The Nantucket Association of Real Estate Brokers announced this week that Edward J. Sanford, of Great Point Properties, is the NAREB Volunteer of the Year for 2025. This recognition is made annually by NAREB to honor a member who has given of their time and talent to the greater community in a meaningful way.

Edward Sanford of Great Point Properties, who has watched island real-estate trends for four decades, said the ceiling keeps rising as wealthy buyers not only purchase at these headline-grabbing price points but then pour tens of millions more into renovations and rebuilds.

In just its first few weeks, the program has provided over 50 bags full of food. Nourish Nantucket and Ramirez work with property managers from real-estate agencies like Great Point Properties and Columbus & Over Group, as well as homeowners, organizing the pickup of leftover groceries when vacationers leave.

On a frigid December morning, emergency work crews arrived at Sheep Pond Road in Nantucket at daybreak with an urgent mission: Stop a wood-shingle beach house from tumbling into the ocean. The land around the meandering road on the Massachusetts island’s south shore has ceded about 10 feet a year to the water for decades, claiming roughly half a dozen homes since the early 2000s. Now, erosion threatened to take another.

From a secluded family compound in North Chatham to Boylston Street penthouses, buyers paid top dollar for pretty spectacular properties. It’s expected that the Cape, Boston, and Nantucket would dominate the priciest sales list — some streets make more than one apparently — but Martha’s Vineyard, a playland for the rich and powerful, didn’t crack the top 10.

It has been nearly two decades since a year-round Nantucket resident won the Opera House Cup Regatta. Chris Magee, owner of the Zingara, was the last year-round winner back in 2005. Bill Liddle—with his 26-foot Alerion, Fortuna—hopes to break that two-decade drought after a third-place finish in 2023 has him heading into 2024 with plenty of momentum. “To win the Opera House Cup I would be ecstatic given the people I am racing against,” Liddle said. “I’m mostly familiar with the Alerion sailors, all of whom are really competent and highly skilled individuals who have been doing it for a while. To be able to actually beat all of them would be pretty fantastic.” Liddle moved to Nantucket as a teenager in the late 1970s and was quickly introduced to sailing by family friends Vladdy Kagan and Erica Wilson. They were passionate sailors, and it didn’t take long for that passion to rub off on Liddle. He said the idea of getting on a boat gives him the ultimate sense of freedom.

As Nantucket real estate agents, the No. 1 question we get asked is, “How is the market?”

The Nantucket real estate market is defined by conflicting socioeconomic, geopolitical and emotional influences. The news cycle that should impact the Nantucket real estate market continues to be menacing:

• Fickle equity markets.

• Rapidly rising interest rates.

• War in Ukraine.

• Constrained inventory.

Bill Liddle was interested in Alerions, the eye-catching 26-foot sloops with Nantucket roots, from the first time he stepped into a sailboat. “I always dreamed of owning an Alerion. I admired them. I bought mine from Alfie Sanford and he reminded me that I had been looking at them for about 40 years, which means I was looking at them when I was a teenager,” said Liddle, a co-chair of Nantucket Race Week, which is set to return to the island with five days of sailing competitions next week.

On a small stretch of Brant Point, one of Nantucket’s most iconic and exclusive areas, the neighborhood is in the midst of a $150 million facelift.