Can you afford to start learning how to buy a house after you find the right one? Who are you really bidding against at the open house?
Most buyers learn the process on the fly, with a house they love on the line and a deadline running. Our buyers do it first. They are pre-approved and know how the whole purchase works before their first open house. So when the right one comes up, they are already the most prepared buyer in the room. Savvy Buyers™ is the free course that gets you there.
Mostly people who have done this before. 79% of last year’s buyers already owned a home, and about 1 in 4 paid cash. You can’t match their equity. You can match their readiness. Savvy Buyers™, our free course, gets you pre-approved and through the whole purchase before your first open house.
What is Savvy Buyers™? A free home buyer course from Mike DelRose Jr. of the DelRose McShane Team at Coldwell Banker Realty in Belmont, MA. It pairs pre-approval, through lender Christina Babigian of Rockland Trust or any lender you choose, with a six-phase education series on the Massachusetts purchase process. The goal is simple. Be the most prepared buyer at the open house.
What is the market doing
where you want to buy?
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.
Who are you actually
competing with for a house?
Mostly people who have done this before. National Association of REALTORS® data shows the typical buyer today is an experienced owner with equity behind them. That is the buyer standing next to you at the open house.
Repeat buyers made up 79% of all purchases, and their median age was 62. They know how an offer works. Their median down payment was 23%, usually from the sale of their last home.
All-cash purchases hit a record 26%. Among repeat buyers it was nearly one in three. A cash buyer has no financing contingency, and sellers notice.
A record low, with a median age of 40 and a median down payment of 10%. If this is your first purchase, you are the exception in the room.
So how does a buyer compete with that?
You cannot match their equity. You can match their readiness. A verified pre-approval, a read on value before you walk in, and knowing how the contract protects your deposit closes most of the gap. Experienced buyers have that from the last time. Savvy Buyers get it before their first open house.
Source: National Association of REALTORS®, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers. National figures for July 2024 through June 2025. Local numbers for your town are in the market section above.
Why get pre-approved
before you start looking?
Because sellers compare certainty, not just price. A verified pre-approval tells a listing agent your offer will close. A quick online letter does not. And you cannot get a real one over a weekend when the house you want goes live on Thursday.
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.
What do Savvy Buyers know
that other buyers don’t?
Savvy Buyers™ is our free home buyer course. 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
How do the lending side and
the real estate side fit together?
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.
Where do most buyers
actually start?
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.
What changes when you
start prepared?
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
Where are you in
your search?
Send this and we take you straight into Savvy Buyers™. No drip campaign, no flood of listings you did not ask for. One of us reads it and answers what you actually asked.
Not ready to talk to a person yet? That is fine. The course and the market data are free. Bookmark the program page when you land on it and work through it at your own pace.
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.