Maine doesn’t track a key piece of data that shows when residents are able to buy their first home.
Each year, the National Association of Realtors publishes the median age of first-time homebuyers nationwide. This year, the median age reached 40 — the highest since the organization began tracking the metric in 1981.
The median age is especially helpful for realtors to understand their first-time buyer clients, and for policy makers to see whether their work to help young people enter the housing market are making a difference, said Jessica Lautz, the National Association of Realtors’ deputy chief economist and vice president of research.
While the national median age is telling, the National Association of Realtors doesn’t break that data down state-by-state, and the local organizations that monitor the state’s real estate market and offer housing assistance don’t fill the gap.
This leaves Maine without an understanding of when people are able to buy their first home or the ability to track that data over time. This knowledge could be especially useful in Maine — the oldest state in the nation — which needs to attract and retain young people to replace an aging workforce.
“When we have a desire, as many policymakers do, to make housing more affordable and bring young people into the fold of homeownership what does that mean?” Lautz said. “We have to know foundationally where we are as a nation before we make decisions to move the needle, and to see if the needle is actually moving.”
In the 1980s, the typical first-time homebuyer in the U.S. was in their late 20s, according to the National Association of Realtors. Current first-time buyers reported expenses like high rent costs and burdensome student loans as some of the things that prevented them from buying a home sooner.
Other factors, like the rising cost of homes and limited inventory in recent years, have contributed to the tightening housing market and barred young people from homeownership for longer across the nation but especially in Maine, Lautz said.
“Maine is one of those states where home prices have increased very dramatically in the last five years,” Lautz said. “From quarter one of 2020 to quarter two of 2025, home prices have appreciated 80.1% within your state.”
The Maine Association of Realtors doesn’t know how old first-time buyers are because a buyer’s date of birth isn’t included in real estate transaction documents, said Clarie Berger, communications and government affairs manager for the organization.
Jeff Harris, the 2025 president of the Maine Association of Realtors and broker with Farmington-based Harris Real Estate, said Maine-specific buyer age information would likely be helpful to have, but he didn’t know how to get the information.
The National Association of Realtors gathered the data by sending out surveys to more than 173,000 people nationwide. They determined first-time buyers’ median age using more than 6,000 responses from recent buyers, according to Lautz.
While local information would be useful, Lautz said it would likely be difficult for individual states to source it.
“You would either need to talk to local realtors after someone made a transaction to see their age, which they may not know, or you would have to go directly to the consumers who purchased a home after and it can be hard to track folks down,” Lautz said.
The Maine State Housing Authority tracks a similar metric through its First Home Loan Program, which helps guide first-time buyers navigate the process and provides low fixed interest rate mortgages. Qualified participants can also receive assistance with down payment and closing costs, according to the housing authority’s website.
The average age of MaineHousing’s First Home participants over the last decade has ranged from 33 to 35, said Scott Thistle, the communication director for MaineHousing. For the last two years, however, the median age of homebuyers has remained at 32.
Last year, 925 people took advantage of MaineHousing’s First Home program. The year before that, 820 people bought their first home with MaineHousing’s help. Their average age was 34, according to Thistle.
While this statistic gives a snapshot of hundreds of people buying their first home in Maine, the data pool is imperfect because it consists only of the people using MaineHousing’s program, Thistle said.
That leaves many first-time homebuyers unaccounted for.
Maine can still gather telling information on its real estate market by looking at how affordable homes are, Thistle said. That’s determined by comparing home prices with median income, which Maine Housing does track.