A 1965 Deed Restriction Beat Short-Term Rentals in Leelanau County. Michigan Just Extended the Deadline That Decides Whether Yours Is Still Alive.

Cherry Home is 531 lots and about 230 homes in Leelanau County. In 2019 the association sent a cease-and-desist letter to a couple renting their place to weekly guests, the fight went to a bench trial in Leelanau Circuit Court, and the association won.

The Court of Appeals affirmed on October 21, 2021, in Cherry Home Association v Baker. The township’s short-term rental ordinance is not mentioned anywhere in the opinion, because it was never the document that mattered.

What mattered was a declaration of covenants recorded with the Leelanau County Register of Deeds on August 27, 1965, containing one line in Article VII: “All land which is subject to this Declaration shall be limited to residential use.” Eleven words, older than the lot owners, and enough to shut the rental down.

Two rulebooks, and buyers usually check one

The first question we get about rental income is always the same: does the township allow it? Fair question, and we keep a township-by-township answer current for exactly that reason.

It is also half the homework. A zoning ordinance is public law enforced by a zoning administrator. A deed restriction is a private contract that runs with the land, and the people who enforce it are your neighbors.

Those two systems do not talk to each other. A township can hand you a rental permit while a 1950s plat restriction on your parcel quietly says no, and nothing in the permit process will surface it. The township saying yes does not mean the paper says yes.

Michigan already decided what “residential” means, and it is stricter than it sounds

There is no magic word. Michigan courts have held for decades that a plain residential use restriction is broad enough to kill short-term renting even when the document never says the words rental, commercial, or Airbnb.

The controlling idea comes from O’Connor v Resort Custom Builders, a 1999 Michigan Supreme Court case about interval ownership at Shanty Creek. A residence requires permanence and continuity of presence — your things are there, you come back when you want. A summer cottage absolutely counts. A rotating cast of weeklong guests does not.

That line has only gotten firmer. In July 2025 the Michigan Supreme Court affirmed, by an equal division of the Court, that a covenant limiting lots to “single family residence purposes” prohibits short-term rentals — Melvin R. Berlin Revocable Trust v Rubin, out of a lakeside subdivision governed by a 1977 declaration. The split matters for the reasoning, not the result. The result stands.

“Nobody has enforced it in fifty years” is the argument that loses

This is the one that costs people money, because it sounds so reasonable. Everybody on the road rents. The board knew. Some past board members rented their own places. Surely the restriction is dead by now.

In Cherry Home the owners made precisely that argument — fifty-plus years of non-enforcement — and lost twice. The declaration contained an anti-waiver clause: failure to enforce a covenant “shall in no event be deemed a waiver of the right to do so thereafter.”

Michigan also compares the character of past violations to the current one. Occasional casual renting nobody complained about does not license the platform-driven, every-week version, because the newer use is a more serious departure. The trial court enjoined those defendants from renting for anything under six continuous months, and the judgment reached three other Cherry Home owners in consolidated cases.

Note what that injunction did not do: it did not bind the whole subdivision. Deed restriction fights are lot by lot, which is exactly why buyers cannot lean on “well, everyone else does it.”

The new wrinkle: some of these restrictions are dying, and the deadline just moved

Michigan’s Marketable Record Title Act — 1945 PA 200, MCL 565.101 et seq. — is a title cleanup statute. It extinguishes stale interests that depend on events older than the lookback period: forty years for most things, twenty for mineral rights.

A 2018 amendment made this sharp. To survive, a restrictive covenant had to be identified in the property’s forty-year chain of title by its actual recording information — liber and page, or the register of deeds instrument number. A vague “subject to restrictions of record” reference does not do it. Miss that, and the restriction is extinguished as to that owner unless somebody records a notice of claim.

That threatened an unknown number of old Northern Michigan restrictions, which is a big deal in a region full of 1920s and 1930s lake plats and summer resort associations. Then the legislature moved twice more. Governor Whitmer signed House Bill 4524 of 2025, and the picture as it stands today is this.

• Condominiums are safe. MCL 565.104(1)(h) exempts restrictions in a recorded master deed. If you are buying a site condo, and a huge share of newer building around Traverse City is exactly that, the MRTA is not going to erase anything for you.

• Anything recorded on or after January 1, 1950 is safe. MCL 565.104(1)(g) protects interests created by a declaration or similar instrument executed and recorded on or after that date. The originating document has to clear 1950 — a 1970s amendment to a 1930s declaration does not rescue it.

• Pre-1950 restrictions are the exposed ones, and whoever wants to keep them has until September 29, 2027 to record a compliant notice of claim.

• Restrictions that expired on their own terms stay dead. MCL 565.103(1). You cannot use the safe harbor to resurrect a covenant that ran out by its own language.

One thing worth flagging: this cuts both directions. If a buyer is counting on an old restriction to protect a view or keep the neighbor from putting up a duplex, that protection is the thing that might vanish.

The 1950 Test to run before you write the offer

Four questions. None of them require a lawyer to answer, though the fourth might be worth one.

1. Is there a recorded declaration or plat restriction on this parcel at all? Not the seller’s disclosure, not the listing remarks — the actual title commitment, with the liber and page. Ask your title company for copies of the restrictions themselves, not just the exception list.

2. What year was the originating document recorded? 1950 or later, and it is protected. Earlier than 1950, and it may already be extinguished as to this owner, or it may get preserved by a notice recorded before September 29, 2027.

3. Does it limit use to “residential,” “residence purposes,” or “single family residence purposes”? Any of those three is enough under current Michigan case law. You do not need to find the word rental.

4. Is there an anti-waiver clause, and is there an active association? An anti-waiver clause plus a functioning board is a live enforcement threat no matter how many neighbors are renting today. A defunct association with no board is a different risk profile, and one worth a real title opinion if the rental income is load-bearing in your numbers.

Who this actually changes the math for

If you are buying a year-round home to live in, this is a footnote. If you are buying a cottage where the pro forma includes summer weeks, the deed restriction is a bigger financial variable than the mortgage rate, and it is the one nobody checks.

The pattern we see up here is that the old lake plats — the ones on the best water, subdivided generations ago by developers who assumed families would stay put — are the most likely to carry restrictive language and the most likely to have neighbors motivated to enforce it. The prettiest streets are frequently the most restricted ones. That is not a coincidence.

Run the four questions before your inspection contingency expires, not after. Pulling recorded restrictions is a same-week task and it costs almost nothing next to a permanent injunction.

Happy to pull the recorded restrictions on anything you are looking at, whether or not you are working with us. Send me an address and I will go dig. If you are still in the browsing stage, current listings are here, and if you are trying to get a feel for Leelanau before you narrow anything down, that is a good place to start.

Taylor Brown, Realtor
Taylor@taylorbrownrealtor.com