Cape Cod's housing market ranks among the nation's most expensive, with a median home price near $600,000 and waterfront and exclusive-area homes often surpassing $1 million. Barnstable County is considering a 2% real-estate transfer fee on luxury-home sales above $2 million that could raise up to $56 million annually to fund affordable and year-round housing. The proposed surcharge aims to enable working families, seniors, and young people to afford living on Cape Cod. Homeownership on the Cape increasingly reflects affluent second-home buyers, pre-retirement couples, high-paid remote workers, and investors, while local workforce wages remain substantially lower.
Cape Cod is one of the most expensive housing markets in the U.S. While the median home price in the beachy region of Massachusetts is about $600,000, waterfront properties and homes in exclusive areas often exceed $1 million, according to Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Home Services. And luxury homes in the region might get even more costly as Cape Cod lawmakers consider a tax on wealthy homeowners.
Since housing is so expensive on the Cape, the majority of homeowners there include affluent second-home buyers, pre-retirement couples, high-paid remote and hybrid workers, and investors, according to Massachusetts-based real-estate firm Guthrie Shofield Group. "We've always been a place where the wealthy or affluent come to vacation and when they come to vacation, it's typically service-based employees and that workforce waiting on them," Alisa Magnotta, CEO of Hyannis, Mass.-based Housing Assistance, said in a statement.
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