Consensus is a rare byproduct of developers trying to build a big box store in townships surrounding Ann Arbor.

Yet that’s what happened when Home Depot assembled purchase agreements on enough property - including an industrial site and about a dozen homes - to plan a 130,000-square-foot store on 26 acres between Jackson Road and I-94.

But now a minor procedural item on an upcoming Scio Township Planning Commission agenda will officially finalize the end of that plan, which started to unravel by the end of 2007.

Commissioners will revert the property zoning back to the original status, probably in September, officially ending one of the more creative workarounds to anti-development sentiment in this region.

“One of the conditions on the conditional rezoning was if Home Depot did not pursue the project, the … homes would revert back to the residential rezoning at some time in the future,” said township planner Doug Lewan.

High-profile and hard-fought in a township that - at that time - had repelled many developments, the Home Depot deal represented a victory for everyone involved.

The store finally found a site suitable for construction west of Ann Arbor.

The township had accepted the rezoning and was ready to work on site plans - and, officials said, even welcomed the big box in that specific location.

And the property owners - including American Broach, which moved to Ypsilanti - were going to receive top dollar thanks to the assemblage of the parcel, located just west of Auto Mall Drive.

But Home Depot notified the township in fall 2007 that it wouldn’t see the deal through. It blamed the slowing economy - which has only slowed further since, thanks to the halt in new home construction.

Bob Andrus of Michigan Commercial Realty kept the property listed at $13.8 million, but the state’s eroding economy kept potential buyers at bay - even the many big box retailers who had shopped the Jackson Road corridor for years.

Andrus had helped pull the property together, keeping all of the homes’ owners focused on the end goal of a group sale. The owners and the township agreed that the area’s time as residential property had passed, thanks to the industry that had grown up around them. That affected values - most of the homes are assessed at under $100,000, and one went through foreclosure.

The pending zoning change benefits the homeowners, Lewan said, since the structures would be nonconforming if the homes remained in use. That could affect remodeling, financing and other issues that a homeowner would take for granted.

The change signals the dramatic falloff in value for large development parcels- and how timing really does count when a proposal is made. In this case, homeowners could have closed the sale and the township could be counting its additional tax revenue. But the timing was off.

“They just never came in for the site plan,” Lewan said of Home Depot. “It was just the final piece … before the whole thing fell apart.

“If it had all happened a year and a half earlier, there’d be a Home Depot there now.”

Paula Gardner is business director at AnnArbor.com, where she covers real estate and development. Contact her at (734) 623-2586 or by email.