The Massachusetts Association of Realtors and the Greater Boston Real Estate Board are flexing their considerable lobbying muscle on Beacon Hill in an effort to kill a transfer fee on real estate that would allow communities like ours to finally address the devastation caused by skyrocketing housing costs. 

We are longtime real estate professionals on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. These groups do not speak for us, nor do they speak for most of the Realtors, brokers and agents we know.

We need to act now, before the communities we love are gone forever. 

If something is not done soon, our communities as we know and love them will be gone. We see daily the damage the housing crisis is causing on the Islands. We also know that similar hurt is being done to neighborhoods and families across Cape Cod, in Boston, Cambridge and other communities around the state where firefighters, teachers, restaurant workers, tradespeople, healthcare workers, young homebuyers and seniors are simply being priced out of the places they call home. 

 Where Doctors Can’t Buy Homes 

There are few things of which MAR should be aware. 

First, seven police officers on a Nantucket force of 40 are leaving because they cannot afford to live here. 

Second, the CEO of Martha’s Vineyard Hospital is worried: the hospital cannot fill 25 percent of their staffing needs because frontline healthcare workers (yes, even the doctors) cannot afford the cost of housing. 

Third, each of us can name restaurants, stores and shops in our communities that do not have the staff to remain open as many hours as they need to – or have closed completely. 

Fourth, each of us know downsizing homeowners who have wanted to leave their homes to their children but, instead, have sold and left the island because there is nothing in which to downsize – neither to purchase nor to rent.  

Public safety. Healthcare. Commerce. Community – these are the victims of a real estate market where houses start at $1 million. Without significant funding for solutions, we are going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. How does a tourist economy survive without restaurants, or shops, or bike rentals, or plumbers, or musicians or corner stores? And how does any community survive without enough fire, police and hospital staff? 

 We’ve Tried Everything Else 

Candace daRosa

We have used every available strategy to build or preserve workforce housing. The available revenue streams are simply not enough to counter the skyrocketing cost of living or renting here. We are not going to build our way out of this, not in communities that have – and need to protect – vast areas of natural open space, as well as fragile ecosystems.  

We need to think creatively, and we need to go where the money is to fund those creative ideas. And where is the money? On Nantucket last year $2.4 billion – that’s billion, with a ‘b’, on one small island – worth of real estate was sold. Does MAR really believe that a 0.5 percent to 2 percent transfer fee on higher end sales is going to do anything to slow that down? Of course not.  

And the revenues created will finally be enough for us to take the steps we need to preserve homes, keep seniors and families here, fund housing that allows teachers and public safety workers to remain in our communities and at their jobs. 

Ken Beaugrand

Each community that opts into a transfer fee has the chance to shape its own solution to the problem – and to protect resident homebuyers and seniors by limiting the fee to high end transactions. Let us say that again: “opts in.” This is an elective tool.  

MAR and GBREB should know this is not simply a problem on our two islands. Communities across Cape Cod are facing the same thing, and this spring we will see more restaurants that can’t open, more seasonal workers living in tents and cars from Provincetown to Bourne.  

We have a crisis in communities across the state – that’s why Boston, Somerville, Provincetown, Concord, Cambridge, Arlington, Brookline and Chatham, like Nantucket, have already passed local home rule petitions calling for transfer fees. All these communities have made it clear that they have serious problems and want the option to implement a transfer fee. 

We need to act now, before the communities we love are gone forever. And MAR and GBREB need to put their muscle behind constructive change, or step back. 

Candace daRosa is a career Realtor and 13th-genration Martha’s Vineyard resident. Ken Beaugrand has been a Realtor on Nantucket for more than three decades.