Two Maine towns notable for their proximity to Sebago Lake took the top spots in an annual report that ranks the state’s hottest housing markets.
Standish took the top spot, as sales in the town grew by nearly 41% from 2024 to 2025, according to the latest Maine’s Hottest Towns report. The Bangor Daily News exclusively obtained the 2025 report, which has been compiled annually for nearly a decade by Scarborough-based Maine Life Real Estate.
The median price of homes in Standish, a town of fewer than 11,000 people, jumped to $480,000 last year.
Gray, located just northeast of Standish, saw the number of home sales spike by nearly a third while average home prices surpassed $557,000.
The annual list shows where Maine homebuyers most want to live — and where homes are successfully changing hands — as the state’s housing market continues to cool in the wake of the pandemic homebuying frenzy. The list highlights the regions that saw the highest growth in year-over-year unit sales and notes whether the median home price in those communities rose or fell.
For Standish and Gray, the neighboring inland communities’ surge in popularity could be due to the access to Sebago Lake they offer while still being more affordable than many other southern Maine regions, said Rob Edgerly, a broker for Maine Life Real Estate who compiled the list.
Standish and Gray also offer easy access to other parts of the state for those who need to commute.
Westbrook and Falmouth — both of which border Portland — took the third and fourth spots on the list, respectively.
The fact that most of the communities on the list either border Portland or are within commuting distance paints a clear picture of how desirable, but pricey, Maine’s largest city has become.
When an appealing area becomes too expensive for many buyers, that forces them to look in the surrounding region for a more affordable option that’s still close to where they want or need to be, Edgerly said.
“Portland has gotten very expensive and the peninsula of Portland has almost become a luxury market,” Edgerly said. “Buyers have had to go further away or up the turnpike because the price point in Portland has risen.”
Augusta and Rockland are the northernmost towns on the list, taking the fifth and sixth place spots, respectively, as each community saw the number of home sales increase by around 20%.
The remaining municipalities on the newly released 2025 list are Biddeford, Cumberland, Yarmouth and South Portland.
The 2025 list notably lacks communities in northern and central Maine.
That differs from previous years when communities in the greater Bangor area or northern Maine sometimes cracked the top 10. In 2024, for example, Hampden took the top spot because sales surged by 50% from the year before.
In 2021, Bangor was eighth in the list while Presque Isle came in second. The year before, Brewer took sixth place, making its first-ever appearance on the list.
Edgerly said it’s not as common for smaller rural communities to appear on the list year-after-year as some Portland suburbs do.
When a community like Hampden cracks the top 10, it could be linked to a new housing development coming online, leading to a spike in sale numbers, Edgerly said. Other times, there’s simply an unexplained increase in popularity.
“If a bunch of people leave Hampden for some reason, it’s hard to know what drove that,” Edgerly said. “I grew up in Brunswick and nobody really wanted to go to Lisbon at that time, but a couple years ago they were on our list.”