The exclusive island where people keep giving away homes for free — even though the typical house costs $3.6 million
Nantucket, an island off Massachusetts, is a popular vacation spot for the wealthy.
Each year, several homes are offered for free — but buyers must move them to new locations first.
Some free houses are moved to create rentals, while others get turned into housing for local workers.
The crescent-shaped island of Nantucket, 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, has long been the home of idyllic summer getaways for the rich and famous.
Nantucket's median sales price is $3.6 million, according to Realtor.com, though many homes cost much more.
In 2021, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman was rumored to be the buyer of a $32.5 million waterfront estate, according to the Nantucket Current, a local paper. The Barstool Sports cofounder Dave Portnoy set a Massachusetts record when he paid $42 million for a six-bedroom home on the island in 2023, outlets including The Wall Street Journal reported.
But in stark contrast to the eight-figure homes is another common Nantucket practice: giving away homes.
Or technically free. Free, but with some caveats. The big one: You have to move them — and pay sometimes hefty sums to do so.
Many wealthy summer residents buy Nantucket properties intending to construct dream homes, which means whatever structure is standing on the land is effectively a teardown, said Anne Kuszpa, the executive director of Housing Nantucket, a nonprofit that creates affordable housing for the island's year-round community.
"Sometimes when someone buys a property, the land is worth a lot more than the dwelling that's on it," she told Business Insider.
Because of Nantucket's "demolition delay" rule, any home with "reuse potential" must be advertised in the town paper for 30 days. It's not required to be offered for free, but doing so has become common practice because most owners would rather not pay for the cost of removal, Kuszpa said.
The real-estate attorney Steven Cohen is representing a "free" home in the Miacomet neighborhood, known for its public golf course and freshwater pond, with a tax-assessed value of nearly $800,000. He said he'd already received 25 emails from interested parties. (Mansion Global first reported the listing.)
The "buyer" must pay to move the home, which usually involves lifting it off its foundation and putting it on a trailer, which is driven slowly to another spot on the island. A 2,500-square-foot home can cost at least $100,000 to move, Cohen said. The bigger the house, the higher the price to move it.
It's much cheaper, however, to move a "free" house onto a property than to construct a new dwelling. Cohen said it cost about $800 a square foot to build a home on Nantucket, making the cost to build that 2,500-square-foot home from scratch about $2 million.
"When you live on an island, your resources are scarce," Cohen told Business Insider. "You reuse them."
House moves are so common in Nantucket that they hold up traffic
House moves in Nantucket have increased in popularity. About a decade ago, Nantucket issued only 19 permits for homes or units to be transported across the island, according to the Nantucket Current. In 2022, the report said, 91 permits were issued by October — and since many house moves happen later in the year, the annual figure was likely even higher.
"Free" houses can range in size from small cottages to megamansions, Cohen said, and some residents will even split houses into smaller parts and move them to new properties to serve as garages or pool houses.
The fire and police departments need to sign off on the permits to move a house, and road closures need to be issued for the 14-mile-long island, as the trailer carrying the home moves at a walking pace.
House moves occur in the fall, winter, and spring. In the summer they're halted because of the increased tourist traffic on the island.
But for year-rounders, the sight of a house being carted across the island is so common that it might just be part of their morning commute.
"If you get to work late and you tell your boss, 'Oh, there's a house move,' people just understand," Kuszpa said.
Some of the 'free' homes do good for the community
Cohen said buyers of the "free" homes fall into three main categories.
The first group is homeowners on Nantucket looking for a small property to turn into a rental for additional income.
The second pool, which Cohen said is larger, consists of individuals or young families who, through their families or other connections, already have land on the island but not enough wealth for a new-construction house.
The third category is housing nonprofits that take the homes as a donation — giving a tax break to the sellers — and turn the structures into affordable housing for the local workforce and low-income families.
"It's the cheapest way to create housing," Kuszpa said.
Kuszpa said the new homes are open only to families making less than 110% of the area's median income, which the census pegs at $135,590. Kuszpa said a typical beneficiary is a family of four making under $100,000, who'd then be able to rent a three-bedroom house for $2,500; the market rent for the same property would be $4,700.
Teachers, landscapers, cleaners, bank tellers, and other members of the Nantucket workforce have benefited from the program and are living in rental homes that were moved to new locations. Kuszpa said that over 600 families were on the waitlist.
Since 1994, Housing Nantucket has repurposed 39 "free" homes into income-capped rentals on the island.
The organization is preparing to move a 1,000-square-foot two-bedroom, two-bathroom home from a plot of land near the center of town, which new buyers purchased earlier this year for $5 million.
Kuszpa said the nonprofit was budgeting $400,000 to move the structure nearly 4 miles to the Atlantic Ocean coast of Nantucket, where it will get a new life as a home for a Nantucket family.
"When you're on an island, materials are just harder to come by," Kuszpa said. "It's about using what you have."
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