Half the Best Driveways Up North Don’t Belong to the County. They Belong to You and Eight Neighbors. Here’s the Math.
Drive far enough out M-22, or up almost any two-track off County Road 633, and the pavement quietly stops being somebody else’s job. The plow truck you’ve been following peels off at the last green-and-white sign, and everything past that — the grading, the gravel, the snow, the spring potholes deep enough to swallow a Labrador — is on the people who live there.
That’s a private road. And in our market, it’s not the exception. Across Leelanau, Antrim, Benzie, and the rural edges of Grand Traverse County, a huge share of the waterfront, wooded, and off-the-grid-ish properties everyone wants to buy sit on roads the county never touches.
Most buyers don’t think about it until the inspection’s done and the lender asks one very specific question.
The Question That Stops a Closing Cold
Here’s where it bites. You’ve found the place, you’re under contract, the well and septic checked out, and three days before closing your loan officer emails asking for a recorded private road maintenance agreement.
You don’t have one. The seller doesn’t have one. And now everyone’s scrambling.
This is one of the most common last-minute snags we see on rural Northern Michigan deals, and it’s almost always avoidable. The fix is to know the road’s status before you write the offer — not after the appraisal comes back.
Why Lenders Care About a Road They’ll Never Drive
The logic is colder than it sounds. If a private road falls apart and nobody’s legally on the hook to fix it, the homes on that road get harder to sell — and harder to sell means the bank’s collateral is worth less. So the bank wants a piece of paper saying the neighbors are bound to keep the road usable.
Whether you actually need that paper depends on your loan, and the rules are not intuitive. Conventional loans backed by Fannie Mae generally want a recorded road maintenance agreement spelling out how the road gets maintained and how costs are shared. Freddie Mac, backing a nearly identical conventional loan, typically doesn’t require one. FHA doesn’t mandate a maintenance agreement but wants a recorded easement guaranteeing legal access. And the VA, as of late 2022, dropped its ongoing-maintenance-agreement requirement and now focuses on recorded permanent access instead.
I’m not your lender, and lender overlays vary shop to shop, so confirm your specific situation with whoever’s writing your loan. But the pattern is clear: the same private road can be a non-issue or a closing-killer depending entirely on the product you’re using. If you’re financing a rural property up here, ask your lender about private road requirements on day one, not day thirty.
What Happens When There’s No Agreement at All
Plenty of Northern Michigan roads have chugged along for decades on a handshake. Everybody chips in for the gravel, somebody’s brother-in-law owns a plow, and it works — right up until it doesn’t.
Michigan actually has a law for the breakdown scenario. Under the Maintenance of Private Roads Act of 1972, owners can petition the township to set up a special assessment district and force shared maintenance, generally requiring a majority of the frontage owners to get on board. It’s a real tool, but it’s slow, political, and not something you want to discover you need in February.
The handshake has a quieter problem too: it isn’t recorded, so it doesn’t satisfy a Fannie Mae underwriter, and it doesn’t bind the next person who buys the cabin three doors down. New owner, new attitude, and suddenly the guy at the end of the road decides plowing isn’t his circus.
The Real Cost Nobody Puts on the Listing
Private road living has a number attached, and it’s worth running before you fall in love with the place.
Snow is the big one. Up here, a single plow visit runs roughly $125 to $175, and in a winter that can bury us from November into April, the events add up fast. Most private-road owners go with a seasonal contract instead, and depending on how long the road is and how many houses split it, your share can land anywhere from a few hundred dollars to well over a thousand a season.
Then there’s the gravel and grading in spring, the occasional culvert, dust control if you’re tired of eating your neighbor’s rooster tail all summer, and the long-term question of whether the road ever gets paved or stays two-track forever.
None of that shows up in the MLS remarks. All of it shows up in your bank account.
The Three Questions to Ask Before You Write the Offer
We tell buyers eyeing anything rural to run what I’ll call the private road gut check before they get emotionally attached.
First, who legally maintains this road, and is it in writing and recorded? A verbal “oh, we all pitch in” is a yellow flag, not an answer. Ask for the recorded agreement, or confirm there isn’t one so you know what you’re walking into.
Second, what does your specific loan require? This is a five-minute phone call to your lender that saves a five-alarm fire later. Get the answer before inspection, not after the appraisal.
Third, what does it actually cost per year, and who’s collecting? Plowing, grading, the works. If there’s an association or an informal kitty, find out the real number and whether people actually pay in — a maintenance agreement only works if the neighbors honor it.
Get clean answers to those three and a private road is a complete non-event. Skip them and it’s the thing that blows up your timeline, or worse, the surprise line item that turns the dream cabin into a money pit.
Why This Is So Common Up North
This isn’t a quirk — it’s the texture of the market. The properties with the privacy, the trees, the water frontage, the no-neighbors-in-sight feeling that pulls people to Northern Michigan in the first place are exactly the ones least likely to sit on a county-maintained road. The thing that makes the location special is the same thing that puts the road on you.
Working in this area, you pick up on which roads have their act together and which ones are one bad winter away from a feud. Janel has watched these private-road dynamics play out across 25 years and four counties, and the pattern holds: the buyers who ask the boring road question up front are the ones who never think about it again after closing.
It’s the same diligence muscle that matters for wells, septics, easements, and deeded water access up here — the unglamorous stuff that quietly decides whether a rural purchase is a joy or a headache. If you’re weighing a place out on the Leelanau Peninsula or the back roads around Lake Leelanau or Cedar, this is exactly the kind of thing worth a conversation before you tour, not after. And if you’re eyeing a rural property as a short-term rental, reliable winter access isn’t optional — your guests have to actually get to the door.
If you want a second set of eyes on a private road before you make an offer — or you’re just starting to browse what’s out there right now — that’s a big part of what we do. Reach out and let’s pull the road status before you get attached.
Taylor Brown, Realtor
(231) 360-1510
