The Dock Going In This Week Might Not Be Yours. Welcome to Michigan’s Bottomland Rules.

Drive any inland lake road in Grand Traverse, Leelanau, or Antrim County right now and you’ll see the same thing: a Bobcat in someone’s yard, dock sections stacked on a flatbed, and a guy in chest waders with a level. The first two weeks of June is when Northern Michigan goes from “lake property” to “lake property you can actually use.”

It is also the two weeks of the year when waterfront buyers find out something nobody told them at closing.

The dock sitting at the end of the lot doesn’t automatically belong to them. Neither does the boat lift. Neither, in some cases, does the right to put a structure there at all.

The myth that gets repeated at every closing table

Here’s the line waterfront buyers hear over and over: riparian rights run with the land. That part is true. If you own the deed, you own the bundle of rights that comes with frontage on a navigable body of water in Michigan — reasonable use, access, the ability to wharf out to navigable depth.

What gets quietly skipped is that the rights to use the water are not the same as ownership of the structures sitting in it, and they’re definitely not the same as the permit allowing those structures to be there.

We see this a lot up here, especially on smaller inland lakes where the prior owner installed a permanent dock decades ago without a second thought. The structure was grandfathered, the permit (if any) was filed under their name, and the purchase agreement said “personal property excluded” without ever specifying what counted as personal property and what was a fixture. Then May rolls around, the new owner calls the dock company that’s been pulling and installing it for fifteen years, and the dock company says, “Sorry — the family took the sections with them.”

Seasonal vs. permanent — the EGLE line that decides everything

Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) draws a hard line based on whether your dock leaves the water in winter.

Seasonal docks and hoists — the kind that get pulled every fall and reinstalled every June — don’t require a permit, as long as they’re private, non-commercial, don’t interfere with neighbors’ reasonable use, and aren’t parked in a wetland. This is most docks on Long Lake, Duck Lake, Lake Leelanau, Glen Lake, the Torch Lake chain, and the bay frontage that comes out every fall.

Permanent structures — cribs, pilings driven into the lakebed, anything left in year-round — require a permit under Part 301 (inland lakes and streams) or Part 325 (Great Lakes bottomlands). And the permit is tied to the property and the structure as approved. Modify it, expand it, or replace it with something materially different and you’re back in front of EGLE.

The trap: a lot of older permanent docks on West Bay and East Bay were installed under permits that don’t match what’s actually in the water anymore. The previous owner added a finger. The lift got bigger. The crib was rebuilt with steel instead of cedar. None of those changes were filed. The dock is “legal” until the day a neighbor complains or you try to replace it — and then suddenly it isn’t.

Great Lakes bottomlands play by entirely different rules

If your property fronts West Bay, East Bay, Lake Michigan north of Frankfort, or any other Great Lakes shoreline, you’re dealing with a separate regulatory animal. The State of Michigan owns the bottomlands below the ordinary high-water mark, and any private use beyond a seasonal dock requires a bottomland conveyance — a deed, lease, or agreement issued by EGLE.

Most residential buyers never touch this because they’re fine with a seasonal setup. But if the home you’re buying has a permanent crib dock, a stone breakwater, a boathouse built over the water, or any fill below the OHWM, ask the seller for the conveyance document. If they can’t produce it, the structure may be in legal limbo. EGLE’s conveyance process is slow — over a year from application to issuance in some cases — and there are annual fees and appraisals attached.

This matters more than it sounds. If you’re paying a premium for a house specifically because it has a boathouse, and the boathouse is sitting on unpermitted bottomland, you’ve just bought a problem that gets handed to you, not the seller.

Shared docks and the association language nobody reads

Then there’s the third category: shared frontage. Plenty of inland-lake subdivisions around here — especially on Long, Spider, Lake Skegemog, and the smaller Antrim chain lakes — were platted with a narrow common “park” lot and a dock association governing dock assignments. The shoreline you can see from the cottage you’re buying might be governed by a six-page document recorded in 1968 that limits each owner to one slip, no jet skis, no overnight guests, and a maintenance assessment that changes whenever the dock association board feels like changing it.

These documents are public record and they sit quietly in the title commitment. If your title company is from out of town and used to platted subdivisions in Wayne County, the dock-association covenant might not get flagged because nobody outside Northern Michigan immediately understands why it matters. Read it. Ask whether your specific slip assignment transfers automatically or has to be approved by the association after closing. The answer varies subdivision by subdivision and sometimes lot by lot.

The Memorial Day-to-Cherry Festival closing window

None of this would matter as much if waterfront closings spread evenly across the calendar. They don’t. The peak window for Northern Michigan waterfront sales is mid-May through the end of July — sellers want the listing photos to show the lake at peak summer, buyers want possession before the Fourth of July, and the financial calculus on a vacation property only works if you get a meaningful chunk of the season.

That means a lot of waterfront closings happen after the dock’s already in the water. The structure is sitting there. The lift is operational. You walk the property with your inspector, look at the dock, assume it conveys, and never ask the question.

By the time you find out otherwise, your real estate agent has moved on, the title company’s closed its file, and you’re negotiating directly with the seller’s family about whether the dock company gets to pull those sections in October. That’s a conversation that goes much better in May.

Four questions to ask before you sign anything on a waterfront property

Working in this market, you learn to slow waterfront closings down with the same four questions every time:

First: Is the dock seasonal or permanent, and if it's permanent, can you produce the EGLE permit? If the answer to part two is "I think there's something in a drawer somewhere," that's a flag.

Second: Are the dock sections, hoist, swim raft, and any furniture on the dock included in the sale? Write each item into the purchase agreement specifically. "Dock" is ambiguous. "The 60-foot aluminum Shoremaster dock sections, the 4,000-lb Shoremaster boat lift with canopy, the 8x8 swim raft" is not.

Third: Who installs and pulls it, and is there an existing service contract? The handful of dock companies serving Northern Michigan are booked solid by January. If the family has a 20-year relationship with the installer, ask whether that relationship transfers. It usually does, but only if the dock company knows you exist before April.

Fourth: If it's Great Lakes frontage, where's the bottomland conveyance? Same logic as the permit question, but the stakes are higher because the state owns the lakebed and unauthorized structures can be ordered removed.

The bigger point

Northern Michigan waterfront has had a strange couple of years — sales volume hit a high last year while values softened slightly, and inventory remains uneven across the region. People are buying. They're also, in many cases, buying without understanding that "waterfront" is a category of property where what you can see is only part of what you're acquiring.

This is different territory from deeded water access, which is its own rabbit hole on inland lake parcels without direct frontage. Bottomland and dock rules are about the structures sitting in the water on properties that do have frontage — and the rules don't scale with the price tag. A $400K cottage on a small inland lake and a $4M bayfront estate are both subject to the same EGLE framework.

If you're looking at a waterfront listing this month — in Glen Arbor, on the Torch chain, on Long Lake, or anywhere along East and West Bay — ask these questions before the inspection, not after. The dock's going in this week one way or another. Make sure it's yours when it does.

If you want to talk through a specific property — or you're trying to figure out whether the dock setup on a listing actually makes sense for the way you'll use the lake — that's the kind of conversation we have a lot. Browse current listings, or just reach out.

Taylor Brown, Realtor

Taylor@taylorbrownrealtor.com

(231) 360-1510