Nantucket beach house sells for 90% off — and its new owner predicts it won’t survive another year

Remote coastal-beach cottages in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Homeowners on the New England island paradise of Nantucket are caught between the shore and a hard place as erosion swallows the land underneath their dream vacation homes.

Most recently, a three-bedroom, two-bedroom beach property once estimated to be worth $1.9 million was sold for just $200,000 after parts of it were swallowed by the sea, the Nantucket Current reported.

The local outlet reported that Jane Carlin and her husband, Ben Gifford, bought the beach house in 1988 on the western end of Nantucket, a crescent-shaped island 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts favored by the ultra-wealthy.

At the time, the couple’s property was separated from the Atlantic Ocean by three nearby properties, an acre of land, and a road.

But after 36 years of land erosion, the ocean has swallowed up the neighboring homes and made the Carlin property a beachfront one.

Three successive storms last winter ate away more of the couple’s property, leaving their back porch just a short distance from the shoreline.

“It’s about ready to go in,” Carlin told the local paper. “It used to be a neighborhood, and you knew who lived where. And now, if you take a drive out there, there’s not much to see.”

The couple had tried to donate the 1,700-square-foot home to a local affordable-housing nonprofit, but she said she had “no luck whatsoever.”

Then businessman Don Vaccaro, CEO of TicketNetwork.com, who already owns a neighboring property, offered to buy it at a steep discount: the final price was $200,000.

“Basically, the house may not last more than six months,” Vaccaro told the Current. “Inevitably, the ocean will win. The house is only temporary, everything in life is temporary.”

He added that he plans to implement erosion-mitigation strategies to try to prolong its life a bit longer, including adding seagrass planting and biodegradable silt fencing.

Carlin and Vaccaro didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from B-17.

The erosion-caused fire sale is a growing trend on the exclusive island, where last year’s median home price was $3.2 million. In February, a home on the same street — Sheep Pond Road — sold for just $600,000 after being originally listed for $2.3 million.

Like Vacarro, the other house’s new owner seemed to understand that time with the home was limited.

“I’d like to think that it’ll be there for a while, but I was definitely aware of the risk of any particular storm causing a problem in the future,” the purchaser told The Boston Globe.

“Those are properties we refer to occasionally as leases with Mother Nature,” real-estate agent Greg Mckechnie told us earlier this year.

Come ‘hell or high water,’ buyers are still snapping up Nantucket homes

Over the next 50 years, sea level rise, coastal flooding, and erosion are estimated to cause over $3.4 billion in cumulative damages to Nantucket, according to the island’s 2021 Coastal Resilience Plan.

The destruction has already made itself apparent: In April, billionaire Barry Sternlicht was forced to demolish his million-dollar home before it literally fell into the water. Others are spending seven figures to move their homes away from sandy bluffs.

Despite the current and incoming damage — and occasional bargain on Sheep Pond Road, if you consider six figures for one summer a bargain — demand hasn’t slowed down on the island.

While prices have fallen from 2022’s all-time high, according to data from local firm Fisher Real Estate, the median sale price is still more than in 2021, and there are more transactions overall than in pre-pandemic years.

“The concentration of wealth is quite stunning on Nantucket, and it keeps escalating,” Bruce Percelay, a real-estate developer and the publisher of the island’s N Magazine, told us in May. “To use a well-worn phrase, come hell or high water, people are still buying multimillion-dollar homes on Nantucket.”