A Nantucket Buyer Only Got One Week in His New House

This summer, a few months after he’d purchased a precariously situated Nantucket beach house for $200,000, Don Vaccaro, the founder of ticket-brokering business TicketNetwork, acknowledged in an interview that while the house was, at least to him, an irresistible bargain, “everyone knows these houses are going to fall into the sea.”

A few months later, Vaccaro’s home has, if not exactly fallen into the sea, come close enough to necessitate demolition, reports the Nantucket Current. The house at 28 Sheep Pond Road was demolished this week, about six months after Vaccaro, who owns a neighboring beach house, bought it. The house lost 10 to 20 additional feet over the last few months, resulting in a demolition order from the town. (Demolitions are ordered when houses come close enough to being literally swept away in a storm that they present an environmental hazard. But it was still, according to Vaccaro, structurally sound.)

A number of other houses on Sheep Pond Road have already been demolished because of coastal erosion, leaving a dwindling number that trade at increasingly discounted prices — it’s unclear how much of the street will even be left in a decade. When 28 Sheep Pond’s longtime owners purchased it 37 years ago, there were three houses, an acre of land, and the road itself (since moved back) standing between them and the water. It was last assessed by the town at $1.9 million, and the last owners tried, to no avail, to give it away. While houses on other parts of the island facing extreme erosion, like Baxter Road, can be moved, Sheep Pond Road houses are situated in such a way that it’s not viable.

Vaccaro told the Current that with the demolition costs, he’d spent around $400,000 on the property, but he didn’t regret it. “I was able to use it one week with my family and kids in both houses, which was a priceless experience, so it was worth it in the end.”