A waterfront estate at 57 Hulbert Avenue on Nantucket has sold for $42.5 million, making it the most expensive home sale in the island's history. The deal, done off-market, blows past the previous record set by Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy when he bought a Nantucket compound for $42 million back in 2023.
The identity of the buyer has not been confirmed. Deed-related reporting from Nantucket Current names the purchasing entity as Stella Blue Waters LLC, but notes that the true identity of the new owner was not disclosed. Separately, Banker & Tradesman reports that Massachusetts corporation records list island lawyer David J. Buckley as the LLC's manager, though that does not establish who is actually behind the purchase, according to The Real Deal.
The property, known as Blue Waters, had been owned by the Fife family since 1972 and was never publicly listed before Thursday's closing, per Nantucket Current's reporting. The Fife family declined to comment on the sale, The Real Deal reports, and the listing agent, Jeanne Hicks of Lee Real Estate, along with buyer's agent Chandra Miller of Maury People Sotheby's International Realty, both declined to comment to the Wall Street Journal, according to the same report. The Real Deal also notes that Barbara Fife served as New York City's deputy mayor for planning and development from 1990 through 1993.
A Brant Point Landmark Changes Hands
The estate sits in Brant Point, a waterfront neighborhood adjacent to Nantucket Harbor known for the Brant Point Lighthouse, one of the island's most recognizable features, per The Real Deal. The main house, which dates to the 1930s, spans roughly 6,400 square feet with direct access to the beach and harbor, according to the outlet's reporting. Banker & Tradesman reports that the home was designed by an architect identified as William Edward Shepherd and completed in 1937, though other reporting has referred to the same designer as William Edgar Shepherd.
Accounts also diverge on how many bedrooms the house holds. Banker & Tradesman describes an eight-bedroom home with six bathrooms on a 0.62-acre lot, while The Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror cites town assessing records describing seven bedrooms, six bathrooms and a tennis court on the same lot. At $42.5 million for a roughly 6,400-square-foot home, the deal works out to about $6,641 per square foot, per The Real Deal.
Record Books and a Contested Massachusetts Ranking
The sale eclipses Portnoy's 2023 purchase of a Monomoy compound for $42 million, which had stood as the previous record for both Nantucket and Massachusetts, according to The Real Deal. Before Portnoy's deal, the statewide home-sale record stood at $38.1 million, the outlet reports.
Whether the Hulbert Avenue sale claims the all-time Massachusetts crown depends on how you count a different blockbuster deal. Nantucket Current describes the $42.5 million sale as the second-highest residential sale in Massachusetts history, behind a $43 million Martha's Vineyard transaction. Banker & Tradesman, however, describes the Nantucket sale as the most expensive single-home sale in the state's history, arguing that the Martha's Vineyard figure actually reflects two separate transactions to two different buyers rather than one deal.
That Martha's Vineyard sale closed in September, when Rippling chief executive Parker Conrad was revealed as the buyer of a $43 million estate in the Herring Creek Farm enclave of Edgartown, as reported by The Real Deal. The seller was Boston tech entrepreneur and investor Michael Bronner, who had originally listed the 31-acre property for $49 million. That estate includes a roughly 6,500-square-foot main house, a guesthouse and cottages, more than 2,500 square feet of private Atlantic Ocean frontage, and works out to about $6,615 per square foot.
A Tightening Island Market
The record-setting sale lands amid a cooling but increasingly pricey Nantucket market. Through June of this year, 89 homes sold on the island compared with 110 over the same stretch in 2025, a 19 percent drop, according to The Kalman Co. Even as sales volume slowed, the median home price climbed 11 percent to $3,675,000 over the same period, the firm's market report shows.
Total home-sale volume on the island reached $400.99 million through June, down just 4 percent from $418.87 million a year earlier, per the same report. Inventory has tightened sharply too, with Nantucket ending June with 167 properties on the market, down 32 percent from 245 a year prior. A separate listing with a $45 million asking price could eventually challenge the new record if it sells at that figure, according to the Cape Cod Times.
Local reporting from The Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror also notes a civic side effect of the blockbuster deal: the sale generated $850,000 for the Nantucket Land Bank through the town's 2 percent real estate transfer fee.
