Homebuyers crazy $899K bet on a crumbling Nantucket cliff is still standing 5 years later
He asked the Atlantic for five years.So far, the Atlantic has kept its end of the bargain.Massachusetts car dealer Charles Fotopoulos and his wife, Miglena, snapped up 93 Baxter Road, a 1951 cottage clinging to the edge of Nantucket’s storied Sconset Bluff, for $899,000 in September 2021. On an island where eight-figure price tags barely raise an eyebrow, it was one of the rare deals that year to come in under seven figures.Five years later, the house is still up there.
Barely.Just a few feet of ground now separate the back of the home from a 40-foot plunge to the sand.When it was built, the ocean sat hundreds of yards away.
Over the decades, the retreating bluff has swallowed a string of the neighbors.The Fotopouloses, who run dealerships in Lowell and Westwood, went in with their eyes wide open.“It was cheap and I said ‘hey, I’ll buy it’,” Charles told the Nantucket Current back when the deal closed.“The foundation is structurally sound, and with the geotubes there, unless we have a killer storm, I think we’re safe.
A lot of people think I’m crazy, but if I get five years out of it, I think I’m good.I’ll take that any day.”From the living room, there is nothing to see but open water.“It’s both a great view, and a scary view,” he said.The sellers took a beating.
Steven and Erin Freeman paid $1.53 million for the place in 2007, when a comfortable 50 to 70 feet of land still stood between the house and the drop.They walked away roughly $631,000 poorer.Their broker, Jamie Howarth, said nobody was fooled.“They knew the risks going in,” Howarth said in 2021.
“I was clear with him and we were clear with him that there was serious risk.”The Freemans didn’t surrender quietly.In 2010 they hauled the house back toward Baxter Road, and in 2017 they took a DIY approach to shoring up the top of the bluff, work the island’s Conservation Commission never approved and slapped them with an enforcement order over.
The couple were also...