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A southern Maine village composed mostly of one of the state’s largest homeowners associations was the most competitive place to buy a home here in June.
Lake Arrowhead, which straddles the York County towns of Waterboro and Limerick, beat Falmouth, North Windham and Yarmouth as the most challenging place to buy a home in Maine last month, according to online real estate marketplace Redfin.
Redfin classified the village as most competitive because most homes get multiple offers, often with waived contingencies. The average home sale goes pending in five days of listing and offers are about 9 percent above list price. It came as home sales cooled in Maine, although prices continued to rise, according to Maine Association of Realtors data released Wednesday
Located about an hour’s drive west of Portland, the village of just more than 3,000 people is made up largely of the Lake Arrowhead Community, a homeowners association with 1,500 homes, two clubhouses, tennis courts and other amenities along the man-made lake. There are a few individual lots in the village, but most are in the subdivision, Michael Fitzpatrick, vice president of the association, said.
“In the past couple years people have been retiring and buying a house on the lake,” he said.
The association only gets school and bus services from Limerick and Waterboro, plus weekly trash pickup from Limerick. Otherwise, it runs itself like a town. It has nine employees to maintain the 51 miles of roadway through the development.
Fitzpatrick said part of the draw to the village may be the amount of house that money can buy. Lakefront properties generally carry a premium price, but those in Lake Arrowhead had a median sales price of $300,000 in June, according to Redfin. That is less than the statewide average of $360,825 in June and the York County average of $460,000 during the first three months of this year, according to the Realtors association.
The homeowners association surrounds the 779-acre Lake Arrowhead, known for its bass-fishing tournaments. For Jack Taylor, who has lived in the subdivision for six years and has been in the area around 20 years, the attraction is that Lake Arrowhead is quiet with few tourists.
Taylor, who owns his own real estate agency, is in the process of selling his home on the Limerick side of the association and moving to the other side of the lake, where he has bought 20 acres of land upon which he will build a new home.
“I love it here,” he said.
