NANTUCKET, Mass. — On a winding road, down a white shell driveway, sits a rambling gray-shingled home with a view of the harbor, where beige lounge chairs ring an amoeba-shaped swimming pool and the living room is filled with pristinely white sofas, plumped, pillowed — ready for the next owners.

The 7,500-square-foot house has been on the market for a year with no takers. “We had some good offers,” said the owner, Paul C. Steinfurth, who runs a Miami real estate business and bought the house for $5.4 million in 2004. “Then Lehman happened and they put their hands in their pockets.”

So Mr. Steinfurth is resorting to a risky tactic new to the real estate market here: next Tuesday he’ll offer the house at an “absolute auction.” The highest bidder wins, no matter how low the bid.

The sale is testimony to just how drastically the market has turned and how severely the economy has hurt even the country’s most exclusive enclaves.

About 600 properties, or 6 percent of all those on the island, are for sale, but almost nothing is selling. “The damage is huge,” said Flint Ranney, a real estate broker on the island for 30 years and president of Denby Real Estate. “The market value of the real estate on the island was about $20 billion in 2008. Now it is about $14 billion. This is much worse than 1987. That decline came from the savings and loan crisis and it was more contained. This is the stock market and it affects everybody’s wealth.”    More from the NY Times……

   http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/business/08nantucket.html?_r=1&em