Lillian Montalto Signature Properties International, LLC

Read a hundred reviews of this Andover brokerage and one thing jumps out: almost nobody reviews the brokerage. They review an agent — Caroline, Syeda, Sammi, Sheon, Ani — by first name, and usually they are a first-time buyer who got walked through the whole thing slowly. Team Lillian Montalto has worked out of 32 Park Street since 2000, by both its own account and the business start date on its BBB file, and lists a service area running from Andover and North Andover out to Boxford, Lynnfield, Reading, Tewksbury, Boston and southern New Hampshire. Its Massachusetts real estate broker license is active. The company names Lillian Montalto as its lead and says RealTrends ranked it the number one team in Massachusetts for 2025 — its own claim, not something confirmed anywhere else here. The buyer-side accounts are the most detailed and the most recent. Reviews from this spring and summer describe an agent who answered questions all the way to a first closing without pushing, and one buyer in April credited the agent with lining up the mortgage, legal and inspection contacts that carried the deal through. Sellers appear too, a few describing listings that had gone quiet and then moved once this team took them over. Then there is the other pattern, and it is an odd one: the one-star reviews are mostly not about buying or selling a house at all. Two of them, years apart, are about the office parking lot. The more recent, from May, comes from a parent who pulled in by mistake on the way to a toy shop and says a partner came out and threatened to call the police while their eight-year-old sat in the car. That says nothing about how a sale gets handled, but it is worth knowing about the office. The older complaints that do concern the work are scattered and unrepeated — one about how a problem during a listing period was handled, one over a commission charge, one about contact that kept coming after a request to stop. BBB grades the office A+ and states plainly that the business is not BBB accredited; those are two separate facts. Its file also lists a single employee under a partner's name, which sits oddly beside the multi-agent team the website presents. If you are buying a first house in the Merrimack Valley and want someone who will absorb the questions, this is a reasonable call. Ask which agent you will actually be working with — the praise here attaches to individuals, not to a house style — and get the fee and commission terms in writing before you sign anything.