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Two southern Maine counties have built more than 5,400 homes between them since 2020 — but other parts of the state are lagging behind in new construction.
Cumberland County has 3,219 homes that have been built between 2020 and 2024, making it the region with the most new housing, according to recently released data from the U.S. Census Bureau. York County came in second, with 2,187 units built in the same five-year period.
Piscataquis and Franklin counties both have the lowest number of new units, as each has built fewer than 110 homes during that time, Census data shows.
The report, which comes from the U.S. Census’ American Community Survey, doesn’t account for new homes still under construction or those that have been approved but haven’t been built yet. But, it gives a clear picture of how many newly built homes have been completed, making it a more reliable source of information than looking at local building permits alone.
Altogether, units built during that five-year span make up a little more than 1% of the nearly three-quarter of a million homes in Maine, totalling more than 10,500 residences.
Androscoggin and Penobscot counties both have built just shy of 760 homes from 2020 to 2024 while Kennebec County added about 635 units in that time.
Hancock, Oxford and Waldo counties each have 450-500 newer homes.
The absorption rate, meaning how quickly a home gets rented or sold after construction wraps up, has stayed high in southern Maine for years. That shows there’s still intense demand for housing that new developments haven’t yet quenched, according to Jack Soley, a longtime Portland-based real estate developer.
“There is an insatiable demand for affordable housing, especially right now,” Solely said. “There’s a waitlist and those units are filled immediately. Market rate homes absorb slower, but in our experience even those units are absorbed much faster than historical rates.”
Soley said he has heard from many people from the Boston area who want to move to southern Maine for the quality of life. They’re often coming from a more expensive region and work remotely, so they’re prepared for and can afford Portland’s housing prices.
In more rural areas, new units tend to take longer to get filled, which shows that production has kept pace with demand, Solely said.
High building costs could also be part of the reason why southern Maine has seen the most new homes added in recent years, Soley said.
That’s because developers need to rent or sell units for more to make a profit, Soley said. The area median incomes that can afford those prices tend to be in southern Maine.
But, Soley warned more developers could pause housing projects until construction costs come down a bit.
“Construction costs have been rising over 10% annually, so it’s exceeded the price of inflation, and that has made it really challenging to build new market rate housing,” Soley said. “I’m about to build 45 units in Freeport and the cost per square foot is around $330. Just last year those same units would’ve cost around $300 per square foot to build.”
In the last few years, developers and lawmakers have been keeping an eye on Maine’s goal of adding at least 76,400 new units by 2030. That number was set by the Maine Housing Production Needs Study, published in late 2023, which credited the state’s glaring housing shortage to historic underproduction.
In the years since Maine’s housing shortage entered the public vernacular, some larger cities, such as Portland and Bangor, started tracking and publicly reporting how many new housing developments have been approved by local governments, and where those projects stand.
But it’s often difficult to tell when or if housing projects end up getting filled, especially at a statewide level.
This year, new legislation will require communities with 4,000 residents or more to report how many residential building permits and certificates of occupancy they approved, as well as how many units were demolished each year.
The bill, signed into law last summer, was created to better understand where housing is getting built or removed. It will be months, however, before the first wave of preliminary results will be released to the public.