It’s a Google dock — and this one in Nantucket, Mass., cost $4.75 million.
The rare deepwater slip in the quaint harbor of a Massachusetts island was sold last month to an entity with ties to Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, and his wife, Wendy, a prominent Nantucket philanthropist.
That may seem like a lot for a place to dock a boat, but this is a beloved seaside town that has increasingly become a summer haven for the very rich.
And it’s one of just three deepwater slips — long enough to dock a 156-foot yacht — in the harbor at the edge of a picture-postcard old whaling wharf, according to the Boston Globe.
“You can see how demand would be quite high,” Jen Shalley, an agent with Nantucket-based Fisher Real Estate who brokered the deal, told the Globe. “It’s such a rarity. There were multiple interested parties.”
Nantucket County property records show that a 99-year lease on the dock was signed last month by a holding company that lists Schmidt’s family investment office in Palo Alto, Calif., as its manager. A spokesman declined to comment.
Wendy Schmidt has taken an increasingly prominent role in island life since she bought a house on Nantucket in 1999. She launched ReMain in 2007, and has spent millions to buy properties, including a popular bookstore that was in danger of closing. She led efforts to save the island’s theater and launched a culinary center last year.
She and her husband also have financed environmental and oceanographic research projects, including a massive vessel — the Falkor — that has partnered with marine researchers based in Woods Hole.
And in recent years, after spending summers on Nantucket, Wendy Schmidt has become an avid sailor in her own right, racing boats and designing Elfjie, a 152-foot luxury yacht built by the Dutch company Royal Huisman.
Schmidt sometimes would dock her boats on Old North Wharf under a lease agreement with its prior owner, according to people familiar with the harbor. Then the opportunity came up to purchase it.
The property was marketed quietly, Shalley said, with several interested buyers, though no bidding war broke out. She said the last deepwater slip that sold in Nantucket Harbor fetched $2.1 million in 2002.
