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.
The number of Maine homes for sale has rebounded significantly since the pandemic but still isn’t where it was a decade ago.
August marked the sixth consecutive month that the state’s active housing inventory rose, Jeff Harris, the 2025 president of the Maine Association of Realtors, said in a report of Maine’s real estate market released last month.
“The inventory level of homes for sale is building as more sellers enter the market — currently at the highest level since October of 2020,” said Harris, who is also a broker with Farmington-based Harris Real Estate.
More supply to meet the high demand that Maine has seen since the onset of the pandemic could lead to lower prices and a slightly more relaxed real estate market. This would come as a welcome relief to prospective buyers who may have been scared off by the pandemic-era real estate frenzy. At that time, availability was limited and homes were on the market for only a few days before being scooped up, likely for more than the asking price.
At the end of September, Maine Listings counted more than 5,400 homes for sale across the state, nearly 2,200 of which were new listings. This is the first time since late 2019 that the state’s housing inventory exceeded 5,400 before the pandemic reached Maine in March 2020, causing the number of available properties to plummet, Maine Listings data show.
Other national companies that display online listings believe the state’s inventory of available properties is much larger than Maine Listings’ records.
Zillow reported that Maine had more than 6,800 homes for sale as of Sept. 30 with an average asking price of nearly $437,300. Redfin, however, reported that the number of homes available for sale across the state exceeded 9,100 as of last month.
All of that data puts the state’s housing inventory far above where it was in the midst of the pandemic, when buyers had fewer than 1,500 single-family homes for sale to choose from, Chris Lynch, president and owner of Legacy Properties Sotheby’s International Realty, said in the company’s September 2025 real estate spotlight.
But, despite the jump in availability, Maine’s active inventory is still only 30 percent of where it was a decade ago when buyers had some 15,000 homes to choose from, according to Lynch.
“If you remember that period, things were going along at a steady pace with both buyers and sellers feeling like there was a strong, constructive dialogue on the value of a home and the terms and conditions that would result in a sale,” Lynch wrote.
Lynch also predicted that the number of homes for sale isn’t going to rise significantly in the coming months because new construction hasn’t kept pace with local demand.
Additionally many homeowners who are locked into low interest rates are reluctant to sell now, as interest rates still hover at slightly more than 6%, Lynch said.
