A buyer under agreement on a one-bedroom at Echelon Seaport called their lender for final numbers two weeks before closing and got a surprise that had nothing to do with the purchase price. The monthly HOA fee on their unit line ran closer to the building's high end than its low end, and once the lender folded it into the debt-to-income ratio, the loan amount that had looked comfortable three weeks earlier suddenly didn't. Nothing about the sale price had changed. The fee had been sitting in the listing the whole time.
That story is common enough in Seaport to be worth writing about directly, because the neighborhood's headline number, the median sale price everyone quotes when they talk about the waterfront, tells you almost nothing about what a given condo will actually cost you every month.
The Median Isn't Even Stable on Its Own
Before getting to buildings, it's worth pointing out that the median itself moves depending on which slice of 2026 you're looking at. MLS PIN data covering the first four months of 2026 put the Seaport median condo sale at $2.375 million, built from 22 closed transactions at a median $1,816 per square foot. A separate March 2026 market snapshot showed the same neighborhood at a median of roughly $2.98 million, with price per square foot closer to $1,940. Redfin's read on the three months ending March 2026 landed even higher, a median around $3.0 million, up 26.7 percent year over year, with homes taking an average of 93 days to sell.
None of these sources are wrong. They're measuring overlapping but not identical time windows, and Seaport is a small enough market, a few dozen closings in a given quarter, that swapping a handful of trophy penthouse sales in or out can swing the median by hundreds of thousands of dollars. If two well-regarded market trackers can look at roughly the same three-month period and land more than $600,000 apart, the median was never going to be precise enough to plan a purchase around on its own.
So set the median aside as a rough orientation point and look at what actually varies unit to unit and building to building: the monthly fee.
Same Waterfront, a Sixfold Gap in Monthly Fees
Pull current 2026 listings from five of Seaport's best-known towers and the spread in HOA fees is not subtle.
| Building | Monthly HOA fee range (2026 listings) |
|---|---|
| 22 Liberty | roughly $940 to $3,216 |
| 50 Liberty | roughly $947 to $2,460 |
| Echelon Seaport | roughly $1,000 to $5,000 |
| Residences at Pier 4 | roughly $1,658 to $5,001 |
| St. Regis Residences | roughly $1,742 to $3,528, with at least one penthouse listing carrying fees above $5,800 |
Two things are true at once. First, within a single building, unit size and line explain most of the spread, a studio and a three-bedroom penthouse were never going to pay the same fee. Second, across buildings, the low end of one tower's range can sit below the low end of another's, and the difference isn't really about square footage. It's about what kind of building you're buying into.
Some of these towers run closer to a traditional residential association: shared insurance, landscaping, snow removal, a modest reserve line. Others run more like a hotel with condo deeds attached: 24-hour concierge, multiple pools, a wellness center, a golf simulator, valet parking, an in-house app that can book a private jet. Echelon Seaport alone was marketed with more than 50,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor amenity space, including an 8,500-square-foot wellness center. That programming doesn't run itself, and the payroll and utility cost of running it shows up in the fee every single month, whether or not you use the golf simulator.
The Parking Line Nobody Prices Into the Offer
Parking compounds the same problem in a quieter way. In most Seaport buildings, if a space is deeded to your unit, it's usually built into your fee allocation and the purchase price includes it outright. Plenty of listings advertise exactly that, a deeded garage space bundled with the unit at Echelon, a garage parking space included at 300 Pier 4.
But not every space works that way. In several Seaport buildings, especially newer construction, parking is sold or billed separately from the unit itself, sometimes purchased directly from the developer as its own real estate. Valet service, where it exists, typically carries its own additional charge on top of self-park rates. Two units that look identical on paper, same floor plan, same tower, same square footage, can carry very different real costs depending on whether the parking line is baked in or billed as an extra.
If you're comparing two units at what looks like the same price, ask specifically whether the parking space is deeded and included, or metered separately. That answer changes your actual monthly number more than most of the finish upgrades in the listing photos.
A Low Fee Isn't Automatically Good News
There's a second layer to this that matters more the longer you plan to own. A building's monthly fee is supposed to fund two different things: this year's operating costs and a reserve for the big-ticket repairs that come due on a schedule, roofs, elevators, façade work, major mechanical systems. When a board underfunds that second bucket, the bill doesn't disappear. It shows up later as a special assessment, and it lands on whoever owns the unit at the time.
Boston already has a cautionary case study from its own waterfront. In 2007, the trustees at Harbor Towers voted to spend $75.6 million replacing the building's HVAC and other core systems. Unit owners were assessed individually to cover it, with bills ranging from $70,000 to $400,000 depending on unit share, and the size of those assessments pushed some owners to sell rather than pay.
Seaport's newer towers haven't had time to accumulate that kind of deferred maintenance the way Harbor Towers did. Echelon Seaport and St. Regis Residences opened in 2021 and 2022, so both are still early in the reserve-building process. 22 Liberty is the outlier on this list, delivered back in 2015, which makes it worth an extra look at how its reserve fund has kept pace over a decade of use. But waterfront buildings carry their own version of the same risk earlier than inland ones do. Marine corrosion, envelope maintenance, and elevated insurance costs tend to push reserve needs higher along the harbor than in a comparable building a mile inland. A fee that looks efficient today can look underfunded in a decade if the reserve line wasn't built with that exposure in mind.
The industry conversation has been trending in exactly this direction all year. Mortgage-finance analysts have been pushing associations nationally to fund reserves more aggressively after years of many buildings underpricing the true cost of upkeep, which means the fee you see quoted today is more likely to rise than to hold flat, regardless of which building you choose.
What This Means If You're Comparing Two "Median" Seaport Condos
- Ask for the building's reserve study and most recent budget before you write an offer, not after you're under agreement. A fee that looks low without a healthy reserve fund is a warning sign, not a bargain.
- Confirm whether parking is deeded and included in the price or billed as a separate ongoing charge. That single line can move your real monthly cost by several hundred dollars.
- Compare the all-in monthly number, principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and the HOA fee, rather than sale price or price per square foot alone. Two condos priced near Seaport's median can carry HOA fees a few thousand dollars apart.
- Get fully underwritten before you shop, not just pre-qualified, so the lender has already tested your file against a realistic fee range instead of a placeholder number.
Seaport's price tag gets most of the attention because it's the easiest number to repeat. The fee is the number that actually sets your budget for as long as you own the unit, and it deserves at least as much scrutiny before you sign.
FAQ
Is a higher HOA fee always a red flag in Seaport? Not on its own. A higher fee in a building with strong reserves and heavy amenity use can be better value than a lower fee in a building that's quietly underfunding its repair account. The number only means something once you know what it's funding.
Does deeded parking add to my mortgage payment or is it billed separately? It depends on the building. When a space is deeded to the unit, it's typically part of the purchase price and financed the same way as the rest of the home. When it isn't deeded, it's usually billed monthly outside your mortgage, so it won't show up in your loan estimate the way the rest of your housing cost does.
How do I find out if a building's reserve fund is healthy before I make an offer? Your agent can request the condo questionnaire, most recent budget, and reserve study as part of due diligence, ideally before you're locked into a timeline. Lenders will often ask for the same documents during underwriting, so getting them early avoids a late surprise.
If you're weighing a Seaport purchase against what the same budget buys a few blocks inland, or want a building-by-building breakdown before you start touring, Zander Realty Group can walk you through the fee structures and reserve health of the specific towers on your list. Get an Estimate to start the conversation.
