Nantucket County

Nantucket's numbers tell a clear story before you run a single spreadsheet line. At a median home price of $3,171,979 and a cap rate of zero, this is not a cash-flow market, full stop. The cash-flow score is 0 out of 100, the affordability index is 0, and the investment estimate shows no positive carry at a 6.85% rate on a $634,396 down payment. What the market does offer is a 90 out of 100 appreciation score and 6.19% year-over-year home price growth, which is the entire thesis here. You are buying a store of value on a 14,065-person island with a fixed land supply, not a yield instrument.

The only investor this market suits is one who is explicitly buying appreciation and can underwrite the carry from outside income or equity elsewhere. A cash-flow buyer has no business here, the score of 0 says it plainly. A value-add operator faces the same ceiling: even if you renovate a property and push rents, the entry price at $3.17 million means the rent-to-price ratio cannot get to a level that services the debt. The appreciation buyer, however, has a defensible argument: 6.19% annual price growth on a $3.17 million asset is roughly $196,000 in paper gains per year, and the island's physical constraints on new supply are structural, not cyclical. That is the bet, and it is a pure equity play.

No economic anchors or employer data were provided for this county, so the demand-side picture comes down to what the numbers imply about the market's character: a population of 14,065 on an island accessible only by ferry or air, with a median home price nearly six times that of Plymouth County and more than eight times Worcester County. That scarcity is the economic anchor.

The carry costs deserve serious attention before you get too far into the appreciation story. At a 1.23% state-average effective tax rate, which is flagged as normal for Massachusetts and should be treated as an estimate since county and township rates will differ, the annual property tax on a $3.17 million asset comes to approximately $39,015. Add state-average insurance at 0.26%, or $8,247 annually, and you are looking at $3,939 per month in tax and insurance alone before mortgage, maintenance, management, or any other operating expense. That figure is not a rounding error; on a property at this price point it is the kind of line item that can quietly consume a rental income stream if the property is rented at all. Any underwrite should treat that $3,939 monthly number as a hard floor on your carry cost before debt service.

The risks here are specific and structural. Concentration is the dominant one: this is a single-island, single-economy market with 14,065 residents. Liquidity in a downturn is a legitimate concern. The buyer pool for a $3 million-plus island property is narrow nationally and essentially non-existent locally. Seasonal rental demand likely drives much of the rental market, which introduces income variability that a long-term hold analysis needs to account for, though vacancy data was not provided. Regulatory exposure in resort and island markets in Massachusetts also tends to be elevated around short-term rental permitting, though no specific local ordinance data was supplied.

Compared to its neighboring counties, Nantucket occupies a completely different investment category. Worcester County sits at a $481,357 median with a rent-to-price ratio of 0.0523 and an overall score of 53, Franklin County comes in at $355,663 with a 0.0604 ratio and scores 54, and Plymouth County, the closest geographically at $621,944, carries a 0.0528 ratio and scores 54. All five neighbors score higher or equal overall, all five have meaningful rent-to-price ratios, and all five are accessible to a conventional leveraged buy-and-hold strategy. If you need yield, you choose Franklin or Worcester and move on. You choose Nantucket over any of these neighbors only when your capital is already deployed in cash-flowing assets elsewhere, you have liquidity to carry a $3 million position through a slow period, and you want hard-asset appreciation exposure tied to a supply-constrained, high-income-demand location. It is a fundamentally different product from the rest of the Massachusetts market, and your decision framework should treat it that way.