This is part of the BDN’s Home Buying series that shares the stories of Mainers who became homeowners despite the state’s volatile real estate market. Want to share your experience buying a home in Maine? Email kobrien@bangordailynews.com.
A new Bangor homeowner had to make an offer on her home the same weekend she saw it to even stand a chance at buying it.
Cassandra Hutchinson moved to a nearly 200-year-old house on Ohio Street with her family this spring, ending a months-long search for a new home. It was Hutchinson’s first time buying a house in Maine, but she previously owned a home in Vermont before moving back to Maine in 2016.
“To go looking for a house a few years later and find that everything is double [the price], it was a mental shock,” Hutchinson said. “I needed to completely adjust my thinking.”
Hutchinson and her husband initially hoped to stay below $300,000 when they began their hunt in late October, but discovered homes at that price were highly competitive, and there wasn’t much inventory in the winter. This forced them to raise their maximum budget to $400,000.
Hutchinson has three children, the oldest of which lives on their own. The middle and youngest children will enter college and high school, respectively, this fall.
“We needed enough space to house all of us, space to sit outside and grill, and some storage,” Hutchinson said. “We needed to meet those basic parameters and we looked at pretty much everything that we could find that did, but there were not a lot of options.”
Hutchinson’s experience illustrates how competitive the Maine housing market has become, even during the winter, which is typically an unpopular time to move. It’s also an example of the sticker shock prospective buyers experience when comparing today’s home prices against those from before the pandemic.
Before the pandemic, the statewide median value of a home didn’t surpass $245,000, according to Zillow data. That’s a stark difference from that same value in March 2026 when Hutchinson bought her new home, which sat just below $416,000.
Aside from high prices and lack of inventory, the speed at which houses sold surprised Hutchinson and further complicated the family’s search.
Early in their hunt, the couple would schedule showings on the weekends because they both work full time. But as the months stretched on, they began taking time off work to look at properties because “houses were disappearing before we could ever get inside them,” Hutchinson said.
Hutchinson once drove to Clifton to look at a house that was available when she left Orono. By the time they arrived it was under contract, she said.
The family changed their strategy at one point and began going to open houses for homes with asking prices above what they could afford with the hope that the price would drop later.
“If the price dropped, we can put in an offer immediately rather than needing to schedule a viewing,” she said. “We weren’t getting to these houses before they sold, so we had to figure out a way to be faster.”
Hutchinson considered more than 20 properties and put unsuccessful offers down on two of them before finding her new home.
The family toured the 2,379-square-foot Ohio Street property on a Saturday in late February, the day after it hit the market. At the time, it already had an offer, but Hutchinson fell in love with the home’s library and kitchen, she said.
There were more showings scheduled for that Saturday and the sellers asked for “everyone’s last best offer by noon on Sunday and they would get back to people that afternoon,” Hutchinson said.
Hutchinson was “very excited” to learn their $350,000 offer on the $325,000 home was accepted. They closed on March 20.
The family previously lived in a house in Orono they rented from family members, but were told last fall that the owners planned to sell the property in the spring. Hutchinson and her husband considered buying the property, but the asking price coupled with the likely cost of necessary work and repairs was too high, she said.
With the family moved in, Hutchinson said she plans to complete small maintenance projects in the coming months and years, including replacing a few older, drafty windows, rebuilding parts of the home’s chimneys, and addressing deterioration on the front door.
“It goes with an old house — there’s always a list,” she said.