Maine’s housing market is stuck and there’s no sign of it getting better

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Housing
This section of the BDN aims to help readers understand Maine’s housing crisis, the volatile real estate market and the public policy behind them. Read more Housing coverage here.

Spring is typically when Maine’s real estate market explodes with new inventory and home sales. But that hasn’t happened this year, or for the last several.

Maine’s housing inventory has seen a small boost this spring, but real estate agents across the state report the number of homes changing hands and their selling prices have remained flat.

“Unless there’s a significant, unexpected economic downturn, prices are going to remain stable,” said Julie Williams, broker, owner and CEO of Bangor-based ERA Dawson-Bradford Co. Realtors. “Even if they went down by 4% or 5% it’s not going to eliminate the 50% increase in value that we saw in 2020.”

The pandemic is years in the past but the historically high housing prices it brought haven’t come down, which keeps many families stuck in homes that don’t match their needs or priced out of the market altogether. Real estate agents predict prices will stay stuck unless interest rates drop or inventory suddenly swells.

Maine had 3,426 single family homes on the market as of Thursday, according to Chris Lynch, president of Legacy Properties Sotheby’s International Realty in Portland. While that’s significantly more than the roughly 1,500 homes that were for sale in Maine during the height of the pandemic, it’s still considered low inventory.

“We’ve come a long way, but those are still incredibly small numbers,” Lynch said. “Going back to 2016, 2017 or 2018 around this time of year, we would probably have 14,000” properties on the market.

New houses are entering the market every day, but most are getting scooped up within a few weeks, Lynch said.

“New inventory is picking up but it’s not exploding, we still have more buyers than we do sellers, and it’s hard to see that dynamic changing any time in the foreseeable future,” Lynch said. “That makes it hard for prices to go down very much.”

This dynamic, which usually favors sellers, isn’t new, Lynch said. In fact, this has been the case in the local real estate market for the last few years, especially in southern Maine.

Statewide, Maine saw the exact same number of property sales — 851 — in March 2026 and 2025, according to data from the Maine Association of Realtors. Those homes also had the same median sales price of $375,000.

“That’s the ultimate definition of a flat market,” Lynch said. “We’re flat, but at all time highs for Maine real estate. We’re bumping along the top.”

Median home prices dipped slightly in roughly half of Maine’s 16 counties in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the same time last year, according to the most recent data from the Maine Association of Realtors.

For the counties that saw prices go up, most shifted by $10,000 or less. Piscataquis County saw the highest uptick to its median home price at $44,000, according to the data.

Despite the steady prices and low inventory, Williams is now seeing buyers be more discerning when they shop for a home. That means a home priced too high likely won’t sell quickly, and more buyers are getting inspections and negotiating costs. This creates a more balanced market, especially in central, western and northern Maine.

“During the pandemic, it didn’t matter what price your property was, it was going to sell like hotcakes and have multiple offers,” Williams said.

Judy Oberg, Maine Association of Realtors president and realtor at Bridgton-based Oberg Insurance & Real Estate, said interest rates sticking above 6% is likely keeping inventory low.

For example, if someone retires and wants to downsize but doesn’t want to take on a 30-year loan with a high interest rate, that keeps them in place, meaning another family can’t buy their home.

Late last year, many realtors hoped interest rates would fall to around 5% by spring 2026, but that didn’t happen, Oberg said.

“Everybody wants the anomaly of 2% or 3%, but I don’t feel that’s going to come back any time soon,” Oberg said. “It used to be that anything near 5% was considered a great rate.”

Despite this, Oberg reported seeing a more “traditional market” in western Maine. This means more properties, especially seasonal camps, are hitting the market and going under contract.

“We’re trending in the cycle that we’re used to,” Oberg said. “We continue to have an active market with buyers and sellers. We’re holding our own.”

More articles from the BDN

Kathleen O'Brien

Kathleen O'Brien is a reporter covering the Bangor area. Born and raised in Portland, she joined the Bangor Daily News in 2022 after working as a Bath-area reporter at The Times Record. She graduated from... More by Kathleen O'Brien

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