"Initiation fee waived to be a member of the Tullymore Golf Resort." That line sits in the middle of a listing description for a home tucked into the Villages at Tullymore, offered up like a bonus feature alongside granite countertops and a wooded lot. Read it twice and the real information surfaces: if the fee can be waived as an incentive, it exists as a separate line item in the first place. Buying the house does not automatically buy the membership.
That distinction matters more in Stanwood than almost anywhere else in West Central Michigan, because Stanwood sits directly against Canadian Lakes, where the opposite is true. One golf corridor treats club access as an optional purchase layered on top of the deed. The other treats it as a mandatory fee baked into the deed itself. A buyer comparing the two after scrolling listings for both places is comparing two different financial products that happen to look similar from the street.
Two Golf Corridors, One Zip Code
Tullymore Golf Course and St. Ives Golf Club sit about five miles apart, both inside Stanwood's 49346 zip code and both adjacent to Canadian Lakes. Tullymore opened in 2002 and was named the number one new upscale public course in America by Golf Digest that year. St. Ives opened in 1995, designed by Michigan architect Jerry Matthews, and carries a five star rating from the same publication. Together they're often described as sister courses, and real estate around both is marketed under a shared "Tullymore Resort" identity even though the two clubhouses, the surrounding home developments, and the fee structures attached to each parcel are not identical to what you'd find a few miles over in Canadian Lakes.
The geography reads as one continuous golf neighborhood. The paperwork does not.
What You Buy at Tullymore or St. Ives
Tullymore's own membership page lays out the structure plainly: membership levels run from Full Golf to Associate Golf, Social, and Corporate, and every level carries an initiation fee, annual dues, and a food and beverage minimum. None of that is included in a home's purchase price. It's a separate contract with the resort's membership office, priced and negotiated on its own terms.
The Villages at Tullymore, the residential development built around the golf courses, is where most of the homes for sale in this corridor sit. Ministrelli Builders developed the land after founder Peter Ministrelli, who passed away in 2021, expanded the resort's original footprint into neighborhoods like the Village of Hamlet and the condominium community Village of Camelot. Lead builder Mike Miller continues the work today, with homes typically set on lots averaging about half an acre.
Builder incentives in this market are specific to the builder and often specific to a single address. Ministrelli's current promotion, for example, ties a complimentary deck or a $7,500 deck credit to one particular home on Killarney, and only if the buyer purchases directly from Ministrelli Builders as part of the final sale agreement. That's the same pattern as the waived initiation fee: a discount attached to a specific new construction transaction, not a standing feature of resale homes in the same neighborhood. A buyer purchasing an existing Villages at Tullymore home from a previous owner should not assume the same waiver applies, because the membership was never bundled into the property in the first place. It has to be asked about, priced, and negotiated separately every time the home changes hands.
What You Buy in Canadian Lakes
Canadian Lakes runs on the opposite model. The association's own website states plainly that no comparable community offers what it does for less than $730 annually, and that fee is not conditional on golfing, boating, or using the pavilion. Ownership options include everything from a primary residence to a vacant lot, and the association explicitly counts vacant lot owners among its membership categories. The Canadian Lakes Property Owners Corporation, established in 1997, administers dues and amenities across the entire community regardless of how actively an individual owner participates.
That mandatory structure has a visible effect on the low end of the Canadian Lakes land market. Longtime lot owners describing the resale market on a Michigan outdoors forum note that legacy vacant lots in Canadian Lakes have listed for as little as $1,200 to $2,000, while comparable lots in a nearby association with lighter dues have listed for $5,000 to $7,000. A mandatory annual fee that never goes away, attached to a parcel someone may never build on, pulls the resale price down toward whatever a buyer is willing to pay just to keep covering dues on land they don't use.
Tullymore and St. Ives don't have that drag, because there's no comparable mandatory fee attached to every deed. The tradeoff is that nothing about resort access comes free with ownership either. Both models solve the same funding problem. They just decide who pays and when in opposite ways.
The Same Zip Code, Two Very Different Price Tags
Reading Stanwood's headline numbers requires the same caution. As of September 2026, one listing platform put Stanwood's median list price at $429,000, down 9 percent from the same month a year earlier, with homes spending a median of 132 days on market. A different platform's rolling three month window, covering the period ending in March 2026, showed a median sale price of $850,000 for the same zip code, nearly double the other figure.
Neither number is wrong. They're measuring different things over different windows in a market too small to average smoothly. Stanwood's active listings in recent months have included a manufactured home on Tullymore Drive itself listed around $199,000, alongside a 5 bedroom, 5 bath home on Dublin Street listed at $825,000, all inside the same handful of streets that make up the resort corridor. Outside the golf footprint, homes on roads like Pierce Road and 7 Mile Road have listed in the $150,000 to $350,000 range, reflecting the area's older manufactured housing and acreage parcels rather than anything tied to Tullymore or St. Ives at all.
With that few closed sales feeding a three month median, one or two high-end golf corridor transactions can swing the number by hundreds of thousands of dollars, while a broader listing median pulls the average back down toward the manufactured homes and rural acreage that make up most of the zip code's actual housing stock. A buyer comparing Stanwood to Canadian Lakes on median price alone is really comparing two very different samples that happen to share a mailing address.
Three Things to Check Before You Compare Offers
- Ask directly whether golf club membership is included with the home, purchased separately, or transferable from the current owner, since none of that is guaranteed by an address inside the resort footprint.
- Confirm whether the specific parcel falls inside Canadian Lakes Association boundaries, which would attach the mandatory annual fee regardless of whether the property is built or vacant.
- Request recent closed sales for the specific street or development you're evaluating rather than relying on a zip-code-wide median, since a handful of transactions can distort the number in either direction.
Three Questions Buyers Ask Once They See This
Does every home near Tullymore or St. Ives come with a golf membership? No. Membership is a separate purchase through the resort's membership office, priced with its own initiation fee, annual dues, and food and beverage minimum.
Does the Canadian Lakes association fee apply if I never plan to use the amenities? Yes. The association counts vacant lot owners among its membership categories, and the roughly $730 annual fee applies whether the lot is built on or not.
Why do two sources show such different median prices for the same zip code? Because one measures asking prices across the wider zip code in a single month, while the other measures a small number of closed sales over a rolling three month window that includes the resort corridor's higher-priced homes. Neither is measuring the same slice of the market.
If you're weighing a golf course address in Stanwood against a lot in Canadian Lakes, the numbers on a listing page won't tell you which fee structure you're walking into. Big Rapids Realty can pull the actual membership terms, association records, and recent closed sales for the specific street you're considering before you write an offer. Contact Us to talk through what a given address actually obligates you to pay.
