"Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination." The line belongs to the broadcaster Vin Scully, but it could have been written for Scarborough's housing market this summer.
Pull up Scarborough on a few different sites right now and you will get a few different stories. One says prices cratered. Another says they barely moved. A third says the median list price just cracked $800,000. All are technically accurate. None of them, on its own, tells you what a house in Scarborough actually costs. The reason isn't bad data. It's that Scarborough is no longer one market. It's two, running at the same time, in the same nine-digit zip code, and every aggregate number you see is an average of both.
The Same Town, Four Different Prices
Here's what shows up if you check the usual places this summer:
| Source | Reporting window | Scarborough figure |
|---|---|---|
| Redfin | March 2026 | Median sale price $413,000, down 49.2% year over year, on 10 homes sold |
| Zillow (ZHVI) | Through May 31, 2026 | Typical home value $691,375, down 0.8% year over year, homes going pending in about 7 days |
| Movoto | June 2026 | Median list price $799,000, on 110 homes sold, up from 93 a year earlier |
| Rolling six-month closings analysis | Published July 2026 | Median sold price $741,500, roughly 1.6 times the state median |
Read those four rows next to each other and the town looks unstable. It isn't. A March count of 10 sales is small enough that two or three closings at either end of the price range will swing the median by tens of thousands of dollars, which is most of what happened to Redfin's number. The rolling six-month analysis made a related point about coastal towns generally: a shift in what's currently sitting on the market versus what actually closed over the prior half year can move a town's price comparison substantially. That analysis called it a composition signal, not a bidding war. It's the right label. The question isn't whether Scarborough got cheaper or more expensive. It's which Scarborough you're looking at.
What's Actually Splitting the Number
The most consequential thing happening to Scarborough real estate right now isn't a rate move or a seasonal dip. It's The Downs.
The Downs is the redevelopment of the old Scarborough Downs harness racing track, which operated from 1950 until it closed in 2020. M&R Development, a Scarborough-based partnership, bought the property in 2018 and has spent the years since building what is meant to become the town's first real downtown. As of July 2026, more than 700 housing units have been completed there, out of a planned 2,000. That is not a subdivision. That is a second town center being built inside an existing one.
The units going up are not estate homes. Cross Street Condos brought 96 luxury units across two buildings. The Breakaway, currently under construction, will add 76 one and two-bedroom apartments above ground-floor retail, including a Verizon store. Sturgeon Place added 51 affordable units built specifically for residents with physical disabilities, described as Maine's first project of its kind. In July 2026, developers announced that NBT Bank and Maine Community Bank would join the town center alongside Verizon, on top of previously confirmed tenants Market Basket, set to become the chain's fourth Maine location, and InterMed, opening its sixth Greater Portland office. Café Luna is relocating there from its longtime Route 1 spot in spring 2027. Costco has anchored the property's north side since 2023.
Every one of those housing types, condos, small apartments, workforce and senior units, closes at a different price point than the single-family homes Scarborough has historically sold. When 700-plus of them enter the sales and rental pool inside a few years, they don't just add inventory. They change what "median" means, because the mix of what's selling has changed underneath the number.
The Old Scarborough Still Pulling the Other Way
At the same time, Scarborough's established neighborhoods haven't gone anywhere. Pine Point Beach still trades on classic New England cottages with ocean views. Black Point still has its larger estates a few minutes from Scarborough Beach State Park. Dunstan Crossing, the Chamberlain Homes community built around traditional neighborhood design principles, still sells its Estate Homes as a limited category, available only in the project's first and final phases, on larger lots than its more compact Village Homes. Dunstan Crossing was planned for roughly 288 residential units total, according to the civil engineering firm that designed its infrastructure. That's a fraction of what The Downs alone is building.
Those two inventories, the compact new-build supply at The Downs and the larger-lot resale and custom-build supply everywhere else in town, are pulling in opposite directions on any single price average. New condos and workforce apartments drag a townwide median down. Waterfront estates and custom farmhouses on multi-acre lots drag it back up. Whichever one closed more often in whatever window a given site is measuring will decide whether Scarborough looks like it's cooling or holding firm.
Proof This Isn't Just Scarborough Noise
If this were only a Scarborough quirk, it would be a curiosity. It isn't. One countywide sales report tracking Cumberland County closings through June 2026 found that the county's overall single-family median rose to $620,000, up 4.6% from May, with homes selling in a median of just 5 days and closing at 101.6% of list price. That headline says the whole county is a strong seller's market. But the same report broke the county down town by town, and the range underneath that headline number was wide. Scarborough's sales volume rose 77% over the comparison period. Cape Elizabeth's fell 22%. Yarmouth's median jumped 38% while Kennebunkport's dropped by roughly a fifth, in the same county, over the same months.
That's the pattern to hold onto. A county or statewide median tells you where the region landed. It does not tell you how any single town got there, and it certainly doesn't tell you how any single neighborhood within that town got there. Scarborough's internal split, driven by The Downs on one side and its established beach and estate neighborhoods on the other, is simply the most visible local example of something happening at every geographic level of this data.
What This Means If You're Comparing Neighborhoods Right Now
If Scarborough is on your list, the portal median is the least useful number available to you. Here's what actually helps:
- Ask which comps built the number. A listing agent quoting a per-square-foot figure should be able to tell you whether it's drawn from Downs-area condos and townhouses or from resale homes in Pine Point or Black Point. Those are different markets wearing the same zip code.
- Treat a single-digit sales count as noise, not signal. Redfin's 49.2% year-over-year swing came from a 10-sale month. A town Scarborough's size can post that kind of headline number purely from which handful of homes happened to close, with no underlying shift in value.
- Expect The Downs to keep affecting appraisals for years, not months. With roughly 1,300 units still to be built out of the planned 2,000, the mix of what's selling in Scarborough is going to keep shifting. An appraisal pulling recent comps from the wrong side of that split can misprice a home in either direction.
- Watch absorption, not just price. The Downs' light-industrial Innovation District sold out five times faster than developers had originally projected, and as of July 2026 more than 70% of the town center's commercial space is already leased or purchased. That kind of demand tends to support values in the surrounding resale market even when the townwide median looks flat or soft.
None of this makes Scarborough harder to buy into. It makes it a town where the number on the screen is doing less work than it looks like it's doing, and where the right read depends on knowing which Scarborough a given listing actually belongs to.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Scarborough still a seller's market in 2026? For established single-family homes in neighborhoods like Pine Point and Black Point, the signs point that way, with Cumberland County homes broadly closing above list price and selling in days rather than weeks as of June 2026. For the newer, smaller-unit inventory at The Downs, the picture is closer to a supply story, with hundreds of units still being absorbed into the market.
Why did one site show Scarborough prices dropping nearly 50% when others showed almost no change? Small monthly sales counts are the likely explanation. A town-level median built from around 10 closings in a single month can swing sharply based on which few homes happened to sell, without reflecting any broader shift in value.
Does The Downs make Scarborough a better or worse place to buy right now? It depends on what you're buying. It adds meaningful new inventory, commercial amenities, and job growth to the town, which tends to support long-term demand. It also means a townwide median price is measuring two increasingly different housing markets at once, so a single aggregate figure won't tell you much about your specific target neighborhood.
Scarborough rewards buyers and sellers who look past the headline number and ask where it came from. If you're comparing Scarborough against other Southern Maine towns, or trying to figure out what a specific listing's asking price actually says about value in that pocket of town, Bedard Homes & Realty can walk through the comps that matter for your search and help you read the market the way someone who watches it every day actually reads it. Request a consultation and let's figure out which Scarborough fits what you're looking for.
