The number of homes sold on the Vineyard in 2024 fell to its lowest point in over a decade, highlighting the effects of rising prices, high interest rates and a persisting hangover from the Covid real estate boom.
Kirsten Sauter, the now-retired veterinarian behind My Pet's Vet on State Road, and her husband David sold the building on August 24 for $1.3 million to R.W. Bryant Realty, LLC.
Million-dollar sales, mostly in Edgartown and Chilmark, are dominating the Island’s real estate market, as figures from the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank make abundantly clear.
Hard numbers illustrating the trend underscore urgent concerns about the lack of affordable housing, the subject of a standing-room-only forum last weekend.
A rising tide lifts all boats, and the evolution of million-dollar price tags from shocking rarities to barely remarked commonplaces has ratcheted up the cost of even the most basic shelter.
The Sharp house on Starbuck’s Neck in Edgartown was sold this week to a Connecticut family for $11,225,000.
The price is a Martha’s Vineyard benchmark of sorts, although a north shore property that included 80 acres of waterfront property sold last year for $12 million.
The summer home on Starbuck’s Neck is a single dwelling on three acres — but among the most prime three acres on the Vineyard, with a lawn down to Edgartown outer harbor facing Edgartown Lighthouse.
The dollar volume of real estate sales on Martha’s Vineyard was far higher in 1999 than in any previous year, reaching almost $350 million. The previous record, in 1998, was about $308 million.
Although it has been clear in recent years that a real estate boom is sweeping the Island, the figures are stark proof. The current boom began in 1996, when the total real estate sales for the year reached $186 million, climbing to $243 million the following year. The last two years have been simply astonishing.
Houses were sold as soon as they came on the market, listings under $200,000 became an endangered species, and building lots were almost as hard to find as a heath hen.
That was Martha’s Vineyard real estate 1998, according to a random sampling of Island professionals in the field, and real estate 1999 is likely to be the same, only more so.
As the Vineyard real estate market keeps going up, off-Island scammers have tried to take advantage of the situation, listing houses for sale or rent online without the owner’s knowledge.
