Nantucket Was Ranked The Most Expensive Town In The U.S. Based On Flawed Data. It's Even More Expensive Than That.

An analysis by the online lending marketplace LendingTree found that Nantucket has the highest median home value of any town in the country. The analysis has been reported by major news outlets, including USA Today. But while Nantucket may have the priciest housing market of any small town in the United States, the data LendingTree used to draw that conclusion is almost certainly completely wrong.

LendingTree reported that the median home value on Nantucket is $1.6 million, far above the $1.2 million figure that secured second place for Vineyard Haven. But that $1.6 million figure is so far below the actual median value that some local real estate professionals couldn’t even venture a guess at how LendingTree managed to arrive at the number.

A LendingTree representative told the Current that the number was derived from “the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates. Specifically, we used the Census median home-value measure for the Nantucket micropolitan area.”

That figure is not even close to the number reported by other sources. Nantucket’s tax assessor’s office puts the median home value at about $2.7 million. That’s likely an underestimate, as the valuations used by the tax assessor tend to trail the market by a couple of years, and Nantucket real estate is only increasing in cost. Still, even that underestimate is over $1 million higher than LendingTree’s number. Separately, Zillow estimates the island’s median home value at a little over $3.1 million.

The median price of homes that are sold on-island is easier to pin down. Fisher Real Estate put the median sale price at $3.5 million last year. This number is probably skewed higher than the median value of a home on Nantucket, as homes that are sold are more likely to be renovated or constructed as vacation dwellings than homes that may have remained in the same family for decades or even generations. Similar figures have been reported by local and state government sources. Sales at $1.6 million or lower are considered rare.

The enormous discrepancy casts doubt on LendingTree’s entire analysis, which focused on towns with between 10,000 and 50,000 residents, and the Census Bureau figures it is based on.

Either way, the conclusion that Nantucket has one of the costliest housing markets in the country, even pricier than many of the nation’s most expensive large cities, is likely accurate.