The number of vacant homes in Maine is falling. Here’s what that means.

The percentage of vacant homes fell statewide in recent years but it hasn’t made renting or buying in Maine any easier.

Roughly one-fifth of the nearly 752,000 homes across the state were deemed vacant in 2020-24, according to newly-released data from the American Community Survey.

That’s less than the previous four-year period, when nearly a quarter of Maine’s 742,700 homes were vacant.

Nationwide, the number of vacant homes decreased by 2% from 2015-19 to 2020-24. However, Maine’s housing vacancy rate has remained twice as high as the national average over the last decade, according to Census data.

Maine’s rate of vacant homes is higher than the national average due to the state’s popularity for seasonal homes. But, the state’s declining vacancy rate hints at how Maine’s real estate market changed during the pandemic as demand grew but the number of available homes plummeted, causing prices to climb.

The U.S. Census Bureau considers a home vacant if the owners spend most of their time living elsewhere, or if the home is available but no one lives there. This could look like a newly-built home that hasn’t sold, or the buyers haven’t moved in yet. A condemned home that isn’t fit for habitation, however, isn’t classified as vacant.

The percentage of vacant housing dropped in every Maine county from 2015-19 to 2020-24. At 7%, Androscoggin County had the lowest vacancy rate in the latest survey.

Piscataquis County had the highest at nearly 43%, even though the vacancy rate did plummet by nearly 12%. Vacancy rates in Somerset and Oxford counties also dropped by almost 8% over the same time period, Census data shows.

Maine’s high vacancy rate can be misleading, as the vast majority of the empty homes aren’t available to those looking to move to or within the state. Instead, most of the empty homes are seasonal properties or used as short-term rentals.

In reality, the number of Maine homes available for someone to buy or rent has remained low for years while demand for them has risen. This has led asking prices across the state to skyrocket in recent years.

“We are in need of housing, and the existing housing stock is getting used to its full potential,” said Laura Mitchell, executive director of the Maine Affordable Housing Coalition. “Decreases in vacancy rates overall means you’re in a tighter, more competitive market. It shows demand is high in Maine.”

In a healthy housing market, roughly 5% of homes are vacant and available for use at any given time, according to Maine’s housing production needs study, released in October 2023. That margin allows residents to move as their needs and desires change over time.

In Maine, however, the share of homes that are vacant and available sits at slightly more than 2% statewide, the housing study found.

There could be several factors influencing Maine’s declining vacancy rate, Mitchell said.

First, more people may have moved to their vacation homes in recent years and turned them into permanent residences, Mitchell said.

Other families may have sold their seasonal properties and the new owners may use it as their permanent residence.

The rental market availability and affordability also tightened considerably during the pandemic, especially in regions like Maine that welcomed new residents looking to escape densely-populated areas, said Dan Emmanuel, director of federal research at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

“Generally, the trend in that time was people moved from typically higher-cost areas to traditionally lower cost places,” Emmanuel said.

While Maine has welcomed more residents since 2020, the number of new homes being created has struggled to keep up.

“Generally, the housing shortage in Maine is a problem that we know is there,” Mitchell said. “We have people moving in, but we’re not building at a fast rate.”