Dover, Massachusetts
Fifteen square miles, no commuter rail station, and no municipal sewer. Those three facts explain most of what a Dover house asks of you.
Dover is defined
by what it does not have.
There is no train and no municipal sewer. Water comes from private wells and the Colonial Water Company. Waste goes into septic systems on the property.
That is not a footnote. Septic capacity is what sets how many bedrooms a house can legally have, which means an addition in Dover starts with a soil test rather than a floor plan. Zoning runs in three residential districts at half an acre, one acre and two acres, and any work within a hundred feet of a wetland needs a filing with the Conservation Commission before it can begin.
A Dover project and a Needham project of the same square footage are not the same project.
Homes for sale in Dover
Homes currently listed for sale in Dover, from the MLS feed.
What the town gives you
No station, and the drive that replaces it
Dover has no MBTA commuter rail station inside town limits. The nearest is Needham Junction on the Needham Line, which means a car at the start of the day and a car at the end of it.
Wells, septic, and what an addition costs
No municipal sewer means every house sits on its own septic system, and the system sets the bedroom count. A house you want to add two bedrooms to may need a new system before it can be permitted, and that number belongs in the budget on day one, not in month four.
In a town this wooded, the hundred-foot wetland buffer catches more projects than owners expect.
Two schools, one of them shared
Chickering Elementary serves prekindergarten through grade 5, with 457 students. From grade 6 through grade 12 students attend the Dover-Sherborn Regional district, shared with Sherborn, with 1,072 students.
Dover is the only town in this part of the market that runs its upper grades regionally.
607 acres at Noanet Woodlands
The Trustees hold 607 acres at Noanet Woodlands with more than sixteen miles of trails, inside a town of 15.1 square miles. Open space is not an amenity in Dover, it is most of the town.
We do not only sell
Dover houses.
Artemis is a boutique brokerage in Westwood that also advises on design and renovation. On a Dover house the question is rarely just what it is worth. It is what the septic will carry, what the Conservation Commission will allow, and what the addition really costs.
Where people look in Dover
Dover has no neighborhoods in the subdivision sense. What it has is four parts of town that people name when they describe where they are looking. How the six towns compare on rail, water and sewer is on one page.
Village Center and Springdale Avenue
The town center, the library, the town offices and the small commercial cluster. Smaller lots by Dover standards.
Dedham Street
The eastern approach, and the fastest line toward Route 128 and Needham. Where the commute argument is easiest to win.
Centre Street corridor
The spine that runs through the middle of town. Larger parcels, older houses, and most of the frontage that people picture when they picture Dover.
Farm Street
Toward the Noanet and Charles River side. The two-acre end of the zoning map, wetlands close by, and the longest driveways in town.
Ask about Dover.
Tell us what you are working out in Dover, whether you are buying, selling or changing the house you already own. You get specifics, not a brochure.
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