Real estate market report for Maine, how COVID19 is impacting listing sales.
Blogging real estate market reports these days, the COVID19 effect on property listing and sales in Maine is what inquiring minds want to know. Like most events in a local real estate market, the factors helping or hurting don’t always impact to the same degree.
Maine is one big state with over 400 small towns, plantations, a handful of cities.
Stay at home mandates, the CDC quarantine restrictions in Maine make how you use your home these days very different. Home offices set up in the corners for Zoom meetings. The blackboard rolled in and table set up for home schooling. Working from home all change the use of the house in Maine.
If you were a house owner used to running the roads and never home.
Well, COVID19 reversed that habit. Shopping for two weeks at a time and not daily running in for a handful of items means park it at home more than anywhere else. Life as you knew if before COVID19 started knocking at the front door. 
The real estate market in Maine is lots of smaller ones from around the sixteen counties.
Summing up what the real estate market is like for the state as a whole is always dangerous.
Because what a reader, listener, viewer of the media report takes away from any report is this latest spotlight information applies to every area of the Maine real estate market.
Lewiston or E Plantation, Vanceboro and Ogunquit or Portland and Caribou’s markets could not be more different for what goes on in the listing, selling real estate World.
Coronovirus and real estate market report for Maine, the last post on the topic compared year to date statistics.
But like any plant closing, health issue, heck even the weather or growing season, the effects on the Maine real estate market take time.
The event hits or misses like an approaching asteroid. Or to see the results and to be able to pin point what caused the chart graph squiggles up high, down low or flat in between. It varies greatly because Maine has urban and very rural markets.
Often the coronovirus could be blamed for a decline in a certain real estate market.
When if you historically look at this time of year, with or without COVID19 in the real estate market background, the market is off for listing production or property sales. The numbers don’t like and you can not just trust your gut as a real estate broker or agent that is supposed to top of the market pulse.
Winter was slower to let up and go away. Who’s in the Blaine House in Augusta can impact the real estate market statistics too.
Housing sales, if the buyer of a home is using a bank mortgage lending program to get the keys to a new place, that process can eat up six to eight weeks.
You have to factor that in to the process as you eyeball the numbers that don’t lie in the real estate market report.
So for sold data off the Maine listings market statistic portal, you hang around out in the waiting room for a while. Real recorded concrete housing sales figures tell the tale and to see the trend, you need some time to elapse.
Also to take away the seasonal habits of how each section of the real estate market in Maine behaves requires study.
Knowing too that in Maine, it is not just house sales, home listings we deal with around the clock. Land sales, waterfront properties, farm listings all swim in the same pond that home buyers and sellers wade into to play the game. Like children in a family, no two are the same and have their ups and downs. But sheltering in place, staying home and working from the same four walls is a so much easier adjustment in small town rural Maine.
So have the keys to the Maine listings data and let’s open up the portal to study the numbers.
Today, the Maine real estate market shows 537 new listings. Statewide, 55 real estate listings canceled, 72 withdrawn from the market. The latest numbers show 321 closed and move over from under contract to the SOLD column statistics. Expired listings for the state of Maine today show 195.
For back on the real estate market, I am seeing 144 sellers put their places back online for sale for another go.
Another 218 existing market listings got their prices trimmed or boosted and the stickers hanging off them changed today. Extensions on existing sales happened on 104 Maine real estate listings.
Statewide, the Maine listings portal that tracks top to bottom and side to side shows 419 current properties for sale went under contract.
Year to date, further market study of Maine real estate shows the inventory statewide is down, days on market has drooped a bit.
Prices over the last year are heading upward which goes hand in hand with the inventory supply reduction. Sale price to original listing price ratios are about the same year to date across Maine.
The absorption rate for residential real estate in Maine is down over the year peek over the shoulder. The days on market averaging 90 down from 100 days.
The sold real estate market analysis as of today when comparing this year to last year’s period of Jan 1st to April 28th shows sale volume is up five percent.
The average sale price is up six percent, at $269,019 for this 2020 period. Everyone wants to know the effect of the COVID19 pandemic on Maine real estate sales. But need some more time to generate the data to show the trend. If a bank mortgage loan on a Maine house sale takes six to eight weeks, lots of sales in the pipeline continued to head to closing.
No giant derailment numbers of existing sales terminated and the increase in sales with further study shows real estate market within a market events.
For example, lower priced homes under $30,000 bought for cash happened to improve the number of sales bottom line. Not everywhere in Maine’s sixteen counties can you pull off a house sale in this price range however. Days lingering on the market (DOM) is down eighteen percent.
Real estate market sales days to close taking less time, too.
Sales selling time shortened from 147 days to 132 for this year’s time period of the first four months comparison to last year. Percentage of list price to selling price up a percent to 98%. The number of single family residential listings is down seventeen percent. Cash sales are speeding up the days on market and days to close figures.
Real estate videos are thru the roof for views.
The you tube analytics show how much folks #alonetogether and #socialdistancing are online watching, listening to videos on everything Maine.
Videos are easy to sit back, toggle the link and start watching, listening, learning.
Stay where you are but tour the community, sample the home town flavor of Maine. Plus one by one in and out you go into houses, any type of Maine real estate for sale right now wherever you are. On any device and come as you are through the cyber virtual open houses online ready when you are.
What’s the average real estate house price in Maine?
That figure is so skewed to the handful of city areas Maine has and so not reflected of the bulk of the rural real estate markets. So county by county, average sale prices are to follow. Aroostook county average sold price… $99,952.
For Androscoggin county $188,068. Checking in with Cumberland County, the average sold price today is $369,730. Quite a spread in the real estate market report for Maine huh? The markets are so diverse. Some have restrictive zoning, others you don’t even need a building permit. The cost to live in each area of Maine is vastly different too.
That’s why when a real estate agent or new broadcaster is asked how’s the market?
They have to echo in unison ask “which county, which area, what type of real estate… houses, land, waterfront, farms, small business listings? Today in quarantine work arounds, the curbside take out real estate delivery is brisk and creative. No touching the properties but still showcasing what is for sale in the glass display case under the marketing spotlights.
More county by county market report for real estate sales… the glance at the Franklin county property listing sales show average sold price of $188,207.
Hancock county shows up for average sold price at $292,210. Kennebec county weights in at $240,152, Knox county as $244,963, Lincoln county at $248,462 for average sold price. The market report for Oxford county, average sold price is $163,441, Penobscot county $144,371, Picataquis county showing $105,963.
Sagadahoc county $172,104, Somerset county $161,602, Waldo county $169,646 and Washington county $111,061. Last but not least for Maine market reporting, York county shows the figure $330,064 for average sold price today.
That’s a real estate market report for Maine, still too early to show the full impact of COVID19.
How the coronovirus pandemic is effecting the Maine real estate statistic. This snap shot is still a tad early to know the full blown effects of the spike headed punk virus and how it tainted our lives.
Mainers are a hardy resourceful bunch.
I think we take whatever happens in stride and deal with it with common sense. Stay tuned for more developments in the market for Maine real estate property listings and sales.
I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573 | info@mooersrealty.com |
MOOERS REALTY 69 North ST Houlton ME 04730 USA
