Micéal Chamberlain
Title: Founder, Historic Homes
Age: 66
Experience: 25 years
After a long career in the front office of the New England Patriots, Micéal Chamberlain left it all behind for an even more glamorous world – real estate.
Q: How did you get started in real estate?
A: When I left the Patriots, I had a lot of experience in marketing. I had some friendswho were into renovating and reselling properties, and I decided to work with them – I’d find the properties, they’d fix them up, and then I’d work with them to sell them.
At that point, I had a very good friend of mine who was a much bigger developer, Merrill Diamond. We were friends, and one day we said, you know, maybe we should get into the brokerage business, just doing estate properties. At that time, no one was specializing. One of the reasons we really called ourselves Historic Homes 25 years ago was that we knew, having lived in Brookline, that a lot of the inventory was historic. So we knew it was very appropriate, but that’s not all the property that we list. If Sotheby’s hadn’t been taken we might have taken that! [Laughs.] But we wanted to always represent upper-end properties, and so that was the whole idea, to make us different from anybody else. [Diamond moved on after seven or eight months] and I took over and ran with it.
Q: Did you find the real estate business a challenge, after a long career in such a different field?
A: I think the hard thing about the business is finding people who do what we do, who want to commit themselves to the middle and the upper end. Most people in the business want to sell all ends. You can be successful in the business doing that, but I think it’s hard. Right now we only cover Brookline and Newton, and when you’re looking at single-family homes and condos at all levels, it’s a lot of property. We never really look at anything too much under $1.2 million or $1.3 million. So we’re able to physically walk into the space. We’re much more educated than just simply looking at a [computer] screen … that’s something, I think, that has been very helpful to us. I think a lot of brokers, when they’re pricing properties, tend to just throw a dart. We try to be a little more scientific … certainly everything over a million and half dollars, we’ve at least seen.
Q: So many of the homes you deal with are historic, and might need restoration work or be restricted in the features that can be changed. But many of the buyers at the upper end want to have modern luxuries, especially when it comes to bathrooms and kitchens. Do you have to develop a bit of a contractor’s eye when you take a listing, in order to figure out what sorts of work might be needed?
A: Exactly. I have a listing now – Hammond had it for two years, and then we were called in. What we realized was that when the house was built, the family only owned [a small portion of the current lot]. So that was why the driveway had sort of been squished into a corner. We realized that [the layout was a problem] and before we put it on the market we needed to create some value, so we went to the Historic Commission in Newton and got permission to move the house more towards the middle of the lot. [Now] you have greater views of the property, and you wouldn’t be so squished – you could add a courtyard – and we also got permission to put a three-car garage rather than the existing two-car garage. So that’s underway now. It’s been totally moved, and we have a buyer now and we’re working out the final details. It was put on for $7.5 million, and it will close for over $7 [million]… but a $7 million buyer wants it his way, so we’re working with him.
Q: What made you take such a big leap? Moving the whole property, getting approval from a historic commission – these are not small details. You probably had to have every peg numbered.
A: We knew in our gut that this had to be done. If you’re going to try to hit a $5, $6 million number, at the end of the day, you’d need a new basement that would let you put in a family room, a media room, a wine cellar, create really valuable space down there. Our feeling was, nobody would buy the house without those permits in place, because these days people want turnkey-and-move-in. Here was a prized piece of property, on two and a half acres, and we wanted to get it to a point where a buyer or a developer could say, “Okay, I know I can do this;” there wouldn’t be a question mark. And as soon as we did, we put it under agreement.
Chamberlain’s Top Five Most Fashionable Neighborhoods In Brookline And Newton:
- Cottage Farm
- Longwood
- Pill Hill
- Brookline Village
- Chestnut Hill
