 Open Houses & Real Estate · Friday Edition Friday, August 28, 2026 | The Daily Spotlight · Presented By Warrior Ice Arena Skate where the Bruins practice — Brighton’s home rink. | Sponsored advertisement | Weather ⛈️ 83° / 62° The one unsettled day of the four. Patchy fog before 8am, then the National Weather Service puts the chance of showers and thunderstorms at 40 percent, arriving after late morning, on a light south wind of 2 to 6 mph. It clears overnight, and the weekend behind it is the dry half · full forecast → | The T Right Now ● RL ● OL ● GL ● BL Day nine of eleven, and the last one: the Orange Line stays suspended between Oak Grove and Back Bay through Sunday, with service due back Monday, Aug 31. Shuttles run Oak Grove to North Station and the Green Line covers North Station to Copley and Back Bay. On the Green Line, Brandon Hall stays bypassed on the C through Oct 4 and Symphony stays closed on the E · live status → | Roads Nothing daytime on Friday’s planned list. The overnight work runs into the early hours and clears before the commute: I-95 south closed between Route 117 and Route 30 in Waltham until 4:30am, I-93 lanes down between Exit 20 and Exit 28 in Reading until 3am, and Route 1A in Revere given over to crews from 1 to 4am. The next daytime work starts Monday. |
| The number: $499,600 — the median assessed value of a Dorchester condo across 6,448 units, from the City of Boston’s FY2026 assessment roll. One of the four open houses below is asking $499,900. every district → | ⚾️ Marlins 4, Sox 0 — Boston was shut out in Wednesday’s finale at Miami, ending a five-game winning streak, and had Thursday off. Four at Yankee Stadium now: tonight at 7:15, a split doubleheader Saturday at 1:05 and 7:15, and Sunday at 1:35 · full scoreboard → | In the market, week of Aug 20: the 30-year fixed averaged 6.65% ▼ down 0.02 from 6.67% the week before — a second straight weekly dip, easing off the 6.69% one-year high set two weeks earlier. That is Freddie Mac’s most recently published survey; this week’s release was not out when this edition was built. And from our own books: Dorchester holds 6,448 condo units and 5,108 single-family homes on the city’s FY2026 roll, the largest combined residential stock of any district on our table. Rates and the calculator → | 🏠 Open Houses Four open houses, one Saturday route, nothing over $700,000 The route runs south and outward — two in Dorchester, then Mattapan, then Roslindale — and it is the cheapest four we have put in a row. Saturday is the dry day of the weekend, 79 and mostly sunny, so the rain that lands Friday costs the route nothing. Today ⛈️ 83° / 62° T-storms | Sat 🌤️ 77° / 62° Sunny | Sun 🌤️ 85° / 68° Mostly sunny |
Dorchester · Sat 10:00am–1:00pm $679,900 · 3 bed · 1.5 bath · a Colonial on a quiet single-family street, on the market for the first time in nearly fifty years. Also open Sunday, same hours. | Dorchester · Sat 11:00am–12:30pm $499,900 · 2 bed · 1 bath · a top-floor condo with front and back decks and a walk-in pantry — and the closest thing on the board to the district’s own median. Also Sunday, noon to 2. | Mattapan · Sat 12:00–2:00pm $699,000 · 3 bed · 2 bath · an updated Colonial with a finished basement, a detached garage and a generous lot. The only Saturday session of the four with no Sunday repeat. | Roslindale · Sat 1:30–2:30pm $539,000 · 2 bed · 1 bath · built in 2018, over 1,000 square feet on one level, with deeded garage parking and Roslindale Square a short walk away. Also Sunday, same hour. |
Editors’ picks, described in our own words, with every fact taken from each listing’s own page. Times can change — confirm with the listing agent before you go. ExploreBoston is not a brokerage. | 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. 6 Boston’s largest neighborhood by a wide margin, and the one that behaves least like a single place — Savin Hill and Fields Corner and Ashmont and Codman Square each keep their own centre of gravity, strung along the Red Line and the old streetcar routes. It carries more homes on the city’s assessment roll than any other district, and it is where a Boston condo still trades close to the citywide middle. Do · Franklin Park — the largest link in the Emerald Necklace, and on Saturday the ground for the Caribbean Carnival. | Live here · the district table — median condo $499,600 across 6,448 units, median single-family $627,900 across 5,108 homes, on the FY2026 roll. Two of Saturday’s four open houses are here. | Eat · the week’s most-booked tables — city-wide, not Dorchester-specific. We do not yet have a Dorchester eating guide, and would rather say so than point you at a list that is not about the district. |
| Allston-based City Realty Group won a bidding war for nine buildings on St. Paul, Browne, Harvard, Naples and Beacon in Brookline — 65,262 square feet, 49 residential units and three commercial spaces, 96 percent occupied. Colliers, which represented seller Ramon Realty, credits the dismissal of the statewide rent-control ballot question with the depth of investor interest, per Banker & Tradesman. | Work at 262 St. Botolph St. is suspended after asbestos-containing material was disturbed during demolition of the 1910 Matthews Arena. Completion slips from fall 2028 to the first half of 2029 — a nine-month delay that leaves the hockey teams without a home rink for a third season, per the student-run Huntington News. MassDEP has been notified; crews get safety training and air monitoring before work resumes. Suffolk Construction is the general contractor. | Redfin’s economists name early October the best moment for Greater Boston buyers, one of five metros they single out. Their measure is the point where the average discount off list price stops widening — inventory is still ample and sellers who listed in spring may be ready to cut or offer concessions. It is one brokerage’s seasonal read, not a forecast, and their own note concedes the peak of new listings has already passed. |
| The plaza becomes an outdoor dance floor for a 1970s-themed tribute night, DJ and disco lighting included. Free and open to all — and it is the one outdoor plan tonight that the 40 percent chance of storms could reach, so check the sky before you go. | Greene originated Audrey on stage and played her in the 1986 Frank Oz film; she appears live alongside a screening. The indoor answer to a wet Friday night. | A University Research Gallery show on how commercial studio photography built the picture of American life, drawn from the museums’ own American Professional Photographers Collection. Admission is free to everyone, every day. | The Texas group that carried norteno-cumbia onto the global streaming charts closes out August on Lansdowne Street. | |
| Local Nearly 79 percent of Boston leases turn over on Sept. 1, according to the agency Red Tree Boston — the day that earned the sidewalk-furniture nickname. This year the Massachusetts primary falls on the same date, with polls open 7am to 8pm, so the streets carrying box trucks and double-parked cars are the streets carrying voters. Boston.com spoke to movers about the day; one, in his second Boston Sept. 1, called it simply hectic. | Education The state inspector general’s report, released Wednesday and covering 2018 to 2024, found staff hiring vendors without valid contracts or competitive bidding, then paying them through companies that already held district contracts. Some of those middlemen charged markups, costing at least $77,000. Inspector General Jeffrey Shapiro told WBUR investigators found no fraud or criminal conduct, but that at least $200,000 could have gone to students. One detail carries the report: a $96 invoice for four books arrived with a $211 shipping charge, for a delivery of three blocks. | Politics The Healey-Driscoll administration has funded the next design phase for restoring Canterbury Brook and the wetlands around Mass Audubon’s Boston Nature Center. The brook surfaces from a culvert near Harvard and Morton streets, runs under Morton and along American Legion Highway, and most of it is channeled or buried before it reaches the Stony Brook drainage system. Residents from Morton Street toward Canterbury have reported chronic flooding; project leaders point to clogged culverts, sediment and trash, the Dorchester Reporter writes. | Business Developer Joseph Federico Jr., who bought the distressed 2.7-acre site at 1717-1725 Hyde Park Ave. last year, has filed to build two five-story self-storage buildings instead of residences. His permitting attorney tells the Boston Planning Department the pair would set a high architectural standard for commercial-industrial work in the neighborhood. The project needs large-project approval from the BPDA, per Banker & Tradesman. |
| 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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