Maine homes sit on more land than those in almost all other states, a housing study released Thursday found.
Averaging a little over 1 acre, median property sizes in the state are the third-largest in the U.S., are a product of the state’s agrarian history and sparse population, according to the study by online home repair website Angi. Only Vermont at 1.8 acres per median property and New Hampshire at 1.1 acres beat Maine. The U.S. average was about one-third of an acre per property.
The study comes at a time when property sizes throughout the country are shrinking, especially for new construction and in urban centers, the study found. At the same time, Maine has seen a land grab. After the real estate market heated up early in the pandemic, housing prices shot up amid right inventory, causing an influx of people seeking to buy land in Maine.
Adding to the popularity, land prices in Maine were among the lowest in the country at $7.17 per square foot, coming in third to last on the survey. Angi analyzed data from more than 393,000 for-sale listings across the country on the real estate website Zillow in May 2022.
It makes sense that northern New England would have roomy properties, State Historian Earle Shettleworth said.
“Maine is as large as the other New England states put together, so historically there has been a good deal of land available for people to acquire and develop,” he said.
In the 18th through early 20th centuries, Maine was heavily agricultural, which increased the size of land ownership to sustain farming livelihoods. Shettleworth said a lot of development took place when people pushed out into rural areas to farm in the 40 years from when Maine became a state in 1820 until the start of the Civil War.
Some U.S. states, including Maine, have zoning laws that establish minimum lot sizes to accommodate essential infrastructure in rural areas such as septic tanks or drinking wells, the study noted.
Maine’s statewide zoning law requires any housing lot with a septic tank must be at least 20,000 square feet, or half an acre, driving up the size of the average parcel. Many other areas of the country have more public sewers that don’t require the extra land. The median lot size in Maine is 45,738 square feet, or 1.05 acres, the third largest of any state.
In Vermont, many municipalities have enacted minimum housing lot size zoning laws to protect natural habitats and keep land open for agriculture and forestry. Many towns have specially zoned large-lot rural districts, where lots must be between 25 acres and 50 acres. The median lot size in Vermont is 78,408 square feet or 1.8 acres, more than 10 times the median lot size in Nevada and the largest of any state.
Shettleworth said zoning and land-use planning are relatively new developments, and northern New England’s generous property sizes stem from it being heavily rural, forested and agricultural.
“Historical developments over a long period of time have a lot to do with why we are where we are now,” he said.