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The market shows signs of cooling, but home demand in Maine is still through the roof.
That’s why around 2,100 residential properties were sold in Maine in June, according to a Bangor Daily News analysis of property records. The trends reflect Maine’s current housing market and where it could be headed. Here they are.
$310,000 and 86
That first number was the statewide median sale price for a home last month, while the average was nearly $393,000. That average was raised by the number of expensive properties on the market — 86 of which sold at $1 million or more.
$1 to $14 million
That was the range of prices. One property each in Waldoboro and Kittery sold for that nominal amount. Then, a $13.7 million, 10-acre oceanfront property was sold in Camden.
The buyer was Betsy Sherman, who listed her home address as Miami Beach, Florida, and was recently profiled in The Wall Street Journal for listing the most expensive home in the Baltimore area. She is a Massachusetts native and the widow of George Sherman, the late executive at power tool manufacturer Black+Decker Inc.
The two $1 properties appeared to be family transactions. The Waldoboro property was a transfer from parents to a daughter and her husband, while records describe the Kittery one as a “deed between parent and child.”
40 percent
It is the share of Maine residential property purchases that happened in the Portland metro area, corresponding to the share of Maine’s population in that area at the 2020 census.
Cumberland County saw the most sales (480), followed by York (281), Penobscot (205), Androscoggin (172), Kennebec (165), Oxford (115), Aroostook and Hancock (95 each), Knox (68), Sagadahoc (65), Washington (64), Franklin (60), Lincoln (57), Waldo (56) Somerset (53) and Piscataquis (35).
The most popular cities to buy homes roughly corresponded to population. Portland had the most with 89 sales, Lewiston the second most with 49 and Bangor the third with 44.
Homes sold at each of those locations differed sharply in price. The median home in Portland was $510,000, in Lewiston $249,000 and in Bangor $218,000.
2,066
That was how many properties sold in Maine last month — around 69 per day.
Of those, 1,264 were rural, 521 were urban, 33 were apartments offering between two and four units, 33 were on lakes or ponds, 25 were oceanfront, 19 were mobile homes and six were on streams or rivers. Another 165 were classified as “other.”
239
It is the number of properties sold below $100,000. Even amid Maine’s red hot housing market, there are still a lot of very inexpensive homes in certain parts of the state.
Those were almost entirely in more rural sections of the state. Penobscot County (16 percent of all sales) and Aroostook (14 percent) made up the biggest chunk of them.
