Quick Update:  We have discontinued our blog here at this site and moved our blogging "operations" to http://charlesgaterealty.com/blog

In case you missed our last blog posts about the upcoming online auction we are holding for a condo on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay, it's almost upon us.  This Sunday, November 20th is Auction Day. Read more on our new blog here.

Here's an extraordinary opportunity for buyers in Boston.  We'll be conducting an online auction for a Back Bay condo on Marlborough Street on November 20.  Auctions have been used to sell residential condo developments previously, but what makes this different is the online format of the auction, similar to an EBay auction with special modifications for real estate, and the fact that it is for an individual non-bank owned property.

Special Thursday Night Open House

Having been in real estate my entire professional life, I am always getting asked, by both clients and friends, “how’s the market”? Perhaps for more than for any other industry, the general population always seems very interested in real estate. Maybe it is because everyone lives somewhere, and most people’s core expense is that of their home.  Some people already own, some are thinking of buying or selling, and the rest are just plain curious.  The answer I’d like to give is “how much time do you have?”, as there is no authentic generic answer to this question. But then you may end up stuck talking to me for an extended period of time, which I wish on no one….
 
So, instead I’ve copped out to “depends” as my go to answer….
 
That is not only the honest answer, but the most accurate. It is an answer fueled by what the general public, and frankly most industry professionals, just do not grasp. Real estate is micro-local. It’s that simple. The market can vary dramatically from region to region, state to state, city to town, neighborhood to neighborhood, street to street, and even on the same street!

[This is a post by one of our buyer agents Susan Doig.  Susan can be reached at sdoig@charlesgaterealty.com.]

This past Wednesday, like every Wednesday morning, we started our day with a weekly team meeting. We gathered to go over market news as well as the pipeline of upcoming listings coming our way. There are a lot of really great listings from Charlesgate Realty coming on market in the near future!

We did not have a guest speaker this week. (And you didn’t hear it from me but rumor has it we are having a mortgage professional join us next week that can help with some of the issues being experienced by buyers on condo mortgages. Check back here next week for more details!)  Since we are constantly striving to make ourselves better, we learned some efficient ways to improve communication with our buyer clients.  The technology and systems we use here are really state of the art and help us provide the best service and advice to clients.

After our meeting, we headed out to preview a few new listings coming on market soon.  We viewed two condominiums in South Boston and one condo in the Theater District, all ranging in price from $399,000 to $745,000. They were all great properties but I am picking the 3 bed/2 bath condo located on Nassau Street in the Metropolitan as my “sneak peek of the week”:

[This is a guest post by iconoclastic developer and marketer, Merrill H. Diamond.  Merrill can be reached at mdiamond@diamondsinacori.com. Read his bio below.]

Having recently touted the first-class architecture of 45 Province, among other aspects of this extraordinary property, and the Marino Center at Northeastern, I’d like to turn my attention to the state of contemporary architecture, in general.

As an architect-turned-developer, I attended architectural school at a time when it was transitioning from the tail end of formal Beaux Arts training to the advent of Bauhaus, New Brutalism and other contemporary design ideologies that have continued to dominate the design of contemporary building design.  With that statement, I am dismissing the work of Frank Gehry which is, at best, a series of tours de force signature buildings, but not a real architectural movement.  Frankly, it’s more fashion than architecture, the latter of which must function in the real world, not in an isolated context as is the case with Gehry’s celebrated Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.  A better example of Gehry’s failings is represented by the Strata Center at MIT, a building that is different for the sake of being different and hardly fits in within its context.  I’d hate to live across the street from it, and the photo below is its best view.

[This is a guest post by iconoclastic developer and marketer, Merrill H. Diamond.  Merrill can be reached at mdiamond@diamondsinacori.com. Read his bio below.]

The Clarendon, The W, and 45 Province

It’s no secret that 45 Province*, like The Clarendon and The W, its two sister-projects (by way of demographics, pricing and, of course as evidenced here, association by anyone writing about any of the three), has struggled.  It’s also no secret that all three buildings came on the market at the exact wrong time, right around the time the financial world and the residential real estate market collapsed in 2008.  That said, the similarities end there for me.  Most people find The Clarendon to be the best located of the three and, in my opinion, it’s a reasonable piece of background architecture whose only flaw is the unresolved top of the building which looks like it’s missing…its top.  The W is both an uninspired piece of architecture and is situated in an area that best can be described as neither here nor there, but relatively close to areas that are both here and there.  I wish both buildings well as the economy begins to recover. 

The book on 45 Province is that its Downtown Crossing location provides its biggest challenge just as the architecture of the building provides one of its strongest and most unique selling propositions.  I tend to disagree with the book in this particular instance.

[This is a post from Susan Doig, a Buyer Agent at Charlesgate Realty Group. If you have questions, please contact Susan].

 
As a buyer agent at Charlesgate Realty Group, I always get a lot of questions about what I do.  So I'd like to write about just that in a regular weekly post and also share some of what makes us great at Charlesgate Realty.

Yesterday, just like every Wednesday morning, we start our day with a team meeting. We gather to go over any new properties that are coming on the market as well as our pipeline of upcoming listings.  This helps keep us up to date on the market and be able to educate the buyers that we represent to help them get a better deal on a new home.