In the Hamptons, $20 million no longer necessarily buys you the Atlantic Ocean.

For decades, the rule of thumb in Hamptons real estate was simple. If you wanted to spend big, you bought on the beach. But that math is starting to change.

A rarefied group of deep-pocketed buyers is increasingly shelling out oceanfront-level money for estates farther inland, trading direct access to the surf for something even harder to find on the East End these days: space.

The emerging shift is showing up north of the highway, on bays and across sprawling interior parcels where buyers can get the privacy, acreage and elaborate amenities that have become increasingly difficult to create along the heavily regulated coastline.

“We’re seeing numbers in the $20 million range north of the highway,” Douglas Elliman broker Kyle Rosko told The Post. 

Exhibit A is 29 Wills Point Road in Montauk. The brand-new seven-bedroom bayfront spec mansion is roughly 10,000 square feet. It sold this month for its full $23 million asking price after landing a buyer just three days after hitting the market in July. Public listing records show the deal closed Sept. 7.

The sale set a new high-water mark for a non-oceanfront Montauk home, according to Rosko, who represented the listing.

“The demand for that is higher than ever … people want that space,” he added. “And if they can accomplish that space, they’re willing to go away from the ocean and away from south of the highway.”

And he would know. Rosko said he also handled the previous $17 million record last year at 18 Maple St., after earlier setting the benchmark at $14 million.

The jump is especially striking because $23 million was oceanfront territory in Montauk as recently as last year.

For perspective, Rosko said he closed three Montauk oceanfront deals over the past year, and every one of them went for less.

But 29 Wills Point isn’t exactly a consolation prize for someone who couldn’t land a house on the ocean.

Set on 1.6 acres overlooking Fort Pond Bay in Culloden Point, Italian architect Piero Lissoni designed the house. It has glass walls running floor to ceiling and a courtyard built around a mature Japanese maple. Outside there’s a rooftop lounge, a 56-foot infinity pool and a private path down to the bay.

So why pay beachfront money for a bay view? It comes down to space, and the rules that govern it.

In late 2024, East Hampton Town, which includes Montauk, cut the maximum size of a single-family home in half, from 20,000 square feet to 10,000. A separate formula now caps how much can be built based on lot size. Oceanfront parcels also face an extra gauntlet of FEMA and coastal regulations.

Rosko said Wills Point was permitted before the tougher limits took hold, and that a house like it could not realistically rise on the ocean today.

“It’s pretty much impossible to amass a piece of oceanfront property that would allow for this type of house to be built,” he said.

The bigger story, Rosko said, is what the property’s record price says about what ultra-rich buyers now value.

Buyers with a wish list that runs to barns and tennis and padel courts rarely find the acreage on the sand. Instead, they are heading inland, where bigger parcels still exist.

“There’s only so much land left,” Rosko said.

“A one-of-one location isn’t always the ocean,” Rosko said. “A one-of-one location can be in a setting that gives you a view and a vista that’s incredibly unique and very powerful.”

Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of appraisal firm Miller Samuel, said the shift remains relatively new.

“Over the last five years, sales at or above $20 million were largely those with ocean front views. Beginning last year, we began to see a few $20 million or higher sales north of the highway,” Miller told The Post.

He attributed the change partly to tight supply at the top of the market and strong Wall Street compensation, while cautioning that ultra-luxury sales can swing significantly from year to year depending on which properties become available.

He also agreed the town’s size crackdown is sending buyers elsewhere.

“The limits on home size construction force a growing number of buyers to look for alternative locations to create a house the size they want, and that seems to be north of the highway,” Miller said. “Teardowns in the East End almost always result in a new home that is substantially larger than the original.”

Rosko has more on deck. He is preparing to list a $27.5 million spec mansion north of the highway, and said a couple of nearby homes recently went into contract above $20 million.

Still, nobody should write off the beach.

Miller cautioned that the inland megadeals are “still a very small niche of the super luxury market, in the very early stages of evolving.”

“Oceanfront pricing continues to expand faster,” he said.

Scarcity is doing the heavy lifting there. Owners rarely build on the ocean on spec, so few homes come up, and the ones that do fetch staggering sums. Earlier this year, a contemporary oceanfront home on Beach Lane in Wainscott changed hands off-market for $59 million, up from $45 million in 2021.

Rosko is quietly shopping a 10,000-square-foot Montauk oceanfront estate for $60 million, a figure that would set a record for the hamlet.

He added that some off-market oceanfront asking prices across the Hamptons have climbed north of $275 million. As for why so many of these trophies never hit the open market, “It really has to do with privacy,” he said.

Demand isn’t cooling with the weather either. Rosko said he got seven or eight requests to tour oceanfront homes in his portfolio in a single recent weekend.

“That’s a lot of requests for oceanfront, especially when it is not the summer season,” he said.

In other words, the richest buyers aren’t being priced out of the beach. Many of them just want more house than the beach will allow.