By Scott Hughes

hen DXD Capital broke ground on two self-storage projects in 2024, the optics were striking: one site in Kihei, on the Hawaiian island of Maui, and another on the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts—two islands on opposite sides of the country in the same year and two entirely different logistical universes, thousands of miles apart.

And yet, beneath the surface, these projects had more in common than one might guess. What united them was not just their island setting but the discipline, deep subcontractor relationships, and creative problem-solving that island development demands at every turn.

Kihei sits on the southwestern shore of Maui, Hawaii, a 727-square-mile island defined by its volcanic peaks, fragile ecosystem, and approximately 164,000 permanent residents. But those numbers only tell part of the story. During peak tourist season, the island hosts nearly 2.5 million visitors each year, with visitor numbers straining an infrastructure built for only a fraction of that demand.

Nantucket, by contrast, is a small island of nearly 50 square miles sitting 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod. For most of the year, it’s home to a quiet, year-round population of just 14,500 residents. From May to October, however, that number explodes. The population quadruples, reaching more than 65,000 on peak summer days, as a flood of seasonal residents and visitors transform the isolated island into a bustling, high-density destination.

Both islands are engines of seasonal tourism. Both are geographically isolated. Both require every nail, beam, and roll of insulation to be transported across open water. This logistical constraint is not just a footnote; it is the defining challenge of construction.

From the earliest stages, our team recognized that island construction is a much different animal than construction on the mainland. The typical playbook of identifying a contractor, getting bids, and awarding the work quickly breaks down when the local contractor base is finite, deeply networked, and in overwhelming demand. You cannot simply import a general contractor from the mainland and expect the same results.

During our initial due diligence, we made it a priority to walk the communities and meet with local contractors. Our primary focus was to understand the rhythms of each island. This meant understanding not only the seasonal ebb and flow of the population but also the deep-seated cultural currents that shape daily life and commerce. That time we spent on the ground, before a single dollar was committed, proved to be one of the most valuable investments we made. The relationships we developed with locally embedded contractors, vendors, and neighbors became foundational to the success of both projects.

Island contractors don’t just build. They manage logistics, anticipate delays, navigate local politics, and serve as the institutional knowledge for a market that can be opaque to outsiders. Finding those partners early and investing in those relationships genuinely set the tone for everything that followed.

On Maui, we learned that the workforce was already strained by new development, a situation dramatically compounded by the 2023 Lahaina wildfires. The truck drivers recruited to haul debris were the same drivers who previously operated concrete trucks. While the plants could produce all the concrete we needed, the shortage of drivers pushed our concrete-pour schedule from six weeks to six months. We were able to partially mitigate this by importing key labor from the mainland, but it was a powerful lesson in how interconnected an island economy can be. The upside was Maui’s pristine weather. We lost only three days to weather during the entire construction year.

Nantucket was the mirror opposite. Due to the astronomical cost of living, where new home builds start at $1,500 per square foot, most of the island’s workforce commutes daily by ferry from Cape Cod. The workday begins with 500 workers boarding a 6:10 a.m. ferry, arriving after 7 a.m., and navigating congested streets to their job sites. With the ferry home departing at 4:35 p.m., the effective workday is 75 percent to 80 percent of a mainland equivalent.

The weather is also a constant factor. Nicknamed the “Grey Lady” for its frequent fog, Nantucket required us to budget over 40 weather days to account for rain, wind, and the rough seas that cancel ferries for days at a time. The system is so challenging that one major off-island contractor found it more efficient and cost-effective to buy two turboprop airplanes and employ full-time pilots to fly his crews in and out each day rather than rely on the ferry service.

In Kihei, the supply chain is straightforward in concept, if demanding in execution. Virtually all materials arrive on cargo ships from the West Coast, a 2,400-mile Pacific crossing that takes three weeks plus port clearance. A mainland contractor might order materials two weeks out; in Kihei, we had to place orders two months in advance. A miscalculation doesn’t cause a few days’ delay; it can result in weeks’ worth of delay before opening.

If Kihei was a long-distance challenge, Nantucket was an intricate puzzle of history, regulation, and culture. Nantucket’s regulations forbid cargo ships, making the island’s sole lifeline the Steamship Authority’s fleet of 200-foot-long ferries, which make the two-hour journey carrying a mix of passengers, cars, and a limited number of tractor-trailers. This constraint transforms logistics into a high-stakes reservation game when ferry reservations open in late January each year. Every truckload of steel and every pallet of materials had to compete for a slot alongside tourists and residents. It’s a world away from the ports of Hawaii, where a single cargo ship can deliver 10,000 containers or more in a single trip. For Nantucket, our entire project had to arrive one truckload at a time.

For a personal trip this summer, I logged on at the moment that the year’s ferry reservations opened to the public on January 27th at 8 a.m. sharp and was placed 18,000th in the virtual queue. For a family, that’s an inconvenience. For a construction project, it’s a crisis.

In 2022, UPS famously failed to secure its priority ferry reservations for the summer, nearly crippling the island’s merchants. The message was clear: The ferry is not a convenience; it is the only supply chain.

Our path forward on Nantucket was shaped by one of those early, foundational relationships. Our waterproofing subcontractor introduced us to the owner of our neighboring parcel, who operates Cape Cod Express, the company handling 80 percent of all freight to and from the island. This introduction was transformational.

All our construction freight was routed to their staging facility in Wareham, Mass. When we needed a trailer, we gave them 24- to 48-hours’ notice, and the material arrived at our job site reliably and efficiently. This arrangement wasn’t just a convenience; it was a vital function that made the project’s economics work.

In Kihei, a similar story unfolded. Our success was cemented through an early investor who held an ownership stake in a large, union-affiliated site work company with deep roots in Hawaii. This partnership provided access to an invaluable network that would have taken us years to build independently. While we paid a premium for their union labor, the return on investment was immense. They connected us with local expeditors, building officials, and other key contacts based on relationships cultivated over two decades. Those introductions were instrumental in navigating the project to completion, not only on time but also under the initial budget we had established more than two years before breaking ground.

The Nantucket project required eight years from initial master planning to breaking ground, largely guided by the island’s Historic District Commission. The entire island is a National Historic Landmark, and the commission rightly ensures any new construction earns its place.

The result is a self-storage facility unlike any other in the country. The building features white cedar shingles, grooved red cedar siding, standing seam metal roofs, and multiple cupolas. It’s a piece of architecture that happens to store things, including a two-story deep basement. This contrasts sharply with the Kihei project, which is pragmatic and grounded, a well-executed, locally appropriate building that does its job without pretense.

The distance between Kihei and Nantucket, more than 5,000 miles as the crow flies, from one end of the country to the other, is misleading. In the ways that matter for a development company, these two projects share a common DNA:

• Both required us to understand markets that do not behave like the mainland.
• Both required us to build relationships before we built anything else.
• Both rewarded patience, local knowledge, and humility about what we did not know.
• Both reminded us that the most valuable assets a developer can bring to a difficult market are not capital or construction expertise; they are trust and relationships with the people who already belong to that place.

At DXD Capital, we expect our projects to reflect the markets in which they are built. That philosophy is more than aesthetic. It is operational. It is the reason we walked Nantucket’s cobblestones and Kihei’s shoreline before we ever opened a spreadsheet. The islands told us what they needed. We listened.