We’re Realtors who see the damage every day. A transfer fee won’t hurt home sales, and it will help provide housing.
Combined, we have more than 60 years of real estate experience on Martha’s Vineyard, and we share a deep concern that skyrocketing home prices are threatening the economy and the quality of life on the islands we all cherish.
As people who make our livings through the buying and selling of property, we believe the best path forward in this crisis is the adoption of a modest transfer fee on high-end real estate transactions. The money can then be used in creative ways to preserve and build housing that will be affordable to retail and restaurant workers, carpenters, nurses, teachers, firefighters, artists — in other words, to the people who make up a community, and who are being priced out of the islands and most of Cape Cod.
Repeatedly the islands have joined with communities like Provincetown, Chatham, and Wellfleet in asking the legislature to provide us this crucial tool to keep working- and middle-class families in our communities, to provide homes for young people who want to move here, and to older residents who want to stay where they have roots.
Our legislative delegation has worked tirelessly for the transfer fee. Gov. Healey has joined us in that work, as have medical, public safety, business, and nonprofit leaders from across the Cape and islands. But with only weeks left in the legislative year, once again, real estate lobbying organizations are pushing the House and Senate to kill the transfer fee and not allow Cape and Islands leaders to determine the best path for their own economies.
Lobbyists and legislative leaders need to look carefully at a recent University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute study proving convincingly that our businesses and economy are suffering badly from the dearth of affordable places to live, and that transfer fees work — without hurting the volume or prices of real estate transactions.
UMass researchers interviewed hundreds of small business owners on both Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard to assess what we have long felt instinctually and heard anecdotally: Small businesses and the economy on the islands — and the UMass report includes other Cape communities in its conclusion — are suffering from a lack of workers caused by already extraordinarily high housing prices that have exploded in the past five years.
According to the UMass study, median single-family home prices on the islands are the highest in the state: $1.4 million on Martha’s Vineyard and $3.7 million for Nantucket. Who now can buy a home on Nantucket? A family with a household income of $800,000.
With more than half of those homes on each island vacant in winter, the stress on businesses dependent on a robust summer economy is, frankly, devastating.
More than half of island employers report losing workers, having job offers declined, and being forced to raise wages because the people who want to work here cannot afford to live here. Employers reported shrinking hours of operation, closing early, putting up workers in their homes, and seeing workers who want to stay forced to leave. The report shows in exhaustive detail what a transfer fee could do to alleviate this drain on small business dollars.
A reasonable transfer fee set by each island would raise $10 million annually on Martha’s Vineyard from a 2 percent fee on the portion of a transaction above $1 million, and $3.3 million on Nantucket on a 0.5 percent fee on the portion of a transaction over $2 million.
Those dollars would be used to acquire and reuse properties; to construct affordable worker housing; to preserve low-cost housing at affordable rents and sale prices; and to help locals lease units year-round.
Would this work? It does work.
Four communities in the Hamptons facing exactly the pressures confronting Cape and island towns adopted transfer fees very similar to those proposed on the islands.
“Sales volumes in the towns implementing the additional transfer fee for housing remained steady and consistent, with no discernible difference from volumes in the neighboring towns,” the UMass study concluded.
The best part? Those fees not only didn’t harm Hamptons sales or prices: They raised $15 million for housing in the first half of the first year they were implemented, 2024.
We know the island real estate business, understand the market, and strongly support a real estate transfer fee to help the communities we call home. The crisis is now. The legislature needs to act.
Jim Feiner is the principal broker for Feiner Real Estate, who served 25 years on the Chilmark housing committee. Candace daRosa is a 13th-generation Vineyard resident who worked for more than 30 years as a Realtor, and now works as a broker with a non-Realtor-affiliated office in part because of the Massachusetts Realtors Association’s opposition to transfer fees.
