Contact Tim Harvey

Messages sent here come to me. I read them and I answer them myself. There is no call center in the middle, nobody hands your name off to a rotating list of agents, and no automated email sequence starts up to follow you around for the next two years. Getting in touch commits you to nothing, and a fair number of these conversations end with “not this year” — which is a perfectly good outcome.

The details

• Tim Harvey Real Estate, brokered by From Boston South Realty
• 166 North Street, Upton, MA 01568
• Phone: (508) 958-7980
• Email: tim@timharveyrealestate.com

Call or write, whichever suits you. If you get voicemail, leave the town and one sentence about what you need, and the call back will be a more useful one.

What to put in a first message

The difference between a reply that helps and a reply that asks four more questions is about three lines of context:

• Buying, selling, or both. Doing both in the same stretch of months is its own problem, and it changes the order everything happens in.
• Which town. Bylaws, municipal water and sewer, septic and how a sale actually runs vary enough town to town that the answer depends on where the house is.
• Your timeline, honestly. “Sometime next year” and “we have to be out by June” get different advice.
• The address, if you are asking what something is worth. I cannot say anything meaningful about a house I cannot look up. With the address I can pull the assessor’s record and the recent closed sales near it before I call you back.

Why people usually write

You want to know what your house is worth. That is real work rather than a number off a website. Here is how a home valuation is put together and what I need in order to do one.

You are thinking about selling. Most people write well before they are ready, which is the right time. The order a sale runs in — valuation, preparation, pricing, marketing, offers, inspection, closing is worth reading first.

You are buying and want a second read on a house. This site has no listing search, on purpose. It has how to read a listing and what to check before you make an offer instead, including what matters around here: septic, private wells, older wiring, permit history.

You are on a short deadline. A job, an estate, a house you already bought — say so in the first line, because a deadline changes the advice. There are ways to run a sale on a compressed timeline, with trade-offs you should hear before you pick one.

You have a question about a particular town. Ask it. If it is Upton, the page on Upton’s housing stock, town services and commuting distances may cover part of it already.

Where I work

Upton, Westborough, Hopkinton, Northbridge, Grafton and Mendon. What my background does and does not establish is set out in full, including the claims this site will not make. If your house sits just outside those towns, ask anyway — I will either take it on or tell you plainly that someone closer to it is the better call.