Why this keeps happening in Michigan

Because the ten-year clock is silent, automatic, and runs while everyone involved is doing something else. A developer stops building in a downturn. Units sit as lines on a plan. Ownership of the paper interest changes hands, sometimes several times, sometimes through tax foreclosure. Then a decade later somebody wants to build, and discovers the thing they bought was extinguished years before they bought it.

The Court of Appeals has now said the same thing four ways in two years:

• Charter Township of Fenton v Fenton Orchards Condominium Association, No. 370733 (17 September 2025, unpublished) — installing roads and utilities does not make units “developed.” General common elements are not vertical improvements. Following Elizabeth Trace Condominium Association v American Global Enterprises, 340 Mich App 435, 446 (2022). The Township also lost because it offered no record evidence the roads and utilities were even built — only counsel's assertions at the hearing.²
• Soho Land Development v Oakland County Treasurer, No. 368567 (16 December 2024, unpublished) — an “as-is, without warranty” conveyance protects a seller as to condition but cannot validate a conveyance of interests that no longer exist.
• PCJ Investments v Richard Rowhouses Association, No. 371319 (13 August 2026, unpublished) — a binding oral settlement in a reversion fight was enforced against a party that later refused to sign it, and the association was not required to record a deed reflecting the reversion.

What this means for a board in practice

Three concrete steps, in order:

1. Read the condominium subdivision plan, not the master deed's narrative. The designation that matters — “must be built” versus “need not be built” — appears on the plan. Associations regularly discover that units everyone assumed were coming were never committed.
2. Date the clock from the recording of the master deed, and check whether any recorded amendment restarted or altered it. An unrecorded assurance did not.
3. Record the amendment. Reversion happens by operation of law, but the record does not update itself, and the gap between the legal position and the recorded position is where the litigation lives. Woodfield Greens' association recorded in 2022 and won; the parties who relied on letters lost.

The warning from the other direction

Being right about reversion is not enough. In Shenandoah Ridge Condominium Association v Bodary, No. 364972 (13 January 2025, published), individual co-owners who asserted a reversion claim were held to lack standing — only the association had it — and were hit with slander-of-title damages for leaving a lis pendens on title after the claims were dismissed.

The reversion is the association's to assert, through the statutory procedure, or not at all.

What to watch next

Senate Bill 272, which passed the Senate 34–1 in March and would make the 2016 “undeveloped land” definition retroactive. If it becomes law, the premise underneath this line of cases changes for every pre-2016 project.