When Bill Sofield and his partner, Dennis Anderson, purchased their Maine lighthouse 25 years ago (on a whim—they were reading the Sunday New York Times real estate section over breakfast), it’s safe to say they had no idea what they were getting into. At the closing, which was the first time they’d set foot on the island, their lawyer whispered, “We have a way to get out of it. A loophole,” Anderson remembers. “We just looked at each other and said ‘but who ever gets to do something like this?’”