Chelsea Stinson

I'm a Connecticut and New York licensed real estate advisor with Lake Homes Realty, specializing in waterfront and lake-access property across Candlewood Lake, Lake Lillinonah, Lake Zoar, and Bantam Lake. I live on Lillinonah in Brookfield and own property on Candlewood, and I'm a landlord myself, so when I run the numbers on a rental property for you, it's the same math I run on my own.

Before real estate, I spent ten years as an occupational therapist and rehab director, building and managing teams of 8 to 15 staff. I was burned out, I hated being locked in an office, and I wanted to build something on my own terms.

Legacy is personal to me. My father died when I was 24, and I went through my own family's estate and probate, so I know what the family side of an inheritance looks like. Across Connecticut, so much real estate is legacy real estate. Homes stay in families for decades, until there is no next of kin still living in the area, or living a life where they use the house, and everyone is left with hard decisions to make. It is one of the reasons I ended up focusing on lake property too, because so much of it is legacy real estate.

I focused on waterfront because I watched so many agents handle it poorly. These properties have so many nuances and little situations with them: easements, FirstLight, the power company owning the rights to the property. People need to be guided by someone who is truthful and willing to do the digging and the research for them so they don't make a mistake.

My first six lake closings, May to July 2026, averaged 27 days on market, against a 41-day career average as of August 2026. And since I went all-in on the lake, my average sale is just over a million dollars.

I will tell you the hard thing before you fall in love with the wrong property. I am not going to tell you what to decide. I am going to make sure you understand everything so you can. My clients do not just feel informed. They feel protected.

Inherited and probate properties, anywhere in Connecticut, are the work I care about most. My years working with families at the hardest point of their lives taught me how to stay calm in the middle of a hard family decision. When there is more than one heir, everyone gets the same information at the same time, in writing. I will tell you plainly what a sale or a buyout means in dollars, and when a question belongs to your attorney or your accountant, I will wait while you ask. Legacy starts by the water.

Not all agents are created equal. Showing you the houses and getting an offer accepted is only the beginning, and to me the easiest part of the job. A Realtor's real value often becomes clearest when something goes wrong.

My buyers learned that an error by their original lender had put their financing and the entire purchase in jeopardy. They were at risk of losing money, losing the home, and they had already sold their home and were living with family at the moment.

When I received the call, my first thought was, "This cannot become my clients' consequence to carry." We had three days to create another path forward, and I immediately went to work.

I brought in another lender, one I frequently work with who could evaluate the situation quickly and who I know is like myself with work ethic, problem solving and won't give up until there is a solution. We rebuilt the financing strategy, reworked the deal terms, and negotiated additional time from the sellers. At the same time, I coordinated communication among myself and the other agent, the attorneys, the lenders, and everyone else whose cooperation was needed to keep the transaction alive.

There wasn't one magical phone call that saved it. It took three days of constant problem-solving, carefully managed communication, and knowing who to call and what to ask for when the original plan fell apart. They were able to close on the home and avoided the financial and personal disruption.

I do not promise a perfectly smooth transaction. I do promise to recognize the available solutions, protect my clients' position, and keep moving until we have exhausted every responsible way forward, and treat each transaction like it is my very own and like they are my family.

Woodworking in epoxy is one of my hobbies, and it is how I process difficult transactions while I'm working through them. I do an epoxy project most months of the year. I hand carved Candlewood Lake into a coffee table and poured epoxy into it, freehand with a router and no stencil. It took about a month, and there were lots of mistakes I had to figure out how to build into the piece. One layer of epoxy didn't set right, so I sanded it down and poured it again. It sits in the living room of our Candlewood Lake cabin. It turned out good enough. I am proud of it, but it certainly isn't perfect at all!