The Lot Rent Index: Maine

The Maine state registry lists 464 licensed manufactured housing communities across 16 counties. It does not publish lot counts, so this page counts parks rather than lots. Of the 177 parks FEMA has mapped, 4 (2.3%) sit in a special flood hazard area. For scale, HUD's FY 2026 fair market rent for a two-bedroom rental across those counties runs $1,224 to $2,130/mo — the area apartment benchmark, not lot rent, which usually runs well below it.

Maine's new state dashboard, and what this page adds

On August 17, 2026 the Maine Office of Community Affairs published Manufactured Housing Communities in Maine, built with the Governor's Office of Policy Innovation and the Future. It maps the state's licensed communities with their lot counts, unoccupied lots, which ones are resident-owned, and the average lot rent at each. The dashboard says the data comes from the Manufactured Housing Board's 2025–2026 licensing round, is self-reported by the license applicants rather than field-verified, and will be refreshed every year with the licensing cycle. It was covered by the Portland Press Herald and Maine Public.

For a question about Maine, start there. It is the state's own record, and it carries the one figure this page does not: what people are actually paying. Our Maine rows come from the same board's licence list, pulled July 23, 2026, so the two park counts will not match exactly. Different cut, different day.

What this page adds is the comparison. Maine built that lens for one state; the Lot Rent Index runs the same lens across thirteen, so a Maine number can be read next to twelve others on the same day, from the same kind of source. It also joins each county to HUD's fair market rent, and each park to the EPA drinking-water system it runs and the FEMA flood zone it sits in: three federal datasets a state registry has no reason to carry. Different job, same public record underneath.

Parks and the county rent benchmark

One row per county. Registered parks come from the Maine registry itself, as of July 23, 2026. HUD FY 2026 2-BR FMR is what HUD estimates a modest two-bedroom rental costs in that county — the figure Section 8 payment standards are set from. It is the area apartment benchmark and it is not lot rent: lot rent buys the ground under a home the resident owns, and it usually runs well below the FMR. The two are side by side here because the gap between them is the thing worth reporting, not because they are the same measure.

Maine is a town-based FMR state, so each county figure is the median of the town-level areas HUD publishes inside it. The Maine registry does not collect vacancies, so there is no vacancy column — an absent column, not a zero.

What the parks themselves look like

Two federal joins the registry does not carry, matched park by park, and the one occupancy figure a handful of registries do collect. Each says exactly what it counted and what it could not.

• Their own drinking water. At least 31 of 464 registered parks (6.7%) run their own EPA-regulated community water system: a well or intake, a distribution main, and a meter on every lot. Those parks are water utilities that also rent land. This one is a floor, not a census: a park counts only where the EPA record matched confidently enough to publish, so the real number is higher, never lower.
• Flood exposure. We hold coordinates for 230 of the 464 Maine parks; FEMA returns a flood zone for 177 of them, and 4 of those (2.3%) sit inside a special flood hazard area. Unlike the water count, this share is not a floor: the parks we could not place or FEMA has not analysed could be more exposed than the mapped ones or less, and we have no basis to say which.
• Vacancy. Maine does not collect it. Only three of the thirteen registries in this index do, which is itself the finding: nobody can say how much of this housing stock sits empty, because almost no state asks.

Method, in one paragraph

We pull each state's own licensing or registration file, normalize the addresses, geocode what we can, and join the result to three federal datasets: HUD's county Fair Market Rents, EPA's inventory of active community water systems, and FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. Nothing is modelled, estimated, or filled in. Where a source is silent, the page says so and shows nothing. Counts come from the registries and can lag real life: a park that closed last month may still be licensed, and a park that opened may not be listed yet. Every figure above recomputes from the snapshots each time the page is served, so the next pull moves the numbers with no edit to the page.

Source: Maine Office of Professional and Occupational Regulation manufactured housing community licenses (pfr.maine.gov), as of July 23, 2026. Counts come from the state's registry and can lag real life. See something out of date? Tell us.