City Realty Group

The pattern in City Realty Group's reviews is hard to miss: nearly every five-star write-up names a person — Orlando, Sammy, Cristian, Bob from maintenance. The one-star reviews name the company. City Realty Group is an Allston brokerage whose Massachusetts real estate broker license is active, and it works three sides of the housing market at once: placing renters, listing and selling homes, and managing the buildings tenants then live in. Posts in a Boston commercial-real-estate subreddit reported it as the buyer of the Chestnut Hill Office Park for $41 million in 2024, and named Steve Whalen and Fred Starikov on an $18 million purchase in 2022. On the leasing side the praise is specific and it repeats. Renters writing through 2024 and 2025 described agents who lined up a wide slate of units on tight deadlines, toured places on a client's behalf from across the country, and filled an off-cycle listing within two days. Two buyers writing in September 2024 credited agent Cristian Lorenzo with walking them through a first home purchase. Tenants in 2024 wrote about maintenance the same way, one listing a refrigerator, dryer, balcony light, door lock and blinds all fixed inside half an hour. What to ask about is everything that happens after signing. Two reviewers in January 2023 at 197 Green Street in Jamaica Plain described move-ins pushed back by weeks, one saying the final notice arrived six hours out. A tenant writing in May 2023 said a ceiling leak was still open after six months and emails had stopped being answered. An applicant in May 2024 said $6,400 in deposit money went unreturned for weeks. In March and August of 2025, two tenants described showings run during their last weeks in the unit with little or no notice. The sharpest thing to weigh: three unconnected reviewers, writing in January 2023, January 2023 and January 2024, each said the company's own five-star reviews are fabricated. That is an allegation, not a finding — but it comes from three separate accounts and it bears directly on the 4.2 average sitting across 224 Google ratings. A commenter in a 2011 Boston Reddit thread also told readers to steer clear. If you're renting or buying through one of its named agents, the last two years of written history is mostly favorable and unusually specific about who did what. If you'd be signing a lease in a building it manages, get the maintenance-request path, the notice policy for showings, and the deposit-return timeline in writing first. The past six months have been quiet — one review — so the current picture rests largely on 2024 and 2025 accounts.