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Erosion has come for yet another home on the billionaire hot spot island of Nantucket.
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A house last purchased in July was demolished on Tuesday.
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Buying on certain parts of the wealthy island has become a gamble as weather patterns intensify.
Just over six months after businessman Don Vaccaro signed the paperwork on his new property on Nantucket’s coast, the beach house is no longer.
On Tuesday, the three-bedroom home was demolished after being condemned by the town after the coast eroded to within five feet of the structure, according to a filing by the town’s conservation commission. Just last year, the property was valued at nearly $2 million by the town’s assessor. Vaccaro spent only $200,000 on it, but its upkeep cost several hundred thousand more.
Vaccaro says that in hindsight his purchase of 28 Sheep Pond Road was a “terrible investment.”
“Not only the $400,000, but the time suck of having to deal with it,” Vaccaro wrote in an email to Business Insider. He cautioned other beachfront homeowners to think seriously about erosion strategies, like planting sea grass, to avoid a similar fate.
Though Vaccaro followed the town’s condemnation order, he still believes 46-year-old home could’ve lasted longer before it finally fell into the ocean.
“I hoped to have the summer of 2025, but that will not happen,” he wrote.
The home’s final demise was also a surprise to Mike Melvin, the general manager at Holdgate Partners, which oversaw the demolition, told Business Insider. Just last year, his firm had updated the house when its septic tank fell into the ocean.
“It was a little bit surprising to see how fast things have eroded out there,” he said.
Melvin blames storms this winter with strong southeast winds that chipped away at the island’s southern shore.
“They’d be better with a nor’easter, to be honest,” Melvin added.
By the end of the week, what remains of the house will either be turned into gravel or packed up and sent to a contractor to handle the disposal off-island. Melvin worries other homes in the area might still be at risk as the year goes on.
“It could be just one bad storm” that takes out other properties, Melvin said.
Buying a home on certain parts of Nantucket, an island off Cape Cod’s coast known for attracting the ultrawealthy like billionaires Eric Schmidt and Steve Schwarzman, is a gamble. In recent years, erosion has led to the demolition of a handful of properties, many once valued at multiple millions of dollars. Other residents have spent seven figures to move their homes away from threatened bluffs.
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.
While there have been a number of firesales on particularly vulnerable properties, the island’s larger real estate market has remained healthy. In 2024, the number of single-family homes sold on the island increased 11% year over year, according to data from local firm Fisher Real Estate. Since 2020, the number of homes sold on Nantucket for more than $10 million has increased 50% and the median home sale price reached an all-time high of $3.7 million.
“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, who has been vacationing on Nantucket for nearly all of his life, told BI last year. “To use a well-worn phrase, come hell or high water, people are still buying multimillion-dollar homes on Nantucket.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
