When 5 Grant Avenue changed hands in late October for $35 million, the buyer's side also paid the Nantucket Islands Land Bank $700,000. The house overlooks Jetties Beach. It sold for $19.9 million in November 2022 and for $26.6 million in January 2024. Nantucket Current reported that its value rose 75 percent from the 2022 purchase in under four years.
The $700,000 matters as much as the $35 million, because it's a public record. Almost every paid sale on the island leaves one of these checks behind. Add them up month by month and you get a running count of what sold and for how much, with no brokerage filtering it. This year the count says something the online medians don't: Nantucket is recording far fewer sales, and each one carries a much bigger check.
The Check Every Buyer Writes
Under the Land Bank's enabling act, the fee is 2 percent of the purchase price. The purchaser pays it, and the purchaser must claim any exemption. So every taxable deed shows up in the Land Bank's books as a price.
The math checks out exactly. From January through September 2026, the Land Bank took in $19,766,479 on $987,628,944 of taxable transfers, which works out to 2.00 percent. The monthly table sits in the Land Bank's October 13, 2026 meeting packet, next to the same months of 2025. That side-by-side view is the most useful document a Nantucket buyer can read this fall.
Fewer Checks, Each One Larger
These are the Land Bank's calendar-year figures through September 30 of each year. The bottom row is simple division.
| Through September | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taxable transfers | 329 | 260 | -21.0% |
| Taxable gross value | $1,091,687,993 | $987,628,944 | -9.5% |
| Fee revenue | $21,826,760 | $19,766,479 | -9.4% |
| Average taxable transfer | about $3.32 million | about $3.80 million | about +14.5% |
The number of paid sales fell about twice as fast as the money behind them. When fewer transactions move almost as many dollars, the average check has to grow, and it grew by roughly half a million dollars per deed.
The summer months made the gap wider. Add up July, August and September and 2026 shows 115 taxable transfers, down from 151 in the same three months of 2025, a drop of about 24 percent. Taxable value for those months fell about 16 percent, from roughly $606 million to roughly $510 million. That pushed the average summer deed from about $4.0 million to about $4.4 million.
September 2026 was the busiest month of the year so far: 112 total transfers, 51 of them taxable, $249,169,115 in gross value and $4,755,041 in fees. Even so, it fell short of September 2025, when 68 taxable deeds paid $5,825,639.
What a Bigger Average Is Measuring
A higher average can come from two very different markets. In one, the same houses are selling for more. In the other, the cheaper houses have stopped selling, so the expensive ones make up more of the count. The Land Bank table can't separate the two, and the island's 2026 sales show both at work.
5 Grant Avenue is the first case: one property, sold three times in under four years, each time higher. 94 Main Street is the same story over a longer stretch. William Hadwen, a whale-oil merchant, built it in 1846, and Frederick Brown Coleman, the builder-architect behind the Atheneum, designed it. It sold for $4.7 million in 2014, and according to Nantucket Current's report on the sale, it changed hands this October for more than $15 million. The deed records the price as $15,250,000.
April 2026 is the second case. The Land Bank recorded just 16 taxable transfers that month, the fewest of the year, worth $33,604,500 in total. That's about $2.1 million per deed, in the same year when one sale on Grant Avenue was worth more than the whole month. A single sale of that size shifts an island-wide average in a way that no ordinary house in Surfside or Madaket can.
For a buyer comparing neighborhoods, this changes what an island median means. When the top end makes up more of the count, the median rises even if the house you're actually considering hasn't moved at all. Comparable sales from your own street and price range tell you more than the island headline does.
Most Deeds Aren't Sales
The Land Bank table has a second column that rarely makes the news. Through September 2026, Nantucket recorded 729 deed transfers, and 469 of them were exempt from the fee. That's about 64 percent, up from about 58 percent a year earlier, when 462 of 791 were exempt. Exempt transfers held steady and even edged up while paid sales fell by a fifth.
The act lists what qualifies. Exempt transfers include:
- gifts made without consideration
- certain transfers into and out of trusts
- transfers by operation of law, such as at death or in bankruptcy
- corrective deeds with no added consideration
- qualifying entity formations and liquidations
- property divisions in a divorce
- transfers to federal or state government, and qualifying charitable or religious transfers
- foreclosure and forbearance transfers to a mortgagee
These deeds show up in county records and in weekly transfer lists, but no buyer and seller agreed on a price in any of them. On Nantucket, most of the paperwork that moves property is families, trusts and entities rearranging who holds title. Count all recorded deeds and you'll badly overstate how many real sales are happening. Only the taxable column measures the market.
The Exemption That Grew in January
One exemption works directly on the purchase price. Starting January 1, 2026, the Land Bank's first-time homebuyer exemption covers the first $1.4 million of the price, up from $1.2 million. That raises the possible savings from $24,000 to $28,000, according to the Land Bank's notice on the increase. Under the statute, neither the purchaser nor their spouse can have previously owned an interest in real property anywhere. The purchaser must make the property their actual domicile within one year. A lien and recapture provision applies if the property is transferred within five years.
A separate exemption applies to property under a qualifying affordable-housing restriction with at least five years left to run. It isn't limited to first-time buyers and has no cap on the exempt amount, subject to occupancy and compliance conditions. This is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Your closing attorney can confirm whether an exemption applies to your purchase.
October Sets the Year's Comparison
October 2025 was the Land Bank's biggest month of last year, with 77 taxable transfers, $370,305,507 in taxable value and $7,406,110 in fees. The Land Bank's monthly table for October 2026 is still to come, and when it arrives, how far this October lands from that mark will shape the gap between the two years.
The weekly records from October already show part of the picture. Nantucket Current noted on October 8 that calendar-year sales had passed $1 billion, in a week led by an $11.25 million sale on Vestal Street. In the week of October 15 to 22, The Inquirer and Mirror reported $1,232,500 in Land Bank revenue and $22,136,005.44 for the year to date. Then came the week of October 22 to 29, which Nantucket Current's roundup shows was dominated by the top of the market:
- 5 Grant Avenue, $35,000,000, on 0.42 acres, assessed at $19,895,000
- 94 Main Street, $15,250,000, on 0.10 acres, assessed at $7,509,600
- 5 Pilgrim Road in the Cliff, $10,750,000, a 4,441-square-foot home with six bedrooms and seven baths, assessed at $8,229,300
- 57 Somerset Road near Hummock Pond, $7,400,000, a new build from Hanley Development, assessed at $2,053,500
Those four deeds total $68.4 million and $1,368,000 in fees, which is the bigger-check pattern again in a single week. The assessments also show how far a town valuation can trail a sale price. A finished new build like 57 Somerset Road sold for more than three times its assessed value. When a listing or a weekly roundup shows an assessment, read it as an old snapshot of the property, not a guide to what it will sell for.
If you want to know where a particular house sits in that ledger, Amy and Henry can pull the taxable sales from your street and price range and walk you through what they show. Start the conversation with Sanford & Sanford Real Estate and buy, sell, or rent with a family team that follows Nantucket's market one deed at a time.
