The Real Reason Caswell Beach Costs More Per Square Foot Than Oak Island

Pull up listings in Caswell Beach and Oak Island side by side and a strange pattern shows up fast. The Caswell Beach houses are smaller. The Caswell Beach prices are higher. Earlier this year, listing data tracked by a regional MLS aggregator put Caswell Beach's average price per square foot at $726.66, against $499.51 on Oak Island proper. Caswell Beach's average home size ran 1,611 square feet, well under the Brunswick County average of 2,045.

That gap isn't a quality story. Caswell Beach homes aren't built with better materials or finished to a higher standard than the rest of the island. The gap is a supply story, and the supply problem has a specific, findable cause: a large share of Caswell Beach's land left the residential market permanently in 1949 and never came back.

The Houses Are Smaller. That's the Clue, Not the Contradiction.

Most buyers assume price per square foot tracks with home size. Bigger houses cost more per foot because of finish level, view premiums, or lot size. Caswell Beach breaks that assumption. Its homes run smaller than the county average, yet its per-square-foot price sits roughly 45 percent above Oak Island's. When price and size move in opposite directions like that, the explanation almost always sits outside the house itself. In Caswell Beach it sits in how little of the town's land was ever available to build on in the first place.

Two Hundred Fifty Acres That Never Reached a For Sale Sign

Caswell Beach sits on the eastern tip of Oak Island, and a meaningful chunk of that tip belongs to the North Carolina Baptist Assembly, the retreat operated by the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina on the former grounds of Fort Caswell. The fort itself was built between 1826 and 1836 to guard the mouth of the Cape Fear River, occupied by the Army, then the Navy, until the U.S. government sold the reservation to the Baptist State Convention in 1949. The property runs to roughly 250 acres today, down from an original reservation of about 2,200, and it still operates as a working retreat and conference center that can house more than a thousand guests at a time in facilities like Hatch Auditorium and the Smith Conference Center. Part of the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013 as the Fort Caswell Historic District. Public access is limited to whatever the Assembly's director allows.

None of that acreage shows up as inventory. It can't be subdivided, listed, or sold lot by lot the way ordinary residential land can. For a town as small as Caswell Beach, removing that much land from the pool of what's buildable does more to the math than any single upgrade or ocean view could. Scarcity, not craftsmanship, is doing most of the work on that price-per-square-foot number.

A Second Town Hall Buyers Don't Always Notice

Caswell Beach is also its own incorporated municipality, separate from the Town of Oak Island next door, and it's marking its 50th anniversary in 2026. It runs its own Board of Commissioners and its own five-member Planning Board, with its own code of ordinances governing land use inside town limits. That's not a technicality. It means zoning decisions on the eastern tip of the island get made by a different body, on a different timeline, than decisions covering the rest of Oak Island.

The town's scale keeps its civic agenda close to home. In April 2026, commissioner Melissa Alford announced she was resigning her seat to move overseas, keeping her Caswell Beach house while she and her family settled in Italy. Around the same meeting, commissioners were negotiating with Verizon over where to place four cellular nodes along Caswell Beach Road, weighing whether to consolidate them into a single tower in the public parking lot instead. In a town this size, a cell tower siting decision and a single commissioner's move abroad both become front-page business. That's what a genuinely small, low-turnover town looks like from the inside, and it's part of what a buyer is paying for when the price per square foot runs high.

What Turns Up When So Little Land Turns Over

The thinness of the market shows up in the listings themselves. Recent tracking of the Caswell Beach neighborhood found only a handful of homes with three or more bedrooms on the market at any given time, with a median list price around $1,790,000 earlier this year. Days on market varied wildly between individual properties, with some homes moving in under four months and others sitting for well over a year, a spread that's typical of a market with too few comparable sales to smooth out the pricing.

The Ocean Greens Condominiums illustrate the same pattern at a smaller scale. It's an exclusive 28-unit community built in 2001, sitting immediately adjacent to Oak Island Golf Club, and units there seldom come to market. When one does, it tends to draw attention precisely because it's rare, not because that particular building is meaningfully different from other coastal condo stock nearby.

Here's how the two towns compared on the numbers pulled earlier this year:

These figures are a snapshot from earlier in 2026, not a live feed, and both towns' markets move month to month. The direction of the gap, though, tracks with something structural rather than seasonal: one town has a meaningfully larger, permanently non-residential landholding sitting inside its borders than the other does.

What This Means If You're Comparing the Two Towns

Buyers cross-shopping Oak Island and Caswell Beach are often treating them as one continuous market with a price gradient based on distance from the beach or age of construction. The two towns are adjacent, share a barrier island, and even share some infrastructure. But they are not one market. Oak Island has room to add inventory as older homes turn over or lots get redeveloped. Caswell Beach doesn't have that same room, because so much of its land was locked into institutional use decades before either town's current housing stock existed.

That distinction matters most for anyone weighing a premium purchase in Caswell Beach against a comparable Oak Island property. The higher price per square foot isn't buying a bigger house, a better build, or necessarily a better view. It's buying into a supply-capped micro-market where new listings are rare enough that each one gets bid on its own terms, largely disconnected from what similar square footage costs a few minutes away on the rest of the island.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will any part of the Fort Caswell property ever be developed or sold for housing? There's no indication of that. The land has been owned outright by the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina since 1949, it operates as an active retreat and conference center today, and part of the site carries historic district protection through its 2013 National Register listing. Access is controlled by the Assembly's director, not by the town's planning process.

Is Caswell Beach governed by the Town of Oak Island? No. Caswell Beach is a separately incorporated municipality with its own Board of Commissioners and its own Planning Board, distinct from Oak Island's town government, even though the two communities sit on the same island and share a stretch of coastline.

If you're weighing Caswell Beach against Oak Island, or trying to figure out what a specific address is actually worth once you account for how little land like it ever comes up, that's the kind of question worth working through with someone who tracks this stretch of coast closely. Better Beach Sales has spent years watching how these two adjacent markets behave differently, and can walk you through what a given property's price is really telling you before you make an offer.