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Two Maine locations that offer larger-than-average homes at lower prices made Realtor.com’s top-10 list of U.S. zip codes garnering the most interest from homebuyers visiting its website this year.
The 04062 zip code covering most of Windham, a town of just over 18,000 residents on Sebago Lake in Cumberland County, ranked fifth. That is up from 15th last year, when the town was the only Maine location to crack the top 50. The 04210 zip code of Auburn, a city of just over 23,200 residents in Androscoggin County, ranked 10th. It made the list for the first time.
New England cities and towns dominated the top-10 zip code rankings, with Nashua, Derry and Hooksett, New Hampshire, at second, fourth and eighth, respectively. North Attleboro, Massachusetts, ranked ninth.
Brighton, New York, which is in the Rochester metropolitan area, ranked first, with Worthington, Ohio, at third; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at sixth; and Johnson City, Tennessee, at seventh, rounding out the top 10.
The real estate listing service ranked 42,000 zip codes by the number of unique visitors to each property on its website and how quickly homes sold from January to June. The list, released on Tuesday, is limited to one zip code per metropolitan area.
Auburn and Windham drew the most interest from homebuyers in the higher-priced Portland area.
The Nashua area tended to attract views from Boston homebuyers. The proportion of Boston buyers looking at Boston properties dropped almost 8 percentage points between 2021 and 2022.
Realtor.com said that while the hot zip codes are higher priced than their surrounding area, they still are less expensive than Boston and offer homebuyers a deal.
Rising prices and mortgage rates this year made affordability a top concern among homebuyers. The listing service said the common themes among the zip codes were “value for money” and “relative affordability” compared with nearby more expensive cities like Portland and Boston.
The median listing price across all of the top 10 zip codes reached $432,000 in June. That was 4 percent lower than the national median of $450,000. The median listing price in June in Windham was $505,000 and in Auburn, $267,000.
Millennials were a big part of home ownership in the top-10 zip codes, where 57 percent of millennials located in them owned homes compared with 51 percent nationwide. The millennials in those areas also tended to have higher incomes than their peers nationwide, boosting their buying power and letting more of them own homes.