Things are tough all over, for buyers

of course, not every house is unaffordable. This home in Vesey, outside Bangor, would easily sell for $4 million in Cos Cob, yet a lucky buyer up here snapped it up for just $40,000.

Even in Maine, there’s practically no inventory

There aren’t many. It is a contributing factor to the housing affordability crisis. While your home could fetch a high price right now, it may be hard to get a new one because interest rates are at their highest point since 2002. That is keeping people locked into better mortgages.

There were a little more than 4,700 homes for sale across Maine in August, Redfin says. While that might seem like a lot, it is about 3/5 of 1 percent of the roughly 738,000 homes that Maine had in 2021, according to a recent study on the state housing situation.

That figure was also 27 percent lower than during the same month in 2022. Just fewer than 4,100 of the available homes were single-family dwellings, Redfin found. Only 1,510 homes changed hands in Maine in August, 19 percent fewer than a year earlier, the Maine Association of Realtors said last month.

At the same time, there are still lots of buyers ready to snap these homes up. This is helping lead to those high prices and challenging homebuyers. The median sale price in Maine was $384,700 in August, Redfin said, 10 percent more than it was at the same time last year.

“It depends on the property and location and pricing, but the good ones are going pretty quickly,” Leanne Nichols, a Portland-based broker with Keller Williams Realty. “Some of the sellers are getting a little aggressive on the pricing because prices are definitely up.”

In her 30-year real estate career, Nichols said she has never seen such a competitive market. Since demand continues to outpace supply, buyers have to “act very quickly ….”