It’s located along the Intracoastal Waterway overlooking an undeveloped stretch of Goat Island, and when finished it will encompass six bedrooms and more than 6,000 square feet of living space. It will have its own private dock, a pool with a spa and color-changing bubblers, and a covered patio with a fireplace. The Fox Creek Homes creation at 11 Tabby Lane is available for $11.5 million, placing it among the highest-priced residential listings on the Isle of Palms.
“The sunsets looking west off the dock are incredible,” said Clay Cunningham of Carolina One Real Estate, who is listing the home. “It’s basically at the end of a cul-de-sac, and it’s across from a part of Goat Island that won’t ever be developed. And you can take a golf cart three blocks to the ocean.”
As of late September, the Tabby Lane home was one of three single-family homes on the Isle of Palms listed for $10 million or more, topped by the $17.95 residence at 1 44th Ave. They’re part of a varied real estate picture on IOP that ranges from multi-million dollar homes to 1950s ranch houses to condos sometimes as small as a few hundred square feet. In almost every case, they’re attractive to buyers because of the amenities provided by Isle of Palms and nearby Charleston and Mount Pleasant, as well as the island’s openness to short-term rentals.
“Isle of Palms is still an island community, and the beaches are very accessible,” said Tricia Peterson, owner and broker in charge at Island House Real Estate. “But it’s also very golf cart-able, and a very active community with places like the Windjammer. The great restaurants of Sullivan’s Island and Isle of Palms are at your fingertips, and you’re 10 minutes from Mount Pleasant. You’re not driving down some remote road. You could live in New York, fly in, and be at your house in 30 minutes. It has the ease and convenience of being close to everything Charleston has to offer.”
Isle of Palms, no question, has plenty to offer in its own right — seven miles of beach, a tidy commercial area with institutions like the Windjammer live music venue and a variety of restaurants, two excellent public golf courses at Wild Dunes and an expansive community recreation center. But Isle of Palms is also far less remote than many of the other southeastern beach communities that it competes against for both visitors and prospective homebuyers.
Bald Head Island in North Carolina, for instance, is an hour and a half drive from Wilmington, N.C. It takes over an hour to get from The Sea Pines Resort on Hilton Head Island to downtown Savannah, and nearly that long to travel from Fernandina Beach in Florida to Jacksonville. There’s no city of any size close to Sea Island or Jekyll Island in Georgia. Meanwhile, you get can from the center of Isle of Palms to acclaimed downtown Charleston restaurants like FIG or Halls Chophouse in around 35 minutes.
“There are a lot of other beaches, but they don’t have Charleston right next to them,” Cunningham said. “Some of that beach traffic is driven by the city of Charleston. We have great restaurants, shopping, the arts — there are a lot of things that Charleston has to offer that a lot of other beach communities don’t have.”
‘Walk in, and start living’
Isle of Palms was developed in the years after World War II by J.C. Long, the founder of The Beach Company, and namesake of a boulevard that connects two of the island’s main thoroughfares. Once the domain of lower-cost ranch homes designed to appeal to returning military veterans, IOP, like many other barrier islands, was transformed in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo, when taller, newer homes constructed in adherence to modern coastal buildings codes began to spring up in the early 1990s.
The Isle of Palms of today has a median, year-to-date single-family home sale price of $2.8 million, according to the most recent figures available from the Charleston Trident Association of Realtors (CTAR). Within the greater Charleston area, only one submarket boasts a higher median sales price: neighboring Sullivan’s Island at $4.1 million. For townhomes and condos on IOP, the median sale price through August was $825,000, according to CTAR.
As of Sept. 18, there were 81 active properties on the market on all of Isle of Palms, said Vannessa Carter, an agent at Dunes Properties who specializes in island real estate. Of those, 56 were detached single-family homes and 25 were condos or townhomes. Isle of Palms had seen 82 home sales through August, and 57 townhome or condo closings over that same period, CTAR reported. Those figures encompass both IOP and Wild Dunes, which are considered separate entities from a real estate perspective.
“The homes that sold, almost consistently they were homes that had been fully renovated. They were turnkey —you walk in, and start living,” Carter said. “They had unique design features, they paid attention to outdoor living spaces. The houses that sit on the market are those that are not renovated and not up-to-date. It doesn’t seem to matter if the sellers are dropping the price per square foot, it’s almost like no one wants to take on that responsibility of improving the home. A lot them, because they don’t live here, can’t oversee the project.”
The average Isle of Palms buyer tends to be from outside the Charleston market, agents say, and is searching for a second home or investment property — perhaps with an eye toward someday living there full-time after retirement. Cunningham said he sees lots of potential IOP buyers from drivable markets like Greenville and Charlotte, but he’s also had a recent client looking to move up from hurricane-battered Florida. Peterson says she sees IOP clients from Ohio, New York and New Jersey, while Carter’s clients have spanned from Tennessee to Pennsylvania.
“You can cast a big bet over where our buyers are from,” Cunningham said. “But if you really look at it, I would say the core of our market would be Charlotte, Atlanta, those geographic areas that you can drive to in four to five hours.”
It’s a similar story on Wild Dunes at the island’s northeastern end. Zach Loftis, broker in charge at Wild Dunes Real Estate, says they typically see clients who reach the gated resort community from drivable markets, returning again and again and adjusting their real estate needs through various stages of life.
“When you have kids, you may come here first and stay at the hotel, just get a taste of it,” Loftis said. “Then your rental income is similar to your lifestyle. A lot of people start going to the beach by staying in a condo because it’s affordable, and then they grow into homes. And then I think people get attached to being in here, with the bike rentals and the tennis and just kind of the feel of it, and they’re like, ‘This is where we want to buy a house.’ You do have to go all the way down Palm Boulevard to get to us, and traffic can be tough on a Saturday or Sunday, but once you’re here, you’re home.”
Opening up the buyer pool
A recent client of Peterson’s, who bought a house on Cameron Boulevard on Isle of Palms, perhaps best exemplifies the IOP buyer. They were from outside the region, but wanted to a home to stay in during the six or eight times a year they came to visit their daughter who lives in Charleston. And the rest of the time, they wanted to make the home available as a short-term rental.
“Being able to do short-term rentals out of this house, it pays for the taxes and the insurance and kind of makes it more of a possibility,” Peterson said. “They’re not covering all their costs, but they know they have a place that will appreciate, and the rental income offsets some of the cost. They wouldn’t necessarily be able to do if they couldn’t do rentals out of it.”
Sullivan’s Island banned short-term rentals more than two decades ago, save the roughly 40 properties that were grandfathered in when the restriction went into effect. In January of 2023, Folly Beach capped the number of short-term rentals allowed on the island at 800. It’s a very different picture on Isle of Palms, where 40 percent of all dwellings held short-term rental licenses, according to the most recent information available on the city’s website.
It’s not a free-for-all; the Isle of Palms municipal code places limits on overnight occupancy, maximum occupancy, and the number of vehicles that can be allowed at any given short-term rental property. But of the 4,610 total dwellings on the island, according to the city, 1,850 of them held short-term rental licenses — and it’s likely that many of those owners wouldn’t have been able to buy the property without it.
“It opens up a little bit bigger buyer pool, “ Cunningham said. “If you’re looking for a nice investment opportunity like a five- or six-bedroom beach house, you can have that. If I’m looking for a second home or investment property, I can’t really rent it on Sullivan’s Island, and maybe not on Folly. Isle of Palms is the one that gives me that opportunity, which makes it fairly appealing from a value standpoint.”
Finding that property can still take some work, even though the Isle of Palms market is relatively balanced at the moment from a real estate perspective. The island’s median sales price of $2.8 million through August is up a whopping 36.6 percent from the same point in 2024, according to CTAR. And though condos may generally present a lower entry point, some can still run into the millions of dollars, and they come with their own set of pros and cons.
“We do have people who like the price point of a condo, but with that comes a lot of inflexibility as far as rental restrictions and potential assessments,” Peterson said. “And a lot of time, they’re small. There are a handful of one-bedrooms on the market at a great price point, but when you calculate all the fees and everything associated with them, they don’t make sense necessarily financially. You’re not really making money on it from a true investment standpoint, and it’s too small for a lot of people to use.”
The IOP condo buyer “is usually somebody just wanting to dip their toe into this lifestyle down here, or somebody who realistically knows they’re not going to be here as much as they’d like to,” Carter said. “When you want the single-family home, you have to have access to funds that allow you to pay people to take care of that for you.”
The sweet spot, Carter added, tends to be around 3,000 square feet and four bedrooms for between $3 and $4 million. And not just any home will do. Today’s IOP buyers are very discerning, even if they plan to rent the property. “People 100 percent want pools, they 100 percent want elevators,” Carter said. “Homes that don’t have the ability put an elevator in, and don’t have the ability to have a pool, are probably going to sell for way less per square foot than others on the island. It is imperative that you have an elevator and a pool.”
The Wild Dunes appeal
The buyer on Wild Dunes can be a little different than the Isle of Palms buyer in general — they’re looking for the resort amenities that the gated enclave offers, like its six swimming pools and golf facilities and expansive tennis center. Those with families may come to Wild Dunes for the summer, Loftis said, while retired couples or empty nesters from the Northeast may stay on the island from Thanksgiving through Easter.