Newbury Shares Plum Island's Zip Code. It Doesn't Share The Buyout Bill.
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
"In one respect, I've already grieved losing the cottage from all the storms."
That's Lee McLaughlin, describing the beachfront cottage on 75th Street where her family spent summers going back to the 1950s. Last October, after nearly three years of paperwork, the federal government paid her and her wife $1 million to walk away from it. The house was slated for demolition this past spring.
If you've been comparing Newbury real estate to other Seacoast towns, this story probably hasn't crossed your feed, because it ran under a Newburyport dateline. And that's the whole point. McLaughlin's cottage sat on the same eleven-mile barrier island that gives Newbury its most photographed real estate, just a short walk south of Newbury's own stretch of Plum Island. Same sandbar, same jetty, same storms. Different town hall entirely, and a different bill for who pays when the water wins.
Plum Island is not one town's beach. It's split among four municipalities, and the two that matter most for anyone shopping the Newbury side are Newbury and Newburyport. Newbury's slice includes Plum Island Center, the small commercial cluster on the Plum Island Turnpike where Bob Lobster has been selling lobster rolls out of a fish market since 2001. Newburyport's slice, a short drive north across the causeway, includes the oceanfront residential grid where the streets are numbered instead of named: Reservation Terrace, 73rd Street, 75th Street.
That second stretch, the Newburyport side, is where the erosion story has been unfolding in public for a decade. Residents and city staff have pointed to a jetty the Army Corps of Engineers built in 2014 as the trigger. Newburyport's own reporting put a number on it: the city has lost roughly 500 feet of sand since that jetty went in, concentrated in the Reservation Terrace neighborhood.
Newbury runs a separate accounting of its own erosion history, distinct from Newburyport's. The town maintains its own public page tracking past stabilization projects and emergency declarations on its portion of the island, independent of whatever Newburyport is doing a few blocks away. Two towns, two erosion files, one beach.
In February 2023, Newburyport filed an application with FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program to buy out three flood-damaged homes in Reservation Terrace, at 73rd and 75th Streets. The deal that closed with FEMA split the cost the way these federal buyouts typically do: the city covered 10 percent, a little under $400,000, and FEMA picked up the remaining 90 percent, roughly $3.6 million.
Only one of the three homeowners took the offer. McLaughlin did. Her former neighbor on 73rd Street, whose house had sand filling much of the first floor and sat condemned, turned down an offer of roughly $750,000, saying it was about half of what the home was worth. Two identical government offers, two very different answers, both rational depending on how each owner weighed a lump sum against a house they could no longer safely live in.
Here's what none of that has to do with Newbury the town. The buyout was a City of Newburyport line item, financed through Newburyport's free cash account and negotiated by Newburyport's city administration. If your search is centered on Newbury listings, this program isn't something you'd inherit, apply to, or be offered, even on a Plum Island address, unless the parcel actually sits inside Newburyport's boundary. The state's newer ResilientCoasts Initiative, launched in November 2025, is aimed at eventually organizing buyouts like this across more of the Massachusetts coast, but as of now it's still a voluntary framework being piloted town by town, not a blanket program that erases the line between Newbury and its neighbor.
Set the erosion story aside for a moment, because Newbury's own recent sales make a related point without any FEMA involvement at all. On August 27, 2026, a five-bedroom home on Rolfes Lane, the road that connects the Newbury Town Green to the Plum Island Turnpike, sold for $1,850,000. About five weeks earlier, on July 24, a four-bedroom on Newbury Neck Road, in the same 01951 zip code, sold for $580,000.
That's a spread of $1.27 million between two closings in the same town, inside the same zip, within a month of each other. Neither sale involved a damaged or condemned property. The difference is proximity: Rolfes Lane sits on the corridor toward the water and the marsh views that come with it, while Newbury Neck Road sits further inland. A single median price for "Newbury" in any given month is doing the impossible job of averaging those two very different products into one number, which is part of why the portals themselves can't agree. Redfin's trailing three months through April 2026 put Newbury's median sale price at $930,000. Homes.com's June 2026 snapshot put the median list price at $995,000. Movoto's May 2026 read put it at $1.05 million. None of those numbers is wrong. They're measuring a town where the low end and the high end of the same zip code sit worlds apart.
A Plum Island address under a Newbury or 01951 tag doesn't tell you which town's assessor, building department, or erosion file actually governs that parcel. Before you weigh a listing on the island, a few questions are worth asking directly rather than assuming the portal has already answered them:
None of this is a reason to avoid Plum Island. It's a reason to read a listing the way someone who actually works this island reads one, parcel by parcel, rather than trusting a townwide median to describe a beach that two different governments are managing two different ways.
Does a FEMA buyout on a Newburyport street affect the value of a nearby home in Newbury? Not through any formal mechanism, since the programs are administered separately by each town. In practice, appraisers and insurers working this stretch of coast do look at nearby damage and demolitions when assessing risk, regardless of which side of the town line they sit on.
How do I check if a specific Newbury address has any recorded erosion or buyout history? Start with Newbury's own erosion information page, which tracks the town's past stabilization projects and declarations directly. For anything closer to the Newburyport line, the city's public meeting records and FEMA's grant program filings are the primary source, not a portal's risk overlay.
Is Newbury's section of Plum Island less exposed to erosion than Newburyport's? The documented buyout activity and the roughly 500 feet of sand loss reported by Newburyport concern that city's oceanfront blocks specifically. That doesn't mean Newbury's stretch is risk-free, only that the two towns have different public records on the subject, which is exactly why checking the correct town's file matters more than checking the zip code.
If you're weighing a Plum Island property in Newbury, or trying to figure out what a listing's location actually means once you know which town holds it, that's the kind of question worth a real conversation rather than a portal average. Cheryl Grant works this stretch of the Seacoast address by address, and can walk through a specific parcel's history, jurisdiction, and pricing context before you make an offer. Reach out for a straight read on any address you're considering, or start with an instant home valuation to see where your own Newbury property sits in a market that a single median number was never built to explain.
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