Boston Property Report — 2026-09-02

Furlong PA → Boston Area relocation · fresh search, no day-over-day deltas

Section 1 — Corridor Land & Homes (0.75–5.0 acres)

Rehoboth MA — 6 listings (deepest corridor inventory; fails the 10-minute rail rule)

Stoughton MA — 2 listings

Sharon MA — 2 listings (both on the Franklin Line, not Providence/Stoughton)

Canton MA — 1 listing

Norwood MA — 1 listing

Mansfield MA — 1 listing (hard-zero streak broken)

A search-engine AI summary claimed 75 Fowler St, Mansfield MA sold 2026-04-27 for $1,100,000. That claim is contradicted by two independent direct fetches (Zillow search list and the Raveis listing page) both showing Active at $995,000, and is treated as a hallucination.

Attleboro MA — 1 listing (collapsed from 4)

Corridor reversals and resolutions this run

• 0 Read St, Attleboro MA — could NOT be confirmed active. Last run's headline (3.81 ac, $115,000, water/sewer/gas/electric at street) rests this run on search-engine AI summaries only. The live, directly fetched Zillow Attleboro land page (8 results) and the live, directly fetched Redfin Attleboro land page (7 results) both omit it, and no listing page could be produced. Per the standing rule against promoting on a summary alone, it is reported as off-market / unverified, not active. The $115,000-vs-$119,000 price conflict is moot while the listing itself is unverifiable. This is a direct reversal of last run's top finding and should be re-checked before Bill acts on it either way.
• 0 Oak Street, Attleboro MA — RESOLVED and excluded. After two runs price- and acreage-gated, direct Redfin and Zillow fetches confirm MLS 73538541: $160,000 for the combined Lot 15 + Lot 7A package totalling 8,250 sq ft (0.19 acres). The prior “Lot 15 alone is 0.19 ac” reading was actually describing the whole package. Either way it sits far below the 0.75-acre floor, so the sweep's only confirmed full-public-water-and-sewer parcel is formally out of the band. The corridor now has zero listings with confirmed public water AND public sewer.
• 145 Winthrop St, Rehoboth MA — MLS conflict RESOLVED. Direct Zillow fetch confirms Active, $225,000, 3.18 ac, MLS 73463306. The baseline “$219,900 / MLS 73567377” could not be located anywhere and appears to have been a defunct or fabricated record. Use $225,000 / MLS 73463306 going forward.
• 156 Rocky Hill Rd, Rehoboth MA — new MLS-duplicate wrinkle. The zpid page returned MLS 73289527 at $229,900 (stale cache, last updated April 2025) while current live search feeds consistently show MLS 73479150 at $229,000. Reported at $229,000 / MLS 73479150, with the older record treated as a superseded duplicate for the same parcel. Utilities remain “Other” on both — still not confirmed public.
• 38 Dean St, Rehoboth MA — PENDING confirmed at $574,900, pending as of 2026-08-24, after cuts from $650,000 → $599,900 → $574,900. Note it is a two-unit multi-family, so it also appears in Section 3.
• 138 Washington St, Attleboro MA — re-confirmed off-market, delisted from LoopNet and Showcase. New detail: the parcel is zoned Commercial (~2 ac, approved for a 36-car lot), so it would not have qualified for Section 1 even while active.
• Mansfield MA is no longer a hard zero. 75 Fowler St at 2.35 ac is in band and active. The previously cited 55 King Arthur Way (5.2 ac) and 451R Gilbert St (27.7 ac) remain correctly out of band.
• Sturdy Memorial Hospital, Attleboro MA — confirmed open and operating 24/7 at 211 Park St, Attleboro MA, recently expanded with a new cancer and specialty care building. It remains the only hospital covering any corridor town inside 15 minutes.

Section 2 — Beach-Area Weekly-Rental Buys (southern RI)

Explicit zeros this run. Jamestown RI: zero qualifying inventory — homes.com returned “No properties matching your criteria.” Saunderstown RI: zero — only large luxury estates (e.g. a $2.45M five-acre coastal estate), nothing in the condo/duplex/cottage/mobile band. Bonnet Shores RI: zero habitable inventory — the sole “condo” hit is unit V28 at the Bonnet Shores Beach Club, a 16 sq ft bathhouse cabana at $190,000, excluded as not a dwelling.

Weekly rental rate benchmarks

These are blended Airbnb / Vrbo / Booking.com averages across all unit sizes and types, not weekly-listing quotes. No VRBO or local-agency weekly quote could be pulled this run — treat ADR×7 as directional, not an achievable rate for a specific small condo or cottage. The pattern is worth noting on its own: listing counts fell sharply YoY in Narragansett RI and Wakefield RI while revenue per listing rose steeply, consistent with regulatory tightening squeezing out marginal operators and the survivors capturing more of the market.

STR rules by town

• Narragansett RI — permit cap: still enjoined, litigation unresolved. Cap structure 1,100 permits (2024) → 1,000 (2025) → 900 (2026) with a 7-night minimum. Superior Court Judge Sarah Taft-Carter granted a preliminary injunction in October 2024; a December 2024 council vote to rescind failed 2–2, leaving the ordinance on the books but unenforced. Boston Globe · Town Q&A · The Independent
• Narragansett RI — duplex “ban”: still unadopted. A May 2025 package of 14 zoning amendments that would have loosened two-family/duplex restrictions was withdrawn after resident opposition and restarted via workshops; no restrictive duplex ordinance has been adopted either. The pre-existing restrictive zoning simply persists unchanged. The Independent · WPRI
• Statewide RI — 5% whole-home STR tax CONFIRMED from primary source. The RI Division of Taxation's December 2025 FAQ confirms the 5% Whole Home Short-Term Rental Tax effective 2026-01-01, applying to entire houses, condos and mobile homes rented 30 days or fewer, stacking with the (now 2%) local hotel tax and the 7% sales tax. Occupancy date governs the rate, not booking date. RI Division of Taxation FAQ (PDF)
• South Kingstown RI — two distinct ordinances, kept separate. (a) STR registry adopted 2024-04-08, $100 fee / $300 late fee, rentals under 30 days only (town notice). (b) All-rentals registry adopted 2025-10-14, covering every rental dwelling — beachside weekly cottages and year-round apartments alike — deadline extended from 2025-12-31 to 2026-03-31 (town page). Search summaries routinely blend these into one; they are separate.
• Warwick RI — R-6/R-10 bar: now actively CONTRADICTED by the city's own primary source. Escalating from three runs of “secondary-source-only”: the City of Warwick's own October 2023 memo to the state STR legislative commission was fetched directly this run and describes STR as a permitted use in all residential and Village mixed-use zones with no commercial/industrial use, listing seven prohibited unit types — and containing no R-6/R-10 carve-out at all. Either the restriction postdates the 2023 memo, or the widely repeated WarwickPost / BNBCalc / Yahoo-syndicated claim is wrong. No municode ordinance text confirming it could be located. City of Warwick memo (PDF)
• North Kingstown RI — re-confirmed: NO adopted local STR ordinance. Town planning staff have been “researching” the issue since at least January 2023 with nothing adopted as of September 2026; only the statewide DBR registration and the new state tax apply. This matters — North Kingstown RI holds the two closest-to-station Section 2 candidates in the sweep. RI REALTORS · The Independent
• Warren RI — cap: final adoption still unconfirmed by primary source. Secondary coverage (EastBayRI headline “Warren's new law caps density and total number of short-term rentals”) implies passage of a 125-unit cap, $100/unit fee, max 50% of units per building as STR, and one required off-street parking space — but the article body returned empty on fetch and the town's own ordinance page could not be retrieved, so no adoption date or vote count is confirmed. This is the second consecutive run it has not resolved, and it matters because Warren RI is again the deepest duplex market.

Exclusions — cottages and communities that cannot be rented

• Mary Carpenter's / Carpenter's Beach Meadow, 854 Matunuck Beach Rd, South Kingstown RI — hard exclusion, re-confirmed. MLS records this run (a June 2024 sale at $230,000, 2bd/1ba, 480 sq ft) show the subdivision as “Mary Carpenter's Beach Meadows” with “Land Lease Avail: Yes,” seasonal May–Oct 15, and the verbatim cannot-be-rented clause reconfirmed across multiple listing-site descriptions. Coldwell Banker
• Roy Carpenter's Beach, 240 Cards Pond Rd, South Kingstown RI — hard exclusion. Leased land, no rentals, seasonal May 1–Oct 15, ~377 cottages. The association recently bought the underlying 50-acre parcel for $16.3M to secure long-term control. The Independent
• Knowles Camp, South Kingstown / Narragansett RI line — hard exclusion. 106 seasonal cottages on leased land near Scarborough State Beach, no rentals allowed, seasonal May 1–Oct 15, governed by the Scarborough Village Tenant Association. Knowles Camp
• Wickford Ct / Wickford Woods condo cluster, North Kingstown RI — 55+ age-restricted, 40 units, resale-only. Excluded.
• Brandywyne Court, Wakefield RI — 55+ age-restricted, 37 duplex-style attached units built 2012. Excluded.
• Buttonwoods Campground / Buttonwoods Campers Association, Warwick RI — UNRESOLVED for a SIXTH consecutive run, and now declared unresolvable by search. One more attempt was made: the BCA's public “About” page (126-year history, 120 cottages, 25 leased acres) and public FAQ page were both fetched and contain no rental-policy content; all governance documents, minutes and rules sit behind a member-login wall with zero leakage into search-indexed pages. This is now a settled structural fact, not a research gap. It needs a phone call to the BCA Executive Board — contact details are on the committees page.
• NEW WATCH ITEM — Village at Worden's Pond, Wakefield RI (South Kingstown). A 230-site 55+ age-restricted land-lease community; 10 Stellar Way surfaced in this run's mobile-home search at $459,000. No public rental policy was found. Given the 55+ restriction, weekly vacation renting to unrelated groups is unlikely to be permitted, but this is not yet a confirmed exclusion — it needs direct confirmation with park management before any unit there is treated as a buy-to-rent candidate.

Section 3 — Dwelling-Unit Duplexes

Two separate living units, private entrances each. No acreage cap, no price cap, no minimum room count. Rental estimates are comp-based approximations, not quoted figures.

Massachusetts — 9 entries

Attleboro MA is NOT a duplex zero — it is the deepest MA duplex market at 6. This undoes last run's reversal, which had found Attleboro at zero on active inventory. A direct fetch of Homes.com's live Attleboro multi-family page shows 12 active listings, of which 6 are true two-family/duplex properties. The remaining 6 (326 Thacher St, 2 Hope St, 30 Hope St, 110 Knight Ave, 222-226 S St, Attleboro MA) are triplex or larger multi-unit and are correctly excluded from this section. The prior zero finding rested on two specific properties — 1251 South Main St, Attleboro MA (sold 2026-05-01) and 231 Park St, Attleboro MA (off-market since 2006) — both still correctly excluded; the town's wider inventory was simply not visible on the source used that run.

Rehoboth MA is effectively a duplex zero on active inventory — the town's only multi-family listing, 38 Dean St, Rehoboth MA, is pending and not purchasable. Rehoboth MA's overwhelmingly single-family rural bylaws limit multi-family stock to grandfathered structures like this one.

Rhode Island — 13 entries

Warren RI holds as the deepest duplex market at 7 active listings — 31 Child St, 55 Warren Ave, 36 Kinnicutt Ave, 27 Barney St, 348 Market St, 319 Main St and 126 Main St, Warren RI — an exact match to last run's count. The four with fetched detail pages are tabled above. Source

Jamestown RI: zero qualifying duplex/multi-family listings — confirmed by direct fetch of Homes.com's Jamestown multi-family page, which returned “No properties matching your criteria were found.” Bonnet Shores RI has no duplex inventory distinct from the Narragansett RI entries above; it is a Narragansett neighborhood rather than a separately listed market on the platforms checked.

Coverage & Caveats

• Source-gating flipped again, and in the opposite direction from last run. Last run Zillow and Redfin were largely fetchable and carried Sections 2 and 3. This run Zillow rate-limited mid-sweep — after roughly 15–17 consecutive fetches it began returning empty bodies for further homedetails pages — and its RI search results were heavily JS-gated (its South Kingstown mobile-home page rendered “0 Homes” while Trulia, Zillow's own sister site, and Homes.com showed real inventory in the same geography). Homes.com was the most reliable source this run and carries the bulk of Sections 2 and 3.
• 26 Tremont St, Norwood MA re-caught as a live fabrication trap. It still appears on Zillow's search-results page as “$850,000, 5bd/4ba, Multi-family home for sale,” but the individual listing page, fetched directly, reads Off market with the explicit disclosure that the property is not currently displayed as for sale or rent. Its price history shows it listed 2026-05-30, contingent 2026-06-29, and the listing removed 2026-08-19. This is the same address flagged last run and it is excluded again. The lesson generalizes: a source's own search-results page can be stale relative to its own detail page.
• Four Canton MA / Norwood MA duplex candidates could not be detail-verified before Zillow's rate-limiting kicked in and are deliberately NOT tabled above: 26 Howard St, Canton MA ($649,900, 4bd/2ba); 61-63 Elliot St, Norwood MA ($825,000, 4bd/2ba — the paired street number strongly suggests a genuine two-unit); 24 Short St, Norwood MA ($879,900, 2bd/2ba); and 244 Washington St, Norwood MA ($1,140,000, 7bd/3ba — bed count suggests 3+ units). Addresses, prices and “for sale” category tags come from fetched list pages, but unit count, metering and live status are unconfirmed. Treat as leads to re-verify, not listings.
• Canton MA and Sharon MA duplex zeros are qualified, not clean. Two Canton MA candidates were fetched and correctly excluded as not two-unit: 3 Revere Ct, Canton MA ($899,900, confirmed “3 Family — 3 Units Up/Down” triple-decker) and 651 Washington St, Canton MA ($1,395,000, confirmed “5+ Family — Rooming House” with shared kitchen and a leased commercial storefront). Zillow's own Sharon MA duplex category page returned zero results inside Sharon town limits, falling back entirely to neighboring towns. A Homes.com AI summary separately claimed two Sharon MA multi-family listings at $679,900–$849,000 including a described two-family, but no specific address or listing page could be traced, so per the no-summaries rule it is excluded rather than reported. Stoughton MA: a clean duplex zero — its only Zillow duplex/triplex listing, 1508 Central St, Stoughton MA at $1,649,900 with 12bd/6ba, is plainly a 4–6 unit apartment building, wrong property type for this section.
• Norwood MA Section 1 homes are a real coverage gap. Single-family homes on 0.75–5 acre lots could not be systematically screened — Zillow's Norwood house list view does not expose lot size, and the individual detail pages were not all reachable before rate-limiting. Only Norwood land was screened cleanly. Two AI-summary-only Norwood MA claims were caught as stale and excluded: 230 Richland Rd, Norwood MA (sold 2022) and 92 Union St, Norwood MA (sold November 2025).
• The hospital rule still fails corridor-wide. Norwood Hospital re-confirmed closed since the 2020 flood. Governor Healey's eminent-domain bill, signed around 2026-08-07/09, gives Medical Properties Trust until 2026-11-01 to reach a deal with a qualified nonprofit operator or lose the 11-acre site to DCAMM. Construction is reported ~75% complete as of August 2026 but the hospital is not operating. Only Attleboro MA and Rehoboth MA are covered inside 15 minutes, via Sturdy Memorial — and Rehoboth MA fails the rail rule, so Attleboro MA remains the only town passing both the rail and hospital rules, now on the strength of a single qualifying parcel.
• The Franklin Line problem. Sharon MA's and Norwood MA's own commuter rail stations are on the Franklin Line, not the Providence/Stoughton Line the criteria specify. Only Canton MA (Canton Center / Canton Junction) and Stoughton MA (the terminus) sit directly on the Providence/Stoughton Line. This structurally disadvantages every Sharon MA and Norwood MA listing against the 10-minute rule unless the parcel sits near the Canton/Stoughton town line — which 816 Neponset St, Norwood MA appears to, per its own listing text.
• Near-misses excluded for acreage (recorded so they are not re-surfaced): 210 Dedham St, Canton MA (0.72 ac, just under the floor); 35 Turnpike St, Canton MA (0.33 ac); Lot 43 Pondview Ln, Stoughton MA (0.67 ac); 51 Westview Dr, Norwood MA (0.21 ac — Norwood's only other land listing). Also excluded: an active 1.8 ac commercial Rt 138 parcel in Canton MA at $1,100,000 whose address is undisclosed by the listing, which makes it impossible to satisfy the mandatory address format — noted here as inventory that exists but cannot be tabled.
• Confirmed sold / not active (do not re-surface): 135 High St, Canton MA (sold May 2024); 60 Balancing Rock Rd, Canton MA (sold June 2024, $1,975,000); 25 Colts Xing, Canton MA (0.33 ac regardless); 1251 South Main St, Attleboro MA (sold 2026-05-01, $914,400); 231 Park St, Attleboro MA (off-market since 2006).
• Other blocked or gated sources this run: LandVest (three attempts, all empty), Lamacchia Realty (both attempts empty), Coldwell Banker listing pages (empty), Trulia detail pages (JS-gated, nav chrome only), Redfin filtered-URL fetches (provenance-restricted), EastBayRI article bodies (empty — the reason Warren RI's STR ordinance stays unconfirmed), AirDNA's deeper bedroom- and neighborhood-level breakdowns (paywalled), and the Buttonwoods Campers Association member area (login wall). Trulia additionally substitutes nearby towns' listings for empty neighborhood searches rather than returning a clean zero, which was caught and corrected for manually.
• Residual unconfirmed inventory: for-sale-by-owner listings, off-MLS “coming soon” pockets, and any Redfin-exclusive listings are not reflected anywhere in this report. Given Homes.com generally shows single-digit active multi-family and condo counts per RI town, Section 2 and the RI half of Section 3 likely capture the large majority of MLS-syndicated inventory; the MA half of Section 3 is the weakest coverage in this run because of Zillow's mid-sweep rate-limiting.
• All drive times throughout are rough geographic estimates, not routed calculations. All rental figures are estimates or blended market averages, never quoted rents.