Boston Proper Real Estate

Read through the Google reviews for Boston Proper Real Estate and one thing lands immediately: almost nobody writes about the company. They write about a person — Matt, Brandon, Grace, Amber, Mia. This is a Back Bay firm at 49 Gloucester St whose reputation has been assembled agent by agent, one Boston apartment hunt at a time. It describes itself as a boutique operation covering buying, selling, rentals, and residential and condo-building property management, with Boston as its stated service area. Its BBB page puts the business at 31 years, started in January 1995, with Barry McSweeney listed as president. The review history runs deeper than most small brokerages manage: 4.7 stars across 119 Google ratings, and a hundred reviews reaching back to 2021. Twenty of those landed in the last six months, none of them negative. Renters account for nearly all of them, and the same beats keep recurring — a tour scheduled quickly, a shortlist that actually matched what the renter asked for, an application that didn't drag on. The recent ones get specific. A renter searching from California said Matt explained the whole process patiently over the phone and got the lease done. A student with a tight schedule credited Mia Mui with stacking several studio showings into a single tour, which settled the search in about a week. An owner renting out their own Boston condo worked with Brandon and singled out his grasp of the rental process. Another couple found a Back Bay apartment inside their budget with Grace. That pattern — remote renters, students, first-time Boston arrivals — is who this firm keeps getting hired by. One thing is worth raising before you call. The leasing side and the property-management side have not drawn the same reception: the sharpest complaint on the page comes from a tenant, not a renter-client, and it faults the company for being slow to respond on serious maintenance problems. It isn't recent, and nothing like it appears in the last six months — but it sits against a different service than the apartment searches nearly every other reviewer is describing. The BBB grade is A+ with no complaints or government actions posted, though the business is not BBB accredited, and that same page lists it as a sole proprietorship with one employee, which sits oddly next to the roster of agents reviewers name. If you're moving to Boston and want someone to run the apartment search for you, this is a firm whose agents earn specific, repeated credit for doing exactly that. Ask which agent you'll be assigned, since the praise attaches to individuals rather than to the office. And if you're hiring them to manage a property rather than to find you one, ask directly how maintenance requests get handled and on what timeline.