Erosion Firesale: Nantucket Waterfront Home Assessed At Nearly $2 Million Sold For Just $200,000

When Jane Carlin and her husband Ben Gifford purchased a summer home on Nantucket’s west end in 1988, there was a wide expanse between their new property and the Atlantic Ocean that included three neighboring homes closer to the shore, Sheep Pond Road, and an acre of land.

After years of erosion, those homes and the road itself are all gone, and the shoreline is now just a stone’s throw from Carlin’s back porch.

“It’s about ready to go in,” Jane told the Current. “It has really been relentless. 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 writing was on the wall, but Carlin and Gifford had hoped to have at least one more summer at the property where they had forged so many memories over nearly four decades. Mother Nature, however, had other plans. After the three successive storms that hit Nantucket out of the south over the winter ate away even more of their property, the Carlin and her husband cleared out the house and started investigating how they could move and donate the home to a local affordable housing non-profit.

“All winter I had been really frantically trying to see if any of the organizations would consider taking the house and moving it, and we would help with the cost of moving,” Jane said. “I didn’t want to see it fall into the ocean or get demolished. But I had no luck whatsoever.”

That’s when they got a call out of the blue. Don Vaccaro, a businessman who bought the property next door at 26 Sheep Pond Road ten years ago, was on the line with an offer.

read more at nantucketcurrent.com.