Type "Scarborough Maine median home price" into a search bar this month and you will get five different answers before you finish your coffee. One site says $485,000. Another puts the trailing twelve months at $710,000 to $712,500. Movoto listed the median sale price at $799,000 for June 2026. Zillow's typical home value sits at $566,996. Redfin's March 2026 snapshot showed a median sale price of $413,000, a number so far below the others that it looks like a typo.
It isn't a typo. It's a symptom.
Scarborough is not one housing market wearing one price tag. It is two markets sharing a town line, and the gap between them is wide enough to make every "median" you find online technically true and practically useless on its own.
The town that got two markets at once
For most of its history, Scarborough's housing stock told a fairly simple story: modest inland capes and colonials on one end, waterfront and near-waterfront properties near Higgins Beach, Pine Point, and Prouts Neck on the other. That range alone already produces a wide spread, from starter homes in the $350,000 to $450,000 range up through waterfront properties that clear $2 million.
What's changed is the middle. Since 2018, the 577-acre former Scarborough Downs harness racing property has been under active redevelopment by M&R Development, and it is now delivering new housing in a way the resale market never could: in scheduled batches, at fixed price points, announced months in advance.
As of July 2026, the town center project has 700 housing units built at The Downs, spanning single-family homes, market-rate apartments, townhouses, subsidized senior apartments, and tiny homes. Another 1,300 units are projected before the development is finished, for a total of roughly 2,000. That is not a subdivision. That is a second town's worth of housing arriving inside Scarborough's existing borders, on a construction and sales schedule the builder controls.
What the new supply actually costs
The named projects give you the actual price bands, not an estimate:
| Development | Units | Price / Size |
|---|---|---|
| Cross Street Condos | 96 units, two 4-story buildings | $399,000 to $800,000; 682 to 1,244 sq ft |
| Cottages at Simplicity Court | 8 tiny homes | 520 sq ft, 1 bed / 1 bath |
| Sturgeon Place | 51 affordable units | Designed for residents with physical disabilities |
| Hackamore North | 45 apartments (3 buildings of 15) | Built by Risbara Brothers |
| American House | Senior housing | Near the former grandstand |
Dan Bacon, development director for The Downs, told Mainebiz that Cross Street's first 48 units went on sale in December 2025 with construction on the second 48 starting the following year, and that the buildings include amenities like covered parking, a rooftop deck, and co-working space at price points starting under $400,000. That is a genuinely new entry point for Scarborough. It sits well below the $710,000-plus trailing-year median that shows up on most portals, and it did not exist as an option five years ago.
Layer in the commercial side and you can see why this isn't a quiet side project. Market Basket, Maine's fourth location, is set to open later in 2026. InterMed is opening its sixth Greater Portland facility on site. Café Luna is relocating from its Route 1 storefront into the new town center in spring 2027. Verizon, NBT Bank, and Maine Community Bank have all signed on, joining Allagash Brewing Company's tasting room near 4 Market Street. Costco, which opened in 2023 as Maine's first location, is now driving nearly 2 million shoppers a year to the surrounding businesses. More than 240,000 square feet of commercial space is under construction, and 70 percent of it is already leased or purchased.
Greg Payne, housing policy adviser to the Mills administration, put it plainly: "Every community in Maine has something to learn from how the town of Scarborough managed growth at The Downs." Whether or not that holds for other towns, it explains why Scarborough's numbers behave differently than a typical resale market.
Why one building can move the whole town's median
In a normal resale market, price data moves gradually. A handful of homes close each month, spread across ages, conditions, and locations, and the median drifts up or down a few percentage points a year. That is not what's happening here.
When a single building of 48 condos priced from $399,000 to $800,000 closes in the same quarter, or when a batch of 520-square-foot tiny homes hits the sold column at once, it does not blend into the data the way an ordinary resale would. It shows up as a block. Depending on which quarter you're measuring and which price tier is closing, the town-wide median can swing hard in either direction without anything changing in the century-old resale market at all.
That is almost certainly what produced Redfin's March 2026 reading of $413,000, a figure the site itself flagged as down 49.2 percent from the year before. A drop of that size in a coastal Cumberland County town is not a market crash. It is what happens when a lower-priced batch of new construction, or a thinner month of luxury resales, temporarily reshapes the mix of what actually closed. Movoto's June 2026 figure of $799,000, drawn from 110 sales that same month, shows the same market from the other side of the mix.
Neither number is wrong. Both are measuring a moving target: a town whose new-construction pipeline is large enough, relative to its total sales volume, to change the composition of "what sold" from one month to the next.
What this means if you're actually comparing towns
If you're cross-shopping Scarborough against Windham, Gorham, or York using a single median figure, you're not comparing like to like, because Scarborough's median right now is an average of two different products: individually-owned homes that trade the normal way, and a builder-controlled new-construction release schedule that adds and subtracts inventory in chunks.
Cumberland County as a whole carries the state's highest housing costs, with a rolling quarter median of $565,000 as of the November 2025 through January 2026 window, well above the statewide median in the high $380,000s to low $390,000s. Scarborough sits at or above that county figure most months, but where it lands depends heavily on whether that month's closings lean toward legacy resale stock or a fresh batch out of The Downs.
The practical takeaway is not to distrust the number. It's to ask a better question before you look at it: which Scarborough are you actually shopping in? If your budget points you toward the $399,000 to $800,000 Cross Street range or a tiny home at Simplicity Court, you're competing in a market with fixed pricing, elevator access, and a builder's release calendar, not a resale bidding process. If you're looking at an inland cape or a home near Higgins Beach or Pine Point, you're in the older market, where days on market, condition, and individual seller motivation still drive the price far more than any town-wide figure.
A few questions worth asking before you compare numbers
Is the home I'm looking at part of a new development or the resale market? The two behave differently on price, timeline, and negotiating room. A Cross Street unit is priced by the builder. A resale home near Prouts Neck is priced by an individual seller and often moves based on condition and motivation.
What quarter is the data from, and how many sales does it represent? A median built on 110 sales in June carries more weight than one built on a thin month where a single new-construction batch closed. Ask your agent for the underlying sale count, not just the headline number.
Does the price point I want even exist in the resale market right now? If you're targeting something under $450,000, The Downs may currently offer more realistic entry points than the older housing stock, simply because that resale price tier moves quickly when it appears.
None of this makes Scarborough's market easier to summarize in one number. It does make it easier to shop, once you know the number you're looking at is really two markets pretending to be one.
If you want a second opinion on what a specific price point actually buys in Scarborough right now, whether that's a resale cape near the marsh or a new-construction unit at The Downs, Michael Mahoney can walk you through the current inventory in both markets and help you figure out which one fits your budget and timeline. Let's Connect.
