A house in Maine used to be the cheap alternative. Now a stretch of its coastline is trading at prices that would not look out of place on Long Island’s East End, and the reason is simple: the buyers are the same people. They are coming from Boston and Manhattan, they are paying cash, and there is very little on the market for them to fight over.

The arithmetic that started it is the plainest part of the story. The median price of an existing single-family home in Greater Boston was $1,032,500 in April, against $590,000 in Cumberland County, Maine, where Portland sits. A Redfin analysis found Portland is the top destination for homebuyers leaving Greater Boston. Among out-of-state buyers driving Cumberland County prices, the two largest sources are Manhattan and Boston. Roughly speaking, one Boston-area house buys nearly two in the Portland area — and remote work made that trade practical for people who once needed to be at a desk five days a week.

At the top end, the shift shows up in a count of transactions rather than a percentage. Five Maine homes sold above $5 million in 2019. By 2024 that number had reached 21. Last year four properties in the state changed hands for more than $10 million. Before that, only seven homes in Maine had ever been publicly listed and sold above $10 million, and every one of them was in the Mount Desert Island area. That is the entire history of eight-figure Maine real estate, and a single recent year accounted for a meaningful share of it.

The deals themselves have the speed that marks a market with more money than supply. A five-bedroom oceanfront property on Ocean Avenue in Kennebunkport, less than half a mile from the Bush family compound, sold for its full $12 million asking price after 90 minutes on the market. The buyer came from Chicago. It was the highest sale ever recorded by Legacy Properties Sotheby’s International Realty, the Portland firm that handled it, and the second-highest statewide in five years. A Cape Elizabeth home once owned by the actress Bette Davis went for $13.4 million. The state record remains a $19 million sale of the late David Rockefeller’s summer estate on Mount Desert Island.

The current asking-price leader is on Cunner Lane in Cape Elizabeth, about seven miles from Portland, which came to market on May 1 at $16.5 million. It is owned by a Sinclair Broadcast executive. If it sells anywhere near that figure, it lands directly behind the Rockefeller sale.

Put alongside the markets Maine is being compared to, the gap is still wide, and worth stating so the trend is not oversold. Nantucket set an all-time record median around $2.34 million, up 34% from a year earlier, with 82 sales above $5 million. In the Hamptons, the median luxury sale price jumped 30% to $13 million in the first quarter, and deals of $10 million or more accounted for $560 million of volume in three months. Maine does that kind of eight-figure volume in a year, not a quarter. What has changed is that it now does it at all.

The ceiling is not unlimited, and Maine sellers who assume otherwise are learning it the hard way. A cliffside estate on Cooksey Drive in Mount Desert, ten bedrooms and 10,200 square feet on six wooded acres, has sat unsold for four years through price cuts that removed nearly half the original ask, and is now listed at $14.5 million. The listing agent attributes it partly to a market that has shifted: inventory is rising, homes are sitting longer, and price cuts are more common than they were during the frenzy.

That is the broader condition underneath the luxury headlines. Maine had 6,664 homes for sale as of December, up 27.3% from a year earlier, with new listings up 21.2% — though the state still carries only about three months of supply. And the volume market remains far below the record sales: of 532 Maine homes sold above $1 million in the first half of last year, nearly 80% were between $1 million and $2 million, and roughly 93% went for under $3 million.

Maine’s coast is not the Hamptons. But for the first time, the same buyers are shopping in both.

JBizNews Desk | Portland, Maine

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