Why this is a warning to boards about what approval is worth

Michigan associations issue architectural approvals on the working assumption that approval settles the matter. In a subdivision with an “any Owner” enforcement clause, it settles only the association's part of it.

The consequences are practical:

• An approved owner is not safe. A homeowner who builds in reliance on board approval can still be sued by a neighbour, years later, and the approval is not a defence in itself.
• The association may get pulled in anyway. Even where the association is not a defendant, its approval decision, its files and its board members' testimony are all in evidence in the neighbour's case.
• Informal variations are the real hazard. Here the plan changed after a conversation with a board member. Nothing in the record turned that conversation into an approval, and it left the built structure outside what the board had actually authorised.

Four things a Michigan board can change tomorrow

1. Find out whether your declaration has an “any Owner” enforcement clause. If it does, stop telling applicants that approval ends the matter, and put a line in the approval letter saying it does not bind other owners.
2. Approve documents, not conversations. Any change to a submitted plan goes back through the same process in writing. A board member's individual view is not board action, and saying so in the approval letter protects both the board member and the owner.
3. Inspect against the approved drawings on completion. The gap between what was approved and what was built is where every one of these cases lives, and it is the cheapest thing on this list to close.
4. Keep the file. Six and a half years later, the association's own record of what was submitted and what was approved is the only reliable account anyone has.

Laches is available, but it is not automatic

The natural defence to a six-and-a-half-year delay is laches, and Michigan does allow it — Bayberry Group, Inc v Crystal Beach Condominium Association, 334 Mich App 385, 410 (2020).

But it is narrower than boards assume. In Powers v Bone, No. 367748 (11 February 2025, unpublished), the Court of Appeals vacated a summary disposition that had been granted to deck owners on laches, because there were genuine issues of fact about whether the objecting owner received sufficient notice to object before the deck was completed. The panel restated the rule: laches “is not triggered by the passage of time alone; rather, it is the prejudice occasioned by the delay.”²

That decision is frequently summarised the other way round — as holding that laches barred the claim. It did not; the laches grant was vacated.

What to watch next

What the Oakland Circuit Court does with section 11.03 on remand. Michigan has surprisingly little published authority on the interaction between a board's approval power and an individual owner's parallel enforcement right, and this is the case positioned to produce some.