What should I check before buying a condo conversion in Somerville?

Somerville regulates the conversion of rental units into condominiums through a city ordinance, enforced by a five-member Condominium Review Board that includes homeowners and tenants. An owner who wants to remove rental units from the market applies to the board, tenants get notice ahead of the hearing, and the ordinance sets tenant relocation fees and waiting periods. Amendments to the fee schedule and the waiting period for formerly tenanted units took effect on October 1, 2025.

For a buyer, this means a conversion in Somerville leaves a paper trail that a conversion in most other cities does not. Ask for the board's approval, or the recorded master deed date that followed it, and ask whether any unit in the building was tenanted when the conversion began. A building that went through the process cleanly is easier to finance, easier to insure and easier to resell than one where the answer to those questions is a shrug.

The city's own page and its conversion FAQ are linked in the sources below. If a listing agent cannot tell you when the building was approved, the Condominium Review Board can.

Most Somerville conversions are frame two- and three-families, built as one house and cut into units decades later. The conversion is only as good as the cut. The first thing to establish is whether the heat, the hot water and the electrical service are separated by unit, each with its own boiler or furnace and its own panel, or whether one system serves the building and the bills are split by formula. Shared systems are not disqualifying, but they change who decides when the boiler is replaced and how the cost is divided.

Then the envelope: the roof, the gutters, the sills, the basement and the porches. These are common elements, owned by everyone in proportion to their percentage interest, and they are where a conversion's deferred maintenance hides. A finished basement unit with fresh paint tells you nothing about the water table under it. The inspection, which a Massachusetts seller can no longer demand that you give up, should cover the whole building wherever access is permitted, not only the unit you are buying.

Spring Hill, Union Square, Winter Hill and the streets between them hold most of this stock; Davis Square and the blocks near the Green Line Extension stops have more of it converted recently. The Somerville area page on this site walks each square with its transit.

A converted three-family is usually a three-unit condominium trust, and in Somerville it is usually self-managed: the owners are the trustees, the budget is a spreadsheet, and the reserve is whatever the three of them have agreed to put aside. That structure is fine when it is funded and documented. It is the whole risk when it is not.

Read the trust document and the bylaws for how decisions are made and what a majority can bind you to. Read the current budget and the reserve balance, and ask what the last three years of common charges paid for. Ask for the master insurance policy and confirm what it covers, since the gap between the master policy and your own unit policy is where an uninsured loss lands. Ask whether a special assessment has been discussed, because in a three-unit trust the roof is one bill split three ways, whichever floor you live on.

Percentage interest is the number that governs all of this. It is set in the master deed, it is your share of every common expense and every vote, and it does not change because the unit above you has a nicer kitchen.

The master deed creates the condominium and defines the units, the common elements and each unit's percentage interest. The unit deed conveys your unit and its interest to you. The recorded floor plans show what the deed means by your unit, which is worth comparing against the actual walls, since a conversion sometimes records plans that predate the last renovation. Exclusive-use areas, such as a deck, a parking space or a basement storage cage, are either in the master deed or they are not yours.

Section 6(d) of Massachusetts General Laws chapter 183A is where the 6(d) certificate comes from: the condominium organization states in writing what common expenses and assessments remain unpaid on the unit, and once that statement is recorded alongside the deed, the unit is clear of any lien for charges that were outstanding before the sale. Your closing attorney will require it, the seller usually orders it from the trust, and in a self-managed trust it may be the first time anyone has written the numbers down.

If the building is mid-conversion, or the developer still owns the other units, read the master deed for any rights the developer reserved and ask when control of the trust passes to the owners. Buying the first unit sold in a fresh conversion is a different transaction from buying into a trust that has run for a decade.

In June 2026 I represented the buyer of a two-bedroom, two-bath condo at 125 Lowell Street, unit 102, in Spring Hill, a converted building on the slope between Somerville Avenue and Highland Avenue. The listing is linked from the recent-sales page on this site.

The work on that purchase was the checklist above, in that order: the building's conversion history first, the systems and the envelope at inspection, the trust's finances before the purchase and sale agreement, and the paper at closing. None of it was exotic. All of it was the difference between buying a unit and buying a share of a building you had not looked at.

If you are looking at a conversion anywhere in Somerville, send me the listing. I will tell you which of the four questions above it answers on its face and which ones you will have to ask.