By the third week of October the signs start going back up along the two-tracks out past Lake Leelanau: Seasonal Road, No Winter Maintenance. Most buyers read that as a plowing inconvenience. It's a legal status, and depending on your loan, it can decide whether you close at all.
What "private road" means, legally
A private road is any road a county road commission never accepted into its own system. The commission doesn't own it, doesn't plow it, and carries no liability for it. That has nothing to do with No Trespassing signs or whether you're allowed to drive on it. If the road commission never took it over, upkeep sits with the owners along it, and only them.
"Seasonal" is a different label, and the two get confused constantly.
Leelanau County Road Commission runs an actual seasonal road system, closed to public travel from November through April, on a map the commission approved February 21, 2017. A road on that list can be fully public. The commission just isn't obligated to keep it open once the snow starts, and a separate policy, adopted April 18, 2018, spells out the minimal upkeep it gets during that closure. Being on the seasonal list and being a private road are two different filing cabinets entirely.
A 2007 ordinance most buyers never ask about
Kasson Township, which covers ground around Lake Leelanau, adopted its own private road ordinance in 2007. It only applies once five or more lots or units share access, but where it does, the specs are exact: an 18-foot gravel road for five to ten lots, 20 feet with sealcoat for eleven to sixteen, 22 feet and a real bituminous surface past that. Maximum grade of 8 percent, 12 in limited spots, 16 feet of overhead clearance so a fire truck can get down it.
And a maintenance agreement, recorded with the Leelanau County Register of Deeds, spelling out who pays what share. The ordinance doesn't mention plowing at all. It only answers who's on the hook once the road needs fixing.
The financing gap
Fannie Mae's own selling guide requires a legally enforceable maintenance agreement or covenant for any private street: each owner's share of repair costs named, a remedy if someone stops paying, and a term that's supposed to run forever. It has to be recorded in the land records. No agreement, no loan, unless a state statute already assigns owner maintenance automatically, and Michigan doesn't have a blanket one that lets a buyer skip this step.
FHA doesn't ask for the same file. HUD's guidance wants an all-weather surface, passable by emergency vehicles and ordinary passenger cars, plus either a recorded easement or ownership by a homeowners association. A road maintenance agreement specifically is not required for FHA. So the same six hundred feet of gravel can clear an FHA appraisal without a second look and stop a conventional buyer flat, because the two loan types are underwriting completely different things.
I wouldn't put a conventional buyer under contract on a private road with no recorded agreement without getting one drafted and filed before closing. It's fixable. It's just not something you want to discover from your underwriter with a moving truck already booked.
Getting one drafted after the fact isn't hard, but it isn't fast either. It generally needs every owner on the road to sign, which is easy with three names on it and a lot harder with fifteen, and then it has to be recorded before your lender will clear the condition. Title companies flag this routinely on rural files up here; ask yours whether the commitment already carries an exception for the road, because that's usually the first sign nobody's dealt with it.
Janel's closed enough of these over twenty-five years to know where the stall usually happens. It's rarely the well, and it's rarely the septic. It's a piece of paper from a decade or two ago that never got recorded.
Where the paper trail runs out
Leelanau makes this checkable because the road commission publishes its own map and its own dates. Grand Traverse doesn't make it nearly as easy; their maintenance and development standards sit behind a document center I couldn't pull up from here, so that one's a phone call to the commission. Antrim County Road Commission has a snow plowing policy and a right-of-way use policy listed on its site with no adoption dates attached. Benzie has a Local Road Policy, revised November 13, 2013, and a 2021 road abandonment policy, and neither is something you'll find by searching; you call and ask about the specific road.
I haven't seen a public seasonal-road mileage count for Antrim or Benzie, and I'm not going to guess at one.
What to ask before you write the offer
Ask whether the road was ever accepted into the county system, since that answer tells you who's responsible for it. Ask for the recorded maintenance agreement itself, not a verbal assurance that everyone pitches in. And ask your lender directly whether the file is FHA, conventional, or something else, because that answer decides which of the two paragraphs above is actually yours to worry about.
A driveway question runs through a completely different office depending on whose road it connects to, the same way we found on Old Mission's state-owned driveway permits. And a recorded, running-with-the-land agreement isn't unique to roads either; it's the same mechanism behind the PA 116 farmland covenants we wrote about this spring.
If you're the eleventh house on a road that's never had a written agreement, who do you think should be the one to finally get it recorded, the seller before listing, or the buyer before closing? I don't think it's obviously either one, and I'd like to hear how people up here have handled it.
Cottage closings on these roads tend to cluster right before the ground freezes, which is the worst possible time to find out a file is missing a document from 2007. If you're looking at anything back a two-track between here and Suttons Bay, or you're already under contract on a house with a private road, send me the address and I'll tell you what I can find before your underwriter does. And if you'd rather compare it against something with public road frontage, here's what's active right now.
Taylor Brown, Realtor
Taylor@taylorbrownrealtor.com
