SPRING

Spring has sprung, seemingly overnight, and we are grateful. Daffodils, forsythia, sunshine that is actually warm and longer days are a hallmark of spring on Nantucket. Daffodil weekend is in a few weeks, the antique car parade is sold out and we look forward to seeing old and new friends alike on-island.

As our Annual Town Meeting is fast approaching on May 6th, the debate about vacation rentals continues to rage. It is unfortunate that so much of the information being circulated is false, causing confusion amongst voters. At last year’s ATM, voters established a work group to gather data, define issues and come up with proposed solutions. The Short Term Rental Work Group has met 10 times since October. It quickly became clear that there was an acute need for accurate data on the vacation rental market on Nantucket. The Nantucket Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB) voted unanimously to fund a study with a thirdparty consultant to evaluate data on vacation rentals. This is data that is only available through NAREB. We will be making the aggregated information available to the community in an effort to better inform the discussion. In the meantime, unsubstantiated information is flying around our community in the weeks leading up to ATM. We have the power, with our Town Meeting form of government, to determine our own future and each of us has a responsibility to become informed and to participate. Last year a contentious article passed by one vote.

The numbers are in for the first quarter of 2023, and it is no surprise that the number of transactions and dollars are down considerably from Q1 of 2022. Primarily driven by the low number of properties on the market, the number of sales are down 48% and the dollars represented by those sales are down 41%.

After the pandemic-driven years of 2020 and 2021, the market in 2022 performed very closely to 2019 in terms of the number of sales (485 in 2022 vs. 474 in 2019). However, it comes as no surprise that the dollars represented by these sales were up 64% in 2022 compared to 2019.

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