Your home search
starts here.
Not at an open house.
Not in your group chat.
Scrolling listings is not a home search. Until you know your real number and how to write an offer that gets accepted, you are looking at pictures of other people’s houses. This is where that changes.
Pre-approval comes first.
Nobody can hand you a number. A lender has to. Until one does, you are guessing, and sellers in these six towns can tell the difference. Get pre-approved, then we go to work. Tell us where you are and we will point you at both.
By submitting you agree that Mike DelRose Jr. may contact you about your home search. Mike DelRose Jr., REALTOR®, Coldwell Banker Realty, 130 Concord Ave, Belmont, MA 02478. Equal Housing Opportunity.
Most buyers get their information from an agent at an open house, a friend who bought in 1994, and a mortgage calculator. All three are working from different facts, none of them yours. Mike DelRose Jr. handles the market side. Christina Babigian of Rockland Trust handles the money side. Same buyer, same plan, same page.
Start with what
the market is doing.
Six communities across Greater Boston. Every figure below is a real closed sale from MLSPIN, not an estimate and not a national average. Pick where you are looking and see what it actually takes.
Nobody can hand you
a number but a lender.
Neither of us is the point of this. Our job is to have already made the mistakes and watched a thousand of these play out, so that when it is your turn you are deciding rather than guessing.
Rockland Trust · NMLS #1143226
She does not write a letter she cannot back up. Plenty of pre-approvals get issued in ten minutes off a form nobody verified, then come apart in underwriting after a seller has already turned other offers down. Listing agents around here know the difference.
Ask her the uncomfortable questions early. What the payment looks like if rates move. What happens if your credit is not where you want it yet.
DelRose McShane Team · Coldwell Banker Realty
Third generation at this. My grandfather Connie was a Fire Captain in Watertown before he joined the business and worked into his eighties. My father has been licensed since 1978. I came in in 2009, with four years out of brokerage building home search software in between.
I am finishing my term as chair of the Grievance Committee at the Greater Boston Association of REALTORS®, where I read a steady stream of complaints about deals that went sideways. It has made me careful, and it means you get the answers you would rather not hear. That the house is not worth what they are asking. That you should wait.
Know more than the person
you are bidding against.
Savvy Buyers™ is our home buyer education platform. Think of it as Massachusetts real estate 101, built from four decades of this team doing the work here. It walks the entire purchase, phase by phase, in the order it actually happens. Not a glossary. Not a checklist. The real sequence, with the decisions laid out where they occur and the reason behind each one.
Zillow research found that roughly 75% of buyers regret at least one thing about their purchase. Most of that regret traces back to a decision made without enough information, under time pressure. This is the fix. Work through it and you walk into an open house knowing what to ask, what to ignore, and what a house is worth before anyone tells you.
By the time we sit down together, you are not starting at zero. You are asking better questions than the buyer you are bidding against.
- What a buyer agent actually does, and how buyer agency compensation works now that the old model changed
- Reading a house: roof, plumbing, structure, electrical, heating, and which upgrades hold value
- Benchmarking fair market value so you can price a home yourself before anyone tells you
- Why an AVM is a starting point, not a value. In Boston the most common one lands within 5% about three quarters of the time, on data running 60 to 90 days behind
- Where online listing data goes wrong, and why a home showing as available may already be gone
- Wire fraud, and the verbal confirmation rule that keeps your deposit safe
- Multiple offers: how to prepare for them, and how to find the houses that avoid them
- Protection versus risk in an offer, contingency by contingency
- The home inspection, and what to do with what it finds
- Buying first or selling first when you already own
The answer is a plan,
not more browsing.
A plan covers three things. What the purchase process actually involves. What you want out of this house and the one after it. And what you can afford, which splits into a lending question and a real estate question. Those two run side by side, not one after the other.
The Lending Side
Christina Babigian · Rockland Trust
- How mortgage financing actually works, from application through commitment.
- What you can afford on paper, verified against real documents rather than estimated.
- What you are comfortable spending every month, which is usually a different number.
- A pre-approval letter a listing agent will take seriously when it counts.
The Real Estate Side
Mike DelRose Jr. · DelRose McShane Team
- How the purchase runs, phase by phase, so nothing arrives as a surprise.
- What you are looking for, which towns and streets have it, and what it costs there.
- Live MLSPIN data on pricing, days to offer, and list to sale ratios.
- How to write a competitive offer and know why it is competitive before you send it.
Confidence is just preparation with a better name
Both sides finish at the same time, and the guessing stops. Sellers here weigh certainty as heavily as price, so a verified buyer with a clear strategy regularly beats a higher offer that looks shaky. That advantage is available to anyone willing to do the work early.
Most buyers begin with
three half-answers.
Half-answers are a fine place to begin. They are a terrible place to write an offer from. Everything below turns each one into a number you can actually stand behind, and none of it takes long once someone walks you through it.
It came from a calculator that never saw your credit, your savings, or your student loans. Christina replaces it with a verified number, then a second one that matters more. What you are comfortable paying every month, which is rarely the same figure.
Three bedrooms, a yard, somewhere near the train. A fine starting point until you learn what each of those adds in Belmont versus Waltham. We price the list, then tell you which tradeoffs are real at your number.
You know there is an offer, an inspection, and a closing. The order they happen in, the deadlines that follow, and the two or three moments where the deal is actually won are the parts nobody explains until you are standing in them. We go through those first.
Same buyer. Same house.
Six weeks apart.
Nothing about the market changes between these two columns. The only difference is which side of the deadline you are standing on when the right listing goes live.
- A listing appears and you cannot tell whether it actually meets your needs, so you save it and wait to see what happens.
- You reach a lender Friday afternoon. Monday morning turns into a scramble to assemble something presentable.
- You do not yet have a read on value or how to position an offer, so you guess at a number and hope.
- It goes to someone else. You spend a while telling yourself you were not that attached to it.
- A listing appears and you know within a minute whether it fits, because you settled what fits weeks ago.
- You already know its fair market value range and where it is likely to sell.
- You walk into the open house with the right questions, and the listing agent notices.
- You write a competitive offer relative to the buyers you are actually against, with a real probability of acceptance.
- If it does not go your way, you know exactly why, and you know the next one is close behind. There is always another house.
founded the team
communities
of REALTORS®
2026, nationwide
Zillow, Realtor.com
figure on this page
Third generation at this. My grandfather Connie was a Fire Captain in Watertown before he joined the business, and he worked into his eighties. My father has been licensed since 1978. I came into the business in 2009 and have been here since.
Along the way I earned a master’s in innovation and strategic management, and I have put it to work consulting for real estate technology startups. That work taught me what these tools can and cannot actually do. It is mostly why I do not oversell them to you.
I am finishing my term as chair of the Grievance Committee at the Greater Boston Association of REALTORS®, and I serve on its Board of Directors. Chairing that committee meant reading a steady stream of complaints about deals that went sideways. It made me careful. It also means you get the answers you would rather not hear. That the house is not worth what they are asking. That you should wait.
Mike Jr. was my neighbor before he was my realtor. It helped make the choice easy because we already knew we had someone we could trust. Not just a great realtor, genuinely just a great person.
Verified Google Review · Belmont, MA
Tell us where
you are.
No pressure, no drip campaign, no sudden flood of listings you did not ask for. One of us reads this and answers what you actually asked.
Not ready to talk to a person yet? That is fine. The buyer program and the market data are free and ask nothing of you.
We share your information only with the parties you check above. Nothing is sold and no one else receives it. You are not required to use any particular lender, attorney, inspector, or service provider.
The right time
to have this conversation
is before you need it.
Whether you are buying in six months or next week, thirty minutes now changes how the whole thing goes. Book a time with both of us, or reach either of us directly.