Businessman Snaps Up Multi-Million Dollar Beachfront Home For Just $200K, Only To Tear It Down Months Later – Here’s Why

Millionaire businessman Don Vaccaro snapped up a multimillion-dollar home on the luxury island of Nantucket, MA, for a bargain price of $200,000, but just six months later, it’s condemned and torn down as erosion continues to destroy the shoreline.

Vaccaro and his family enjoyed the three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,783-square-foot beach house at 28 Sheep Pond Road for a single week last summer, before the property was declared condemned.

“The ability to be able to do that was invaluable,” he told Realtor.com®.

The coastal road where the property once stood has been plagued by erosion, leading to dramatic price drops and a string of condemned properties over the years.

In Vaccaro’s case, the city ordered the house razed after discovering the property had lost up to 20 feet of soil to erosion over six months, allowing the ocean to come within 5 feet of the main structure.

Then a week ago, Vaccaro hired a demolition crew to level his investment property before it had a chance to fall into the ocean.

“The total net loss was in the range of $400,000. That was the worst-case scenario,” the TicketNetwork founder and philanthropist told Realtor.com in an email.

Vaccaro is an experienced investor who has owned a house next door at 26 Sheep Pond Road for a decade, so he was well aware of the chances that his latest property at No. 28 may be at stake, but he decided to roll the dice anyway.

“There’s a valid argument that right after buying the house there was a reasonable chance that I could have flipped the house right away for about $500,000,” Vaccaro explained. “So it was all a calculated risk. I entered the transaction knowing what the risks were and I was willing to take the risk.â€

Vaccaro added that he has been dealing with erosion at his old home on Nantucket for many years and had seen encouraging signs that assured him of the No. 28 are the chances of survival.

“After a rapid period of erosion on that property, the erosion stopped for a few years and in a year it gained a little more shoreline and I believe the same was possible on this one,” he said.

The house Vaccaro bought for $200,000 last summer was once valued at just under $2 million. And at the time he told the Nantucket Current that the house “can’t last more than six months.”

“Inevitably the ocean will win. Home is only temporary, everything in life is temporary.â€

Just in early January, the city decided that Vaccaro’s house, while still standing and not actively affected by erosion, had to be razed for safety reasons. The owner said he could have resisted the order but chose to go along with it.

“Part of the decision to settle with the city was based on my moral principles and respect for the owners and long-term full-time residents of homes on Nantucket,” Vaccaro said.

Nantucket, an island off Cape Cod that is home to just over 14,000 year-round residents, has been a popular vacation destination for the wealthy for generations, earning it the nickname “Billionaire Island.”

But parts of the picturesque enclave, frequented by the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have long been plagued by severe erosion and threatened by rising sea levels, which has had a devastating effect on property values.

Condemned road

Vaccaro’s home is not the only one condemned on Sheep Pond Road.

“Sheep Pond is going broke,” local real estate agent Shelly Lockwood, of Advisors Living, told Realtor.com last month.

In October 2023, a house at 21 Sheep Pond Road was destroyed after a storm caused its deck to collapse, causing the city to seal its fate.

Last March, a 2,625-square-foot home at 6 Sheep Pond Road that was listed in September 2023 for nearly $2.3 million sold for just $600,000.

Then in December, a three-bedroom house at 16 Sheep Pond Road, which had been bought along with a neighboring house at No. 4 for $3.9 million by Boston investor Brett Fodiman was condemned after it was to be sold at a foreclosure auction. Finally moved from her precarious position to a bluff.

But Nantucket homeowners’ battle with Mother Nature is nothing new.

In 2010, the property at 3 Sheep Pond Road was destroyed by erosion and eventually collapsed into the ocean.

A few months later, Nantucket resident Gene Ratner’s storm-battered home at 19 Sheep Pond Road fell apart and ended up underwater.

The future of the remaining homes on Sheep Pond Road looks bleak, given that sea levels around Nantucket are expected to reach 1.15 feet as early as 2040, according to NOAA projections made in 2022.

By 2070, more than 2,300 buildings on the island, 84% of them residential, will be at risk from flooding or coastal erosion. And over the next 50 years, sea-level rise and coastal flooding are expected to cause $3.4 billion in cumulative damage across Nantucket, according to the island’s 2021 Coastal Resilience Plan.

But despite all the warning signs, Nantucket’s real estate market overall remains surprisingly robust, suggesting that moneyed elites continue to be drawn to the island’s chic coastal lifestyle—erosion and sea-level rise be damned. .

Last month, the median listing price on Nantucket was $4.3 million, down 12% year over year, but still the second-highest December listing price since 2016, according to the latest data. latest available from Realtor.com.

“The median listing price in Nantucket County peaked in September 2023 at $5.2 million, and has since eased, but remains well above pre-2023 levels,” says Hannah Jones, senior economic research analyst at Realtor.com.

The island currently has 123 active listings on Realtor.com, ranging from $849,000 to $33 million, including two properties along erosion-prone Sheep Pond Road.