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 house on the upscale island of Nantucket, MA, for the bargain price of $200,000—but just six months later, it was condemned and torn down as erosion continues to eat up the coastline.
Vaccaro and his family got to enjoy the three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,783-square-foot beachfront home at 28 Sheep Pond Road for a single week last summer, before the property was declared doomed.
“The ability to be able to do that was priceless,” he told Realtor.com®.
The coastal road that the property once sat on has been plagued by erosion, leading to dramatic price cuts and a string of properties being condemned over the years.
In Vaccaro’s case, the town ordered the house to be leveled after finding that the property had lost up to 20 feet of land 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 raze his investment property before it had a chance to tumble into the ocean.
“The total net loss was in the range of $400,000. This was the worst case scenario,” the founder of TicketNetwork and philanthropist told Realtor.com in an email.
Vaccaro is an experienced investor who has owned a neighboring home at 26 Sheep Pond Road for a decade, so he was well aware of the odds that his latest property at No. 28 could be in danger—but he decided to roll the dice anyway.
“There is a valid argument that immediately after buying the house there was a reasonable chance that I could have immediately flipped the house for about $500,000,” Vaccaro explained. “So everything was a calculated risk. I went into the transaction knowing what the risks were and was willing to take the risk.”
Vaccaro added that he has been dealing with erosion at his older Nantucket house for many years and had seen encouraging signs that reassured him about No. 28’s chances of survival.
“After a fast period of erosion on that property the erosion stopped for a few years and in one year gained slightly more shoreline and I believe the same was possible on this one,” he said.
The home Vaccaro snapped up for $200,000 last summer was at one time valued just under $2 million. And at the time he told the Nantucket Current that the house “may not last more than six months.”
“Inevitably the ocean will win. The house is only temporary, everything in life is temporary.”
Fast forward to early January, the town ruled that Vaccaro’s house, albeit still stable and not actively affected by erosion, had to be leveled for safety reasons. The owner said he could have resisted the order, but chose to go along with it.
“Part of the decision to comply with the town was based on my moral principles and respect for the long term full-time owners and occupiers of the 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 ultrarich for generations, earning it the nickname “Billionaires’ Isle.”
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 with rising sea levels, which have had a devastating effect on property values.
Doomed street
Vaccaro’s home isn’t the only one doomed on Sheep Pond Road.
“Sheep Pond is going in the drink,” local real estate agent Shelly Lockwood, of Advisors Living, told Realtor.com last month.
In October 2023, a home at 21 Sheep Pond Road was razed after a storm caused its deck to collapse, leading the town 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 purchased along with a neighboring home at No. 4 for $3.9 million by Boston investor Brett Fodiman, was condemned as it was about to be sold at a foreclosure auction. It was ultimately moved back from its precarious perch on a bluff.
But Nantucket homeowners’ battle with Mother Nature is nothing new.
Back in 2010, the property at 3 Sheep Pond Road was worn down by erosion and ultimately collapsed into the ocean.
A few months later, Nantucket resident Gene Ratner’s storm-battered house at 19 Sheep Pond Road came apart and wound up underwater.
The future of the remaining homes dotting Sheep Pond Road appears bleak, considering that sea levels around Nantucket are expected to reach 1.15 feet as early as 2040, according to NOAA’s projections made in 2022.
By 2070, more than 2,300 buildings on the island, 84% of them residential, will be at risk of coastal flooding or erosion. And over the next 50 years, rising sea levels and coastal flooding are expected to cause $3.4 billion in cumulative damages 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 the moneyed elites continue to be drawn to the island’s chic coastal lifestyle—erosion and rising sea levels be damned.
Last month, the median listing price on Nantucket stood at $4.3 million, which was a 12% drop year over year but was still the second-highest December listing price since 2016, according to the latest available data from Realtor.com.
“The median listing price peaked in Nantucket county in September 2023 at $5.2M, and has since eased, but remained 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 the erosion-prone Sheep Pond Road.
