EASTHAM — For more than 100 years, five generations of Collinses have cared for a collection of six rental cottages along with a main house built along the shore of Town Cove. Simple and small, they were the kind of old-fashioned vacation rentals that attracted city families to Eastham for a summer week or two. The Collins Cove Cottages are recognized in the town’s historical inventory and were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.
On Feb. 24, the Collins family sold the property, located just beyond the Eastham-Orleans rotary, for $3.25 million to a limited liability company called 150 Old State Highway Cottages, whose manager is Brewster businessman Gary Vecchione.
Vecchione plans to convert the seasonal cottages into year-round condominiums, priced from about $875,000 to $1 million. Each will also have a boat slip. The project is secured by a $3.95-million loan from 1845 Blue Sky, another limited liability company, based in Texas.
A Difficult Negotiation
The deal did not come together easily. Vecchione first made an offer for $3.25 million on the 2.7-acre property in July 2024 as a trustee of Coopertown Realty Trust. Owners Thomas and Glenn Collins and Lynn (Collins) Francis accepted the offer in writing.
At the time, the property had been on the market since April 2023 with an initial asking price of $4,999,000. That August, the family dropped the price to $4.5 million; in March 2024, they further reduced it to $3,995,000.
Soon after the offer was accepted, though, negotiations came to a halt. When Vecchione tried to move forward by sending a check for $140,000 to accompany a signed purchase-and-sale agreement, the Collinses didn’t cash it. Then, last August, Vecchione filed a court complaint, citing the Collinses as defendants along with two real estate brokers involved in the prospective sale. He sought a jury trial and $5 million in damages for failure to move forward with the deal.
Meanwhile, Vecchione was marketing the would-be condominiums on social media as if he were already the owner.
Attorney Bruce Bierhans, representing the Collinses, argued that the purchase offer stipulated it must be both reviewed by an attorney and signed by the property owner. In December, Bierhans told the Independent that there would be no further negotiations until Vecchione stopped marketing the condos as if he owned them.
A truce was apparently negotiated by Bierhans and attorney Anthony Panebianco, representing Coopertown Realty Trust and Vecchione, and the court case was dismissed with the agreement of both sides.
Still, friction between buyer and sellers continued after the sale, with Vecchione complaining on social media that the Collinses had “unscrewed” a historic weathervane from the oyster shack on the property and taken it with them, and Bierhans countering that the sale had included a provision that allowed the family to take the weathervane. Vecchione then posted an apology to the Collins family and Bierhans for “misreading the situation.”
On March 1, the Collinses removed the last of their possessions from the property, accompanied by police. The police presence had been at the Collins family’s request, said Glenn Collins.
Goodbye, Cesspools
During a Feb. 28 tour of the property, Vecchione said three houses are already spoken for and that he plans to buy two of them — he said he’ll use one and his ex-wife will use the other. Four of the seven cottages remain available.
They’ll be on a new innovative alternative septic system, whose design has already been approved by the town, Vecchione said. Currently, the cottages have cesspools, which will be emptied and removed.
Making the cottages, which up until now have been limited to seasonal use, year-round will require a special permit from the town’s zoning board. Vecchione said that in exchange he plans to add deed restrictions to the condos to prevent them from being used as short-term rental properties. A handful are already equipped with heating systems, and heat will be added to the others, but aside from that and minor interior repairs and some paint, the cottages will essentially be offered in their current state, Vecchione said.
He has apparently put the bitterness of the dealmaking behind him: “The Collins family has a legacy going back 100 years,” he said. “I just want to honor it.”
The End of An Era
The Collins family’s ties to the property go back to 1906, when Lewis Collins bought it. He and his son built the rental cottages in the late 1920s. Lynn Francis, one of the present generation, called the yearly visitors who rented by the week “our extended Collins family” in a phone interview on March 2. “We have taken care of it with love and determination and pride,” she said.
A small building near the docks has historically housed a family shellfish business, and the last remnant of continued presence of the family in that area of Town Cove is an active oyster grant belonging to Cameron Collins. “He has the right to the shellfish grants that are near the property,” his father, Glenn Collins, said on March 2. “The management of those shellfish grants is through the bylaws of the town. The upland property has no control over the shellfish grants that are in the water.”
Lynn said Cameron is currently growing oysters. “Its previous use was by my grandfather and my father,” she said. “They mostly propagated quahogs back in the day.”
The family announced the transfer of the property as “the end of an era” on the website they have used in recent years to rent the Collins Cove cottages.
