Acme’s 182-Acre Meijer Is the Headline. The Water System Study Is the Real Story for East Bay Real Estate.
Drive east on US-31 out of Traverse City, cross the river at the foot of East Bay, pass the Resort, and the road thins out into a corridor of small businesses, a few orchards, the casino access, and a stretch of farmland that doesn’t quite look like it belongs to a town with as much money as this one has.
That’s Acme. Officially, it’s Acme Township, with Williamsburg sitting just beyond it on US-31 and M-72. Functionally, it’s the part of Grand Traverse County most people are passing through on their way to Mission Point or Elk Rapids without realizing they’re driving across one of the more interesting development stories in the region.
The Meijer Project Is Bigger Than the Big-Box Talk
Most of what gets written about Acme right now is the Meijer. There’s been a 182-acre plan moving through the township for years now, anchored at the corner of M-72 East and US-31 — a Class A store of roughly 232,000 square feet on its own 21-acre portion of the parcel. The remaining 160 acres are slated for additional commercial use, perimeter landscaping, and the road grid that ties it all together.
A new big-box doesn’t move a real estate market by itself. But the Meijer footprint here is acting as a forcing function. The infrastructure that gets built to serve it — turn lanes, sewer extensions, utility upgrades, intersection improvements — has knock-on effects for every parcel within line of sight.
Land that was zoned for “someday” suddenly has the road geometry and the service capacity to be zoned for “now.” Vacant ground that traded as agricultural a few years ago is being reassessed as multi-family or mixed-use, and the per-acre numbers have moved in a direction that surprises sellers who haven’t paid attention since the 2010s.
The Water System Story Nobody’s Writing About
Here’s the part that quietly matters more than the Meijer.
Acme Township doesn’t have its own municipal water system. It has sewer, but for water, individual sites rely on private wells. That single piece of infrastructure — or the absence of it — has gated commercial and multi-family development in the township for decades.
Multiple projects that wanted to land on US-31 or M-72 in Acme have walked away because there wasn’t public water to hook into, and a private system on the scale they needed wasn’t economical.
The township has been studying three options: build a fully township-owned water system; build distribution lines and connect to East Bay Township’s water supply; or build distribution lines and connect to a water supply owned by the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. The initial economic development zone identifies roughly 86 potential customers — 48 commercial and 38 residential — with projected demand around 65,000 gallons per day.
I bring this up not because municipal infrastructure is exciting reading on a Friday afternoon. I bring it up because the value of every developable parcel along that corridor changes the day a water main goes in. Working in this market, you pick up on which infrastructure decisions actually move dirt and which ones just generate township meeting minutes. This is the kind that moves dirt.
If you own a five-acre parcel along US-31 in Acme and the township eventually builds water service to your frontage, your highest-and-best use isn’t a single-family ranch anymore. It’s a four-unit townhouse stack or a small commercial building. The arithmetic on what an acre is worth doesn’t survive that transition.
What This Means If You’re Buying in Williamsburg
Williamsburg sits just east of Acme along US-31 and M-72, and it gets pulled into the same gravitational field. The 49690 zip code shows a wide range of pricing depending on how you measure: a typical home value in the $400K range, with the median sale price tilting closer to $600K once Grand Traverse Resort condos and waterfront stock are mixed in.
That gap — between everyday housing stock and the resort-and-waterfront layer — is the most useful thing to understand about the area.
If you’re a buyer, here’s the practical takeaway. The interior Williamsburg parcels — the small subdivisions, the in-town ranch homes, the older Cape Cods near the schools — trade meaningfully under the Grand Traverse County waterfront layer. You can still find a livable single-family home in the low-to-mid $400s here that would be priced $200K higher if you put it on East Bay’s west shore.
But the corridor lots — the ones touching US-31, the ones near the resort, the ones in any eventual water-service zone — are no longer in that category. Those are being priced on what they’ll become, not what they currently are. We see this pattern a lot in our market: the moment a piece of public infrastructure becomes plausible, the parcels closest to it stop trading on existing use and start trading on future use.
What This Means If You’re Selling
If you own land along the US-31 corridor in Acme or western Williamsburg, the answer isn’t “list it tomorrow.” The answer is: know which buyer pool you’re actually serving.
A buyer looking for a five-acre homestead is paying ag-residential numbers. A developer looking at a future water hookup is paying something else entirely, and they need different paperwork — utility correspondence, township meeting minutes, current zoning narrative, anything that helps them underwrite the upside.
Over the past 25 years, Janel has watched a handful of these corridor flips play out in different parts of the county. The sellers who do best are the ones who price for the actual buyer and document the upside the buyer is paying for. The sellers who do worst list at “I heard developers are paying X” and never get the conversation started with anyone who could close at that number.
The Resort, the Workers, and the Backstory You Don’t See on Zillow
The other quiet signal in this corridor: the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and Grand Traverse Economic Development recently opened a 48-bed worker dorm on the Grand Traverse Resort campus, with another one already in discussion. The Resort needs to fill roughly 40 more positions.
That tells you something about hiring pressure on the east bay, which tells you something about the demand for entry-level rental housing within driving distance, which tells you something about where the rental-yield numbers might actually pencil if you’re shopping investment property.
If you’ve been looking at the 2026 Northern Michigan short-term rental guide for the vacation side of the rental thesis, the workforce-housing side is the other end of the same equation in this specific corridor.
The Honest Caveat
I’m not telling you to go buy a Williamsburg lot tomorrow on the assumption that Acme will have municipal water by 2028. Townships move at township speed, and “feasibility study” is a word that can carry a lot of weight one way or the other.
There are real questions about who pays for the system, how assessments fall on existing property owners, and which corridor segments get service first. None of that is settled.
But the direction of travel here is clearer than most things on the east bay map. The Meijer is being built. The Resort is hiring. The corridor is being studied. The lots are already trading at numbers that reflect a piece of that future.
And the part of Williamsburg that’s away from the corridor is still — for now — one of the better values in Grand Traverse County for a buyer who wants real square footage, real garages, and real winter access without the waterfront premium. That window doesn’t stay open forever once the corridor story takes off.
If you want to talk through specific parcels, where the corridor likely lands first, or how Williamsburg stacks up against the other current Northern Michigan listings before you make an offer, I’m easy to reach.
Taylor Brown, Realtor
Real Estate One
(231) 360-1510
