2024
MID-YEAR REPORT
One BILLION is a lot of anything, and much has been made of how challenging it is to comprehend what it means. For example, 10 oranges fill a large bowl, 1 million oranges would fill a swimming pool, and 1 billion oranges would fill a stadium. A billion is a LOT, no matter how you measure it.
Amazingly, in the state of Maine, the volume of real estate sold in the first six months of 2024 was $3,384,796,712 - and that amount is over $1 billion more than the first six months of 2019, when 1,500 more houses were sold. The average price for homes sold in the first half of 2024 was $462k, while it was $264k in 2019.
Inflation seems a weak word for this rise; insanity may be better. But there is another word that starts with “i” that is a real driver of price, and that is inventory. The number of homes listed in the first half of 2019 was just over 15,000, a number which dropped by about 4,000 in 2024.
So it should not be too surprising that a recent listing in Freeport came on the market for $799,500 on a street with similar size and age homes. This home, owned by the original owners who bought it new in 2013 for $365k, is now under contract for over $925k. In 2019, similar homes on the street sold for about $470k. In other words, the appreciation totaled about $100k from 2013 to 2019, and then that number doubled from 2019 to now.
Bought new in 2013
Listed in June for $799,500 and Under Contract for over $925,000
By the Numbers
What immediately stands out in the breakdown of sales by county in southern Maine for the first half of 2024 compared to 2019 is the drop in sales in every county but Androscoggin. Even though the number of sales stayed similar, the number of new construction home sales tripled from 15 in 2019 to 47 in 2024. The likely driver is the difficulty of obtaining permits and other regulations that towns closer to Portland have enacted to limit construction.
New construction prices also factor into the price change in the town of Cumberland in the year over year chart to the right. Median home prices went down 18%, but the number of sales dropped 30% the first of 2024. Digging deeper, there were 5 sales of newly built homes in Cumberland that sold last spring at a median price of 1.3 million. This spring there have been 2 sales of new homes- one a 2 bedroom condo (sold for 620k), and the other a 2 bedroom home built on top of a garage that sold for 591k.
Median Price of a Home
