PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — When Jane Towle moved back to Aroostook County in 2004 after working as a realtor in New Hampshire, “the market was falling behind us as we drove across the Kittery bridge.”
Towle and her husband were returning to raise their sons, and they left just as the housing bubble was spreading from southern New England into Maine and then contributing to the nationwide Great Recession.
“We sold at the peak. It was just lucky,” said Towle, a real estate broker for RE/MAX Central in Presque Isle. As she knew from more than a decade selling homes around Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “the market can go very weak overnight.”
Across Maine, home prices and sales are increasing, driven by the growth of greater Portland and other, mostly southern Maine areas where sellers can expect multiple bids. The median price of a single family home in Maine grew 5 percent from June 2014 to 2015, to $184,000, according to the Maine Association of Realtors. In July, Maine realtors sold more than 1,700 single-family existing homes, 20 percent more than in July of last year, according to the association.
In Aroostook County, it is largely a buyer’s market, with a median home price of around $90,000, price reductions and “motivated” sellers — homeowners willing to kick in a new snowblower and tank of heating oil to sweeten the deal.
The County is still a good place to be a real estate agent, if not a place that inspires novices to try to get rich quick brokering deals or flipping homes.
“Here in Aroostook, we don’t see the tremendous highs, but neither do we see the tremendous lows,” Towle said. “We’ve always stayed very steady. It’s a good place to be. I much prefer this kind of market. It’s a much more pleasant place to do business.”
There were more than 400 homes sold in The County last year, more than at any other time in at least the last 13 years, according to data from the Maine Realtors Association.
More than 300 homes have been sold each year in Aroostook for nine out of the last 13 years, the recent exception being 2008, when 292 homes were sold. Across the state, home sales totalled 14,123 last year, approaching the previous peak of 14,672.
For Towle, it was a gamble trying to pursue a real estate career in a region known for its aging population and outmigration. “We were taking a risk in joining a national franchise,” she said referring to RE/MAX, a publicly-traded corporation and the country’s largest residential real estate sales network. “There are expectations that it’s going to be successful,” Towle said. “We’ve better than met the expectations.”
At the same time, a residential real estate career is something people would want to cautiously pursue in Aroostook because it is hard work and there is plenty of competition, Towle said. “We’re pretty much saturated” in terms of real estate agents.
Northern buyers, migrants have lots of choices
Who’s buying homes in Aroostook County? “It’s a broad mix,” according to Towle.
Native sons and daughters are coming back for retirement, along with young couples with a spouse who grew up in the area, Mainers who had family working at the Loring Air Force Base, and people moving here either for the rural lifestyle or for work, including new employees of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.
“We’re seeing more and more people transferring here from the southern border,” Towle said.
“Some are here to stay at least long enough that they’re buying homes and raising families. A border patrol job is a great, secure job. I don’t see them coming in and out. They seem to be staying.”
There are also people from away moving to Aroostook County because they want to live on a homestead and can find affordable land.
Jennifer Gaenzle, the librarian at the Fort Fairfield Public Library, moved to town with her family seven years ago. Originally from southeastern Pennsylvania, near the Amish communities of Lancaster, Gaenzle was looking for a place to farm, have animals and raise children and searched rural Maine from Calais to Milo. They settled in a homestead about three miles from downtown Fort Fairfield.
Fort Fairfield’s new town manager, James Risner, is also from away. A former Marine and longtime military civilian worker in Virginia, Risner and his wife “spent several years looking for a place in Maine to retire to,” as he said in a media release in May. “Fort Fairfield has what we were looking for: a small town with a good quality of life, close to a hospital and university.”
For people coming to Aroostook with savings and income from selling their homes in large metropolitan areas or wealthier regions, “you can afford more here in Aroostook County,” Towle said. The same is also true for people living here with steady jobs, if to a lesser extent.
The average median household income in Aroostook is just under $38,000, while the median home price is around $90,000 — a price-to-income ratio of 2.3, more affordable than the national average of around 3. Across Maine, median incomes are 26 percent higher than in Aroostook County, but the median home prices are also more than double, and the statewide price-to-income ratio is 3.8.
What Aroostook homes have in affordability, though, they may lack in variety, dominated by small homes often built in the years before and after World War II.
“There just wasn’t that much newer housing, and if there was, the people weren’t selling,” said Clinton Deschene, a Presque Isle native who recently moved back to work as assistant superintendent and business manager at SAD 1, after living in Auburn and Hermon.
Deschene moved back to Presque Isle for the job, but also for a multi-generational family. He was looking for a home for he, his wife and two young kids, plus a kind of in-law apartment for his elderly parents.
“If it had been just my wife and the kids, we would have a lot more options,” Deschene said. “There are some very nice high-end homes and some nice low-end homes. There’s less in the middle.”
In the end, “the one we purchased was designed so it could have an in-law apartment, though we had to do a bit of tweaking,” he said.
One of the big opportunities in Aroostook, Deschene said, is for young homebuyers to add value to homes — refurbishing a garage or adding an addition — and to help reinvigorate the downtowns of places like Presque Isle. The PI City Council recently created a new incentive program for first-time homebuyers that will help pay for some of upfront costs.
Deschene and his family considered living in Mapleton, buying a newer or bigger home and commuting about seven miles each way to Presque Isle, but they didn’t want to drive so much.
“We love our neighborhood. My parents wanted to be close to town. With young children, we wanted to be close to town too.”
