 Open Houses & Real Estate · Friday Edition Friday, August 14, 2026 | | The Daily Spotlight · Presented By Clay Lounge Pottery Wheel Class Dive into a new creative experience with our fun, upbeat one-time classes! |
| Sponsored advertisement | Weather ☀️ 83° / 61° Sunny to start, with a chance of showers arriving later in the day — the weekend itself stays dry · full forecast → | The T Right Now ● RL ● OL ● GL ● BL Red, Orange and Blue normal. Day seven of nine on the Green Line — still no trains between North Station and Kenmore, Cleveland Circle, Babcock St or Heath St, all weekend; service returns Monday morning · live status → | Roads Nothing scheduled on the highways for Friday. The state’s planned work resumes Sunday night: I-93 south drops lanes between Stoneham and Medford, 9pm to 4am. |
| The number: $1,113,800 — the median condo assessment in Beacon Hill, today’s Spotlight district, across 1,142 units on Boston’s own FY2026 assessing roll. Single-family on the hill: $5,196,950 across 228 homes. every district → | ⚾️ Red Sox 7, Blue Jays 0 — Boston salvaged the finale in Toronto on Thursday after dropping the first three, 2-1, 5-3 and 6-4. The Patriots opened the preseason Thursday night with a 13-13 tie against Indianapolis. Next up is Pittsburgh: tonight at 6:40, Saturday 7:15, Sunday 1:35. The Revolution are at Toronto FC on Saturday at 7:30 · full scoreboard → | 🏠 Open Houses · Sat & Sun One Saturday, four front doors, and no train Editors’ picks, ordered by when the doors open. The first three run in a straight line inbound — Brighton at 11, Fenway at 11:30, Beacon Hill at 12:30 — which happens to be exactly the stretch of the Green Line that has no trains this weekend. Plan the 57 bus, the Orange Line or your own two feet. From a 210-square-foot studio at $380,000 to an $825,000 one-bed at Symphony. In the market, week of Aug 6: the 30-year fixed averaged 6.69% ▲ 0.03 from the week before, while the 15-year went the other way, 6.01% ▼ 0.03. That is Freddie Mac’s most recent published survey — this week’s release was not out when this edition was built. Today ☀️ 83°/61° Sunny | Sat ☀️ 80°/61° Sunny | Sun 🌞 82°/66° Mostly sunny |
Four open houses, one Saturday route: | BRIGHTON | Sat 11–12:30, again Sun 12–1:30 · the cheapest one-bedroom on our list and the one with the most floor for the money — 600 square feet on Colborne Road, $430,000, a third of a mile from Sutherland Road. Start here and work inbound. | | FENWAY | Sat 11:30–1, again Sun 11:30–1 · the weekend’s top price on our list — a 847-square-foot one-bed on Westland Avenue at Symphony, $825,000, in a full-service building with a concierge, a clubroom and a terrace. Note the T before you go: Symphony station is closed, and stays closed. | | BEACON HILL | Sat 12:30–2, again Sun 12:30–2 · the smallest thing we have ever put in this section and the reason to walk the route in this order: a 210-square-foot studio on West Cedar Street with its own private entrance, $380,000, in a building whose common roof deck looks straight down the Charles. | | CHARLESTOWN | Sunday only, 12–2 · not a condo at all — a 725-square-foot floating home at Charlestown Marina, one bed, $400,000, with a roof deck over the skyline. Read the fine print with the price: dock fees run $18,645.30 a year on top, water and pump-outs included, electric separate. |
On the real estate desk Beacon Hill keeps changing the rules, and keeps leaving Boston out — the MBTA Communities law, statewide accessory-unit legalisation, a looser variance test in the new budget, and now a Senate push to allow duplexes on any residential lot: none of it reaches Boston, which zones under its own 70-year-old statute rather than Chapter 40A. Boston Indicators calls the exemption a “big donut hole”; a third of the city’s residential land is zoned single-family. Per CommonWealth Beacon. Read more → The Park Square Building could become 490 apartments — the 11-story block on St. James Avenue between Arlington and Berkeley, foreclosed and bought at auction by its lender for $95 million this spring, has an application in to Boston’s office-to-residential conversion abatement programme: roughly 380,000 square feet of apartments, a fifth of them income-restricted, at an estimated $410 million. Remaining office tenants are expected out within a year. Per Banker & Tradesman. Read more → The small groups that take discrimination complaints are running out of money — new federal grant rules set a $5 million minimum operating budget and cap federal money at half an organisation’s budget, consolidating funds that went to hundreds of local groups into five larger ones. The Massachusetts Fair Housing Center, suing HUD alongside the National Fair Housing Alliance, expects to lose more than $400,000 a year; a smaller eight-person group covering Bristol and Plymouth counties, the Cape and the Islands says it cannot see a path through 2027. Small groups handle over 70% of these cases nationally. Per GBH News. Read more → Agent or broker? Put your open house in Friday’s email and on our Real Estate page for a week — from $5.80 this month. Reserve a slot → | Neighborhood Spotlight · No. 4 Beacon Hill Gas lamps, brick sidewalks that will turn an ankle, and a hill steep enough that the streets had to bend around it. The State House sits on top with its gold dome, Charles Street runs along the flat bottom as the shopping street, and in between are the narrowest, most photographed lanes in the city. It is also the most expensive place in Boston to buy a small home and one of the few districts where a studio still comes to market under $400,000. | EAT | The ten most-reserved tables in the city this week, ranked. Book before Saturday. | | SHOP | The antiques row at the bottom of the hill: a dozen dealers in a few blocks, built for the slow browse. Walkable from all three Saturday open houses on our list. | | DO | The cobblestone lane everyone photographs, one block off Charles. Free, takes four minutes, and it is a real street people live on — go early and go quietly. | | LIVE HERE | Median condo assessment $1,113,800 across 1,142 units; single-family $5,196,950 across 228 homes. Boston’s own FY2026 roll, same ruler for every district. | | WALK IT | Our district guide — what to see, where it is, how to get there. |
| A film on the Esplanade under a forecast with no rain in it, and a five-minute walk down the far side of today’s Spotlight district. Bring something to sit on. | The museum’s shipyard building throws its doors open for the day. East Boston runs on the Blue Line, which is the one thing the Green Line closure cannot complicate. | Two thousand-and-something radio staples in an open-air tent on the harbour, on an 80-degree evening with a clear sky. If you have ever owned a lanyard, this is your night. | Coddington Street closes to cars for one of the biggest Asian-American street festivals in the state. Red Line to Quincy Center and you are standing in it. |
| Boston Local A man died after an altercation on an escalator toward the Red Line exit around 5:30 Wednesday evening. Boston police homicide detectives are investigating and no arrest has been announced; State Sen. Nick Collins called the transit system safe and the incident isolated. Per NBC Boston. Read more → | Boston Local On GBH’s Boston Public Radio the mayor said the city has never received information from ICE even when it asked, and is learning about federal activity here — including a reported bid to lease 249 downtown parking spaces — from the national news. “It’s not just that they are not responding to us,” she said, “it’s that they are attacking us.” Per GBH News. Read more → | Politics A 1963 law makes psychics get a local licence and live in the town for twelve months first. Salem licenses 80 to 100 at a time; Boston has five. Rep. Susannah Whipps of Athol has filed to scrap the residency rule and is not optimistic — there is, she notes, no powerful fortune-teller lobby. Per CommonWealth Beacon. Read more → | Business Chinese biotech deal value went from $5 billion in 2020 to $50 billion in 2025, a tenth of the world’s total to nearly a third. At MIT’s Koch Institute last week Ginkgo’s Jason Kelly warned that shipping early drug development abroad hollows out the industry here; RA Capital’s Peter Kolchinsky argued the shared enemy is disease. Behind both: Massachusetts biotech raised $6.85 billion in venture money last year, its lowest since 2019. Per Cambridge Day. Read more → |
| Forward this to someone house-hunting in Boston. One email, every morning at 6:30, and Friday is always the open houses. Send them here → | Tomorrow: culture weekend · Sunday: your week, planned — plus the Scoreboard. You are reading Open Houses & Real Estate, the Friday edition of the Daily Boston Brief. ExploreBoston.com is wicked proud to be a local Boston small business. ExploreBoston · 1 Beacon Street, Floor 15, Boston, MA 02108 |
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