Michigan Real Estate News Roundup

A roundup of interesting Michigan real estate news from the past week.

  • A new 116 unit apartment complex will top the first “neighborhood concept” Meijer store in Grand Rapids. The apartment portion of the development will be called The Hendrik, as an homage to Hendrik Meijer, the founder of the grocery chain.
  • A report by Bridge, the journalism component of The Center for Michigan, covers how property values in Michigan have roared back since the Great Recession. However, some communities have lagged behind in growth (see, e.g., Detroit residential values).
  • Plans have been announced for a new $50-60M mixed-use development in Novi called Asian Village. Novi is home to the largest concentration of Japanese residents in Michigan and is behind only Chicago in the Midwest. The developer is also behind the proposed regional shopping center a few miles away in Commerce Township. Detour Detroit has a great story about a prior development called Asian Village, located east of the Renaissance Center.
  • Michigan National Guard buys a 42-acre site in Dundee for construction of a $42M so-called “super armory”
  • As you would expect given the significant pace of development of residential and commercial properties in Detroit, there is now talk of whether the market is being overbuilt.
  • The talk of an aquarium on the downtown Detroit riverfront has been tamped down by Mayor Duggan, who does not believe the site of the former Ford Auditorium makes sense, but that the east or west riverfront may make more sense.
  • The City of Detroit has filed suit against Bedrock Management Services, a Dan Gilbert affiliated entity, to obtain the personal information of residential tenants who the city believes may be evading the city’s income tax on residents.
  • Is the “blockchain” the future of registers of deeds? Essentially, a blockchain transaction is a database that requires every participant to verify the transaction is legitimate. How this would be deployed in real estate transactions is yet to be seen.
  • The former Southwest Detroit Hospital in Detroit, which has been vacant for over a decade, may be the next site of mixed-use redevelopment in Detroit. The ownership group believes a redevelopment may occur by 2020, featuring residential condos.
  • In 2017, only 27 permits for new single-family residences were issued in the entire city of Detroit. A nonprofit plans to rehab 11 existing homes, and build another 50-60 new homes in Detroit’s North End neighborhood. Shockingly, of the 4,318 sales of existing residential parcels in 2017, 3,150 were all-cash transactions, and only 661 had traditional financing. This lack of traditional financing is a major impediment to the resurgence of property values in the city.