A home in the Oyster Watcha Midlands section of Edgartown sold this week for $24.75 million, just shy of the record price for single family home sales on the Vineyard, set nine years ago. The sale, which closed Wednesday, sent nearly half a million dollars to the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank, the public agency that collects a two per cent fee on most real estate transactions to buy conservation land.

The last time a single family property sold for north of $24 million on the Vineyard was in 2006 when the Hedley home in the Green Hollow section fronting the Edgartown harbor changed hands for $25.1 million.

House was designed by architect Mark Hutker, built by Doyle Construction — Bob Gothard

The sellers of the Oyster Watcha property are Megan and Warren Adams, who bought 15 acres with an Atlantic-facing beach in 1999 and built a sprawling custom family home there. Mr. Adams is an internet entrepreneur who founded Planet All, an online network ing service that preceded Facebook and was later acquired by Amazon. The buyers, according to public documents, are Dr. Leonard Schleifer and his wife, Harriet, of Chappaqua, N.Y. Dr. Schleifer is the founder, president and chief executive officer of Regeneron, a leading science-based biopharmaceutical company based in Tarrytown, N.Y. The chairman of his board is P. Roy Vagelos, former chairman and CEO of Merck Pharmaceuticals and a longtime seasonal resident of Chilmark’s North Shore. The Schleifers have two sons.

The sale was handled privately by two high-end Edgartown brokerage firms. Landvest, co-owned by Tom LeClair and Gerret Conover Jr., represented the buyer, while Wallace and Co. Sothebys International with principal broker Tom Wallace, represented the seller.

The property fronts the secluded Oyster Pond in the rural coastal perimeters of Edgartown; part of it lies in West Tisbury although the house is situated in Edgartown. The Adamses bought the land in 1999, the year they were married, and later designed and built the house, guest house and pool. In 2014 the property was assessed at $14.57 million ($8.66 million on the land and $5.9 on the houses).

Tom Wallace called the location “remarkable . . . one of the few places on the Vineyard where you can walk out the door and be on the beach facing the Atlantic.”

Tom LeClair, who declined to identify the buyers by name, said they were “generational buyers” who have been coming to the Vineyard for years and recently began searching for a property to buy. “I think he found a perfect place where his children and his grandchildren can enjoy the Island,” Mr. LeClair said.

Speaking to the Gazette by phone, Megan Adams said she and her husband who now have three girls, one aged 12 and twins who are nearly nine, plan to continue living on the Vineyard but move closer to downtown Edgartown.

“We built this house long before we had children; fast forward 15 years,” Mrs. Adams said, adding: “We just love the house and if we could lift it up and move it to Edgartown we would. We have three wonderfully active kids with different schedules, and the writing has been on the wall for awhile that town is the place to be. You have to find that next perch.” She reeled off warm praise for the many Vineyard professionals and craftsmen who worked on the house: architect Mark Hutker, landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, stone mason Lew French, builder Doyle Construction. “We loved the design and building process so much, she said. “But what we realized was not negotiable is being many, many miles from where our kids want to be. There are so few places in the world where two eight-year-olds can go out for ice cream on their own . . . For this next chapter, it’s Edgartown. We’re putting the ‘town’ in town.”

Real estate professionals say interest is surging again in high-end properties. — Bob Gothard

Through the boom and bust economic cycle over the past 14 years, exclusive private home sales fetching top dollar have been largely concentrated in Edgartown, records show.

In 2001 the former Peter Sharp house at Starbuck’s Neck in Edgartown sold for $21.8 million, at the time a record price for a single family home.

Then in 2006, two years before the national economic crash, two sales rocketed to the top of the record books. In January that year Adele Waggaman’s 10-acre property at Tower Hill in Edgartown sold for $22.5 million. One month later David and Michele Hedley’s Green Hollow home on 4.7 acres sold for $25.1 million, still the record price today for a single family home sale.

In 2011 Blue Heron Farm in Chilmark, which had been rented by the Obamas for three summers for their vacation, sold for $21.9 million. A separate but related transaction for a beach lot brought the total sale price to $22.4 million.

This past winter a home at Witchwood Lane fronting the narrows of Katama Bay sold for $22 million.

Mr. Wallace and Mr. LeClair both said they are seeing increased activity in the upper tiers of the real estate market. “In what I would describe as the top of the market, we’ve seen this level of activity from Sothebys,” Mr. Wallace said. “In the Hamptons, Nantucket, Manhattan is red hot . . . . there is a little bit of pent up demand I think here on the Vineyard, where we haven’t seen the sheer volume. On the other hand, we on the Vineyard didn’t have the same kind of dip that Nantucket and the Hamptons did.”

Mr. LeClair said his company has closed on three large sales in the past eight months, including the one this week. “We at Landvest see the market really continuing to appreciate,” he said, adding: “A rising tide floats all boats, as the saying goes, and I think soon you are going to begin to see every segment of the market appreciating.”