This newly built home with a two-bedroom guest house on Nantucket fetched more than $9.16 million last October.
Home prices on Nantucket, a summertime retreat for the rich and famous, keep going up.
While most other communities in Massachusetts saw home prices drop over the past two years, Nantucket’s prices jumped 14 percent.
The median price for a single-family home on the island jumped 9.6 percent to over $1.61 million in 2007 from $1.47 million in 2006, according to statistics from The Warren Group, parent company of Banker & Tradesman. Last year’s median was 14 percent higher than $1.41 million recorded in 2005.
Real estate brokers say prices on Nantucket tend to be inflated because the market is driven mostly by affluent second-home buyers and sellers. And the supply of housing is limited because a substantial portion of the island is protected open space that can’t be developed.
“The reality is that Nantucket is such a limited commodity,” said Greg McKechnie, one of the owners of Great Point Properties in Nantucket.
Single-family home sales have fallen every year since 2004, according to The Warren Group. A total of 172 single-family properties were sold on the island last year, an 11.8 percent drop from the 195 sales in 2006. Last year’s sales were almost half the single-family home transactions recorded in 2004, when 322 homes were sold.
As in other markets, buyers have been hesitant to make purchases as they’ve watched home prices decline. Some are waiting and hoping that prices will drop further.
“Buyers are somewhat reluctant to pull the trigger at this point relative to years past,” McKechnie said.
But McKechnie said unlike sellers in other communities, most Nantucket homeowners don’t have to sell.
“They’re not in a position that they need to sell so they’re willing to hold out for the price that they want,” he said.
Edward Sanford, president of Sanford Real Estate, said home sellers on the island aren’t panicked. Rather than slashing asking prices when their properties haven’t sold, many homeowners are simply taking their homes off the market. Sanford estimated that about 100 to 150 listings have been withdrawn from the market since November.
“The sellers are retrenching and not giving in a whole lot,” he said.
Helping to boost home prices last year were three property sales over $10 million. A four-bedroom Colonial at 39 Eel Point Road fetched $10.7 million in September. A historic property at 93 Main St. traded for $10.5 million earlier in the year. And an eight-bedroom home with a pool and tennis court situated on 14.8 acres on Quidnet Road sold for $10.25 million in December.
