Amara’s own website will tell you about the rooftop deck, the harbor views, and the two months free. It won’t tell you the rent. We checked the floor plans page, the availability page, and the home page on September 1, 2026, and not one of them shows a price. To find out what this building costs, you have to leave the building’s website.
So we did. RentCafe listed Amara’s one bedrooms from $2,799 to $3,155 that same day, and its two bedrooms from $3,424 to $4,430. Another platform’s search results put the entry one bedroom at $3,342, about $540 higher. When the same apartment shows two prices depending on where you look, neither one is your number. Your number is the one the leasing office puts in writing, and it’s worth getting before you read on, because every comparison below runs on that number, and a guess going in means a guess coming out.
Price the Free Months Before You Sign Anything
Amara’s site was advertising two months free plus a $1,500 look and lease credit as of September 1, 2026, with offers varying by floor plan, and other listing sites describe the deal differently, so treat what follows as an example rather than a quote. Take unit 203, a 973 square foot two bedroom that RentCafe priced at $3,699 a month on September 1 and an MLS listing carried at the same figure in August. If that unit qualified for the full advertised offer, the giveaway would be worth $8,898 over the first year, and your effective rent would work out to about $2,958 a month.
Here’s the part the banner doesn’t say out loud. The offer applies to the lease you sign now. At renewal you’re back at the sticker, $3,699 or wherever it has moved by then, which on this example is a jump of about $741 a month, roughly 25 percent, built into the deal on the day you sign it. A free month feels like money you saved until you ask who set the sticker price it was subtracted from.
What to do with that. Before you sign or renew, ask the leasing office two questions in writing: what this unit costs on a straight twelve month lease with no concession and with every mandatory monthly fee included, and what the unit rents for once the concession ends. The first answer is your real rent. The second is the number most renters meet for the first time eleven months in.
The Newest Building on the Street Is Also the Least Proven
Amara opened in May 2025 at the corner of Cabot and Rantoul, where Beverly meets the bridge to Salem. It’s 60 apartments over five stories, with a rooftop deck with grills and water views, a lounge with a fireplace and a pool table, co-working space, in unit laundry, and garage parking, and the MLS listing for unit 203 notes a garage space included in the rent. This is the water end of Rantoul Street. The marketing shows the Atlantic, the Beverly Channel, and the Danvers River, the Bass River walkway is close by, and Beverly Depot is a short walk up Rantoul.
What Amara doesn’t have yet is a track record. The building is barely a year old, and we couldn’t find a genuine review base for it anywhere we looked in early September 2026, which is neither a criticism nor a compliment. There are no shops downstairs, unlike the buildings up the street; the ground floor holds a small office and that’s it. And about a quarter of the units were listed available on RentCafe at the start of September, which is what lease up looks like. Lease up is exactly when a building advertises its biggest concessions.
If you toured Amara and loved it, none of that says leave. It says you’re choosing a building whose second year is unknown, on a lease whose second year is priced higher by design, and both of those belong in the same spreadsheet as a mortgage whose principal and interest don’t move.
What a Beverly Condo Costs
Beverly’s ownership market starts with condos. The median condo ran $484,000 in late August 2026, and a live search of one local brokerage’s listings that week showed roughly fifteen condos under $500,000, starting around $255,000. Property taxes at the city’s fiscal 2026 residential rate of $10.91 per $1,000 come to about $5,300 a year on that median before any exemption. Add homeowners insurance and the condo fee and you have the full monthly number to set beside your rent.
Now line up the two sides. At the sticker on our example unit, a year at Amara is about $44,400. Even in the concession year it’s roughly $35,500. A renter who stays three years pays the discounted year once and the full price twice. An owner’s biggest line item, the principal and interest on a fixed rate loan, is the same in year ten as in year one, and part of every payment stays with you as equity instead of leaving as rent.
What to do with that. Bring three numbers to a broker: your effective rent this year, your best answer on the renewal number, and your savings. Ask for the comparison as a complete monthly payment with taxes, insurance, and the condo fee inside it, because on a condo purchase it’s usually the fee, not the loan, that tips the answer.
Rantoul Street Keeps Building Rentals
Look at what’s going up around you. In February 2025, the four Beverly Collection buildings up the street, 394 apartments, sold to a New York investment firm for $162 million. The Planning Board has approved 52 more rental units at 119 Rantoul Street and a six story, 115 unit apartment building near the station. The corridor’s notable for sale building, The Depot condos, dates to 2008, and Beverly has since cut its maximum building height from 75 to 55 feet, with the developer behind much of the corridor saying large new projects are now unlikely.
Play that forward a few years. Renters on Rantoul Street keep getting new buildings, new concessions, and increasingly institutional landlords. Buyers compete for a stock of homes that isn’t growing much. That’s the quiet argument for getting onto the ownership side of the line while your income clears the bar. And your commute survives the move. Beverly Depot is Zone 4, at $8.75 a ride or $281 for a monthly pass, about 33 to 45 minutes into North Station, reachable from many of the same walkable blocks where the condo inventory sits.
Where We Come In
GoldCoast Mortgage Service is an independent mortgage broker in Beverly, up the road from your lobby. John Donlon, who owns it, has spent more than 25 years financing homes on the North Shore, and plenty of that work starts with a renter doing this exact math for the first time. A bank can offer you its own loans. A broker shops your file across many lenders, and on a condo that matters twice, because the building has to qualify alongside the buyer.
We’ll pre-qualify you at no cost, so you know your actual budget before you give up a Saturday to open houses. And if your best move is to take the concession year, bank the difference, and buy next year, that’s exactly what you’ll hear from us.
Recommended Realtors for First-Time Buyers
We work regularly with two local agents who are good with first-time buyers and who won’t rush you:
- Arthur Martiroso, DNA Realty Group, 617-921-5015
- Joshua Riopelle, Simes City Realty, North Andover, 978-590-2741
You’re welcome to work with any agent you like. We mention them because renters often ask us who to call once the financing side makes sense.
Questions From Renters at Amara
With the concession, my rent is lower than any mortgage payment I could get. Doesn’t renting win?
In year one, it might. The comparison that matters is year two and beyond, when the concession is gone and the sticker is back. Run both numbers before you decide. If the discounted year is the only thing making renting look cheaper, the lease isn’t cheaper. The first year is.
Can I use the concession year to get ready to buy?
That’s often the smartest version of this whole decision. If the advertised offer saves you several hundred dollars a month, move that difference into savings on the first of every month, as if it were rent. On our example unit that’s roughly $8,900 over the year, about the size of a 3.5 percent FHA down payment on a $255,000 condo and a serious start on one at $400,000.
Is a 2025 building a fair comparison to an older condo?
Not one for one. Amara’s finishes, deck, and garage space are things most Beverly condos at the median don’t offer. What the condo offers instead is a payment that stops climbing, equity that accumulates, and no renewal letter. You’re not comparing two apartments so much as two positions, and only one of them leaves you owning something when you go.
What happens to my rent when the free months end?
The advertised offer applies to the lease you sign, so renewal starts from the full price. Nobody can tell you today exactly what that number will be, but you can ask, in writing, what the unit rents for without the concession, and treat that as your planning number instead of the one on the banner.
How much do I need for a down payment?
Less than the folklore says. The median first time buyer puts down about 10 percent, FHA allows 3.5 percent down with a 580 credit score, and the Massachusetts ONE Mortgage program starts near 3 percent with no private mortgage insurance. If you banked a concession year, you may be closer than you think.