. Fifth Ave. and S. Division St. A week earlier, the other remaining holdout, William Cosnowski, accepted $1.1 million for his rental house at 338 John St.
The land is slated for Phase II of the university’s Central Campus student housing program. Phase I, a $631 million, 2,300-bed cluster of buildings to the west on what used to be Elbel Field, is expected to be completed by summer 2026. In all, the university hopes to add 6,500 beds for undergrads in three phases over the coming decade.
Related: New Dorms at Last
Most of the land for Phase II was assembled in two giant deals. The first was the December 2018 purchase of the Fingerle Lumber property, about 6.5 acres for $24 million. While there were rumors at the time that the buy would be a foothold for a new dorm, it wasn’t until February 2023 that the university announced it was acquiring forty-nine nearby properties in a blockbuster $75 million deal. Regent Ron Weiser’s McKinley Associates had quietly bought them up and sold them to the U-M at its cost.
Still, there were four holdouts. Hung Kwong Soo sold 336 E. Madison for $1 million in November 2023. Then, in February 2024, Ontario Properties gave up its low-slung 1,232-square-foot, 4-bedroom, 1-bath house at 319 John St. for $800,000.
Those might seem like big sums, and they definitely include healthy over-the-market-rate premiums, owing to the needs of a highly motivated and wealthy buyer. But it doesn’t seem like waiting helped the four owners get any more from the university than their neighbors who sold when Weiser’s folks came calling.
The average price paid per house in the Weiser bundle was $1.53 million. The average for those four holdouts? $1.1 million—and the privilege of avoiding an expensive battle with a buyer that can take property through eminent domain.
