The standing point is the one boards keep getting wrong

Reversion under MCL 559.167 is an association remedy, exercised through a statutory procedure — a two-thirds affirmative vote of members in good standing, written notice to the developer by first-class mail, a 60-day developer window to withdraw the land or convert the units, then recording and filing with the assessor.

What tends to happen instead is that two or three motivated co-owners, frustrated that the board will not act, bring the claim themselves. Shenandoah Ridge holds that they cannot, and that the attempt is not costless.

For a board, that creates a duty it may not have recognised. If the association is the only party that can assert the reversion, declining to assert it is a decision with consequences for every co-owner — and one that ought to be made on advice and recorded in the minutes, not by inaction.

The lis pendens discipline

A notice of lis pendens is easy to record and easy to forget. The lesson here is narrow and completely actionable:

• A lis pendens is tied to a live claim. When the claim is dismissed, the notice must come off. Months of delay is what produced liability here, not the original recording.
• Damages are real and provable. Lost refinancing is a documentable number. So is reduced vendibility on a sale that fell through. This is not nominal-damages territory.
• The same exposure exists on the association's side. Associations record lien claims and notices constantly. Leaving one on title after the debt is satisfied, or after a claim is abandoned, is the same conduct.

Michigan's other slander-of-title lever

Section 8 of the Marketable Record Title Act, as rewritten by 2025 PA 13, provides that a court finding a claim was filed “solely for the purpose of slandering the title to land” shall award the plaintiff all costs, attorney fees as allowed, and all damages. That is mandatory language attached to a statute the same act just made easier for associations to use.

The pairing is worth sitting with. The Legislature has given property owners' associations a clean route to record notices of claim in their own name, and has kept a mandatory fee-shift for recording the wrong one.

A note on the record

Shenandoah Ridge is marked FOR PUBLICATION on the face of the opinion, and Justia carries it among the 2025 published decisions. At least one widely used case database has its metadata as unpublished. On a decision whose whole practical weight comes from being binding, that distinction is worth checking against the PDF rather than the summary.

What to watch next

Whether a Michigan panel extends the reasoning to an association's stale assessment lien. Nothing in the opinion limits it to lis pendens, and Michigan associations record far more liens than they do notices of pending action.