Maine Real Estate Leads to Professional Success and Personal Balance: Meet Chris Lynch

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to, or are watching, Radio Maine. Today, I have with me in the studio the owner of Legacy Properties Sotheby's International Realty here in Maine, Chris Lynch. Nice to have you in today.

Chris Lynch: Thank you for the invite.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I should introduce you actually as also our friend, our friend Chris Lynch, because you actually are a dear friend of my husband and I.

Chris Lynch: Yes, well over a decade.

Lisa Belisle: For a very long time. And I think there's been a lot of intersections over time, not just because of the work that you do, but also the intersections amongst the business and local connections. And you went to Bates.

Chris Lynch: I did.

Lisa Belisle: I went to Bowdoin, of course. You know that, so there's always that ongoing.

Chris Lynch: It's fine. At least you didn't go to Colby.

Lisa Belisle: Right, exactly. We like Colby, there's nothing wrong with Colby, but there is a traditional sort of three college rivalry amongst the liberal arts schools here in Maine.

Chris Lynch: I'm just teasing about Colby too.

Lisa Belisle: Yes, we understand. Although back in the day when I went to Bowdoin, it was a rough rivalry. I don't know if I would've been able to talk to you back then.

Chris Lynch: Back then.

Lisa Belisle: So hopefully it's changed somewhat. A little bit. But there's lots of interesting things going on in Maine with regard to real estate. And you've been doing this long enough, so you've seen ups and downs and backs and forth. Tell me about the state of where we are.

Chris Lynch: It's 17 years since I started the company, and we've grown quite a bit. So now we're over a hundred people statewide and really cover a broad swath. The interesting thing about Maine is every market's kind of a microcosm. Each town has a different vibe, has a different depth, has a different inspiration for people. And so it's super hard to talk about Maine as one market. We tended to carve out coastal communities kind of from Kittery all the way up through the other side of Bar Harbor. And even as you go through the coastal communities, Camden's very different than Kennebunkport. And Bristol is very different than Harpswell, and Northeast Harbor is very different than all the other places in Maine, to be honest. It's a really cool little spot.

And we just opened an office there about 18 months ago. So you kind of have to pick your spots. And even if you look at counties, all the counties are so different. We're breaking out an index right now where we're trying to create our own statistical index that helps report on both microcosms and macro trends in different counties, also different types of cities and towns. And it's hard to do, but we're getting through it and it's giving us a better picture as to what's going on with what we like to look at. So now we're going back into the lakes, the Belgrade Lakes, Sebago Lake, Long Lake, Panther Pond, Little Sebago. And those are each their own microcosms. So it's been fun. Challenging, but fun.

Lisa Belisle: So what are some surprises from doing this work, looking at the data?

Chris Lynch: Well, the biggest surprise is how hot Maine has become, and not just coastal Maine and not just Portland. Portland's been hot for a decade, really, maybe 20 years. Very different than when you were at Bowdoin and I was at Bates. It's come such a long way, and everybody wants to come to Portland and they get here and they learn more about Maine. So last year, I want to say 22, 23 dollars of every high value property dollar spent on Maine property was coming from Massachusetts. And so I think the biggest change has been people from away finding the value that we who've lived here for a long time, it's been 22 years for me, saw a long time ago. People didn't appreciate how much there is here and now have the opportunity, particularly with remote working, to be able to come here and live here and enjoy life here. Big change, though, last two years in particular.

Lisa Belisle: And I know that there's definitely been a Covid impact, and you might anticipate that as Covid starts to, I'm knocking on wood, sort of, as I'm saying this, hopefully starts to recede. The public health emergency is being officially lifted. So I think I'm safe in saying that this pandemic is receding. People are still coming to Maine.

Chris Lynch: They are. So what happened was their friends came during Covid, and then they came to visit, or called them or sent an email or a text saying, hey, you should check this out. And so there's an effect in place that is just going to be here for a long time. It's going to be here for a long time.

Lisa Belisle: Why Northeast Harbor?

Chris Lynch: Northeast Harbor is one of the most highly valued markets in the state of Maine. It's a perfect fit for us. And from Northeast Harbor, we do all of MDI. And we do north and east and a little bit west out towards Bangor, and a little bit south down towards Castine and some just really beautiful towns that are out that way. It's three hours from here. It's a great footprint for that whole Hancock County, even into Washington County for us.

Lisa Belisle: How much work are you doing in Washington County at this point?

Chris Lynch: Very little. Just a little too far. We do a little bit. Funny enough, we've taken three or four listings in Eastport, which is about as far on the coast as it gets in Maine, as you know. So it's the first city to see the sun in North America. So it's been fun.

Lisa Belisle: But even the fact that you have those listings, I think is very interesting to me, because Eastport is far. It is not easy to get to at all.

Chris Lynch: No. So it's far, but it's beautiful. And it's also a place that's been discovered in a smaller way. It's still a fishing village. But it's pretty special. Really beautiful. Very authentic, real Maine.

Lisa Belisle: So one of the things that, as you're talking about this, I'm thinking about, because I come from healthcare obviously, is do we have currently the infrastructure to support people who are coming from outside of the state? I think people look for, depending upon how old they are and where they are in their lives, they look for healthcare, education, access to venues, entertainment, hospitality, food. So are you seeing things start to shift as a result of people coming in from other places?

Chris Lynch: Not yet, but I think you're onto something. I think Maine had a lot of infrastructure for how few people were here. So you could argue for many, many years we had more schools than we really needed. Now they're filling up. We had more hospital beds than we really needed. Now they're closer to capacity. We kind of had, I called it the Noah's ark of life. There was two of everything. And we really only needed one and a half. And now we're at the point where I think we have two of everything. And they're largely filling up. But we're close. I mean, if you think about it, there's really only one major highway in the whole state, and then there's 295, which runs nearby, but not really a major highway. It's probably 35 miles long, something like that. The infrastructure's light here.

Lisa Belisle: So it'll be interesting to see how we handle that, because going back to the healthcare example, we're trying to bring in doctors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants to the part of Maine that I work with, which is sort of the Augusta, Waterville area. And they will come visit us and they'll say, oh, it's a lovely spot. We love your hospital. We can't find any place to live. So there's no place for them to live. But then we have other people who are able to come back, who are looking for healthcare. So we're now at a place where we need more doctors, we need more nurse practitioners, nurses, medical assistants, all of the people. We don't have any place to put them if we bring them from somewhere else. And there really just aren't enough of the people who are homegrown quite yet to take care of the population that's coming in.

Chris Lynch: There's not nearly enough new building going on here. And no one's leaving. So we have no one leaving, a lot of people wanting to come. And so it's really put some pressure on. That's why housing prices have gone up so much, and they're going to have a really hard time going down. That's probably the question I get the most, is are prices going down. And it's just hard for them to go down. There's still 5, 6, 7 buyers for every good property. We talk about the three-legged stool: good home, good location, good price. And there's lots and lots of buyers at every price point, pretty much all over the state, for a property that has those three legs of the stool.

Lisa Belisle: So you came in as somebody from finance when you started. That was your field originally?

Chris Lynch: Yes, it was.

Lisa Belisle: And it was a bit of a risk for you when you moved to Maine, started this business?

Chris Lynch: I didn't realize how big a risk it was at the time.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about that.

Chris Lynch: It's a big risk. I gave up everything. I gave up my job, I gave up my house and packed up the family. We moved to Maine and just started prospecting for a new life and a new job, and a whole new idea of what the next 20 years, which we've just completed now, 22 years here, were going to be like. But I didn't factor. I was 39 years old. It just didn't seem like a big risk at the time. So we did it and never looked back. Not once.

Lisa Belisle: And if I'm calculating back correctly, it seems like you had to weather the 2007, 2008 storm.

Chris Lynch: That was a big storm. So I started the company in 2006. Grew very quickly, opened four offices, got to 45, 50 agents by the end of 2007. And then business just stopped. Not only was there a housing crisis, but there was sort of a liquidity meltdown globally, which made it impossible to do real estate in any meaningful way. And it was a disaster. It was really awful. I never doubted what I was doing was going to work, but everybody else did. Especially my wife and kids. Friends. I still run into people around Portland saying, I can't believe you made it. I never thought that was going to succeed. Someone very recently, funny enough.

Lisa Belisle: So how do you respond to that? If your wife, I mean, God bless Laura for being there and sticking it out. But when you're the person and you've assumed the risk and you're in your early forties and people are saying, oh, this isn't going to work, it's not working for any of the rest of us, how do you respond to that?

Chris Lynch: And for young kids.

Lisa Belisle: And for young kids. I didn't want to keep going and piling it on, except I guess in retrospect you've been successful. But at the time, as you're going through it, what are the sort of internal resources, or what do you have to tell yourself?

Chris Lynch: The reason I started the company was I thought there was a need. I thought that the Maine, coastal Maine real estate, the Maine lifestyle was underappreciated. I thought it was under-marketed. I thought it was undervalued. I thought there was room for a better presentation, for more investment, more infrastructure. It just seemed to me, and again, at the time, it seems like I was the only one seeing that. I was crazy enough to do it. But there was a real opportunity to do more with what we had here. It just looked like it had to be. And for a while I couldn't prove that I was right. It took a long time, but I really believed in it. I just thought we kept doing the right thing, even though 2008 and nine and 10 were really tough. I just kept investing, kept growing.

Lisa Belisle: And when you say you kept investing, you're reinvesting the resources, not only from your organization, but also, I'm guessing, personally.

Chris Lynch: Well, there were no resources from the organization.

Lisa Belisle: Oh. So I guess you just kept personally putting your own money into it.

Chris Lynch: It was my kids' college fund. Which has since been replenished. And three of them are out. But for a while, it was basically our savings. We were saving for our kids' college. And I said, it's time to do something, time to do something different, do something new. It was an idea that made sense to me. It was the stick-to-itiveness that really made the difference.

Lisa Belisle: So where does that come from in you?

Chris Lynch: I don't know, but it can be a problem sometimes. I hate to give up. I hate to lose.

Lisa Belisle: Hate to lose.

Chris Lynch: Yes. I hate to.

Lisa Belisle: So there's something about the challenge of it, and maybe even people saying, oh, we don't think this is going to work, we don't think this is a good idea.

Chris Lynch: And again, I heard that a lot. And I would say, you might be right. Call you back in a year. We'll know better by then. But I was really convinced and, maybe delusionally so, I was convinced.

Lisa Belisle: Well, that's interesting too, because again, you come from finance, you're a numbers guy, so you need numbers to be able to say, typically, this is going to succeed. And yet here you are saying you didn't really have any information that suggested that you actually would succeed.

Chris Lynch: No, I had a plan. And the plan was, first year grow, which I did. And I knew it wouldn't make money. Growth was expensive. And then the second year to grow, and I knew I'd lose money because growth is even more expensive in the second year than it was the first year. And then the third year I would be breaking even. And what I didn't predict was a three year global financial meltdown. And that changed it quite a bit. I worked in the bond business, so I've been through cycles, I've been through interest rates going up, interest rates going down, making money, losing money. And I know cycles usually don't last forever. That was a prolonged and very deep cycle. It was really unpleasant. I'd be kidding if I told you otherwise. It was hard. That was hard. And then 2011, all of a sudden, I felt like everything we had done just came in. It just came to life. And it was July 4th weekend, 2011, and all of a sudden our signs popped up everywhere we'd been prospecting and our agent base was growing and our customer base was growing and we're getting repeat business from four years ago. And it's just, all those little things, it takes a while. And that was the other thing, I think I was maybe a little naive as to how long it takes to start a new brand, grow a new company, and get that acceptance in the marketplace. It seemed so obvious to me. I thought it would take six months, but it didn't. That was going to take three years without the meltdown. It took six instead.

Lisa Belisle: So that's something that a lot of people struggle with, is when to give up versus when to say, okay, I'm going to hang in there. And you obviously chose to hang in there. Other people don't. But you never know what that point is.

Chris Lynch: No. I mean, there is a break point and fortunately, I never got close. Really my resolve was there the whole time. And again, it was hard. It was hard. But my resolve was there. I just knew that if we kept doing it, if you do the right thing long enough, I mean, cliché, but it does, it comes back. And we just kept doing the right thing.

Lisa Belisle: I know in my family and raising my kids, I have my older ones who saw me go through rough times. And my youngest one has seen relatively nice times as a result. And you have a span of four kids.

Chris Lynch: Four kids, eight years.

Lisa Belisle: Have you ever explored with them their experience of going through rough times versus now? Or do you feel like everybody's kind of like, no, I'm good, we're fine?

Chris Lynch: So fortunate, all four of my kids to a pretty high degree take after my wife. And so they're just super nice kids. They communicate with each other, they communicate with us all the time. I would say my two daughters talk to my wife at least every day, sometimes more than that. My oldest son moved back to Maine four years ago and just started his fifth year with my company and was just promoted to chief financial officer. And he's got a great life here in Maine. He loves his life here. He loves his job, he loves the company, he loves his dad, loves his mom, his brothers, sisters. And as they've grown, they've gotten even more close to each other and to us, which is interesting.

Lisa Belisle: So you're not hearing from them that they felt this kind of struggle that you were going through professionally?

Chris Lynch: I don't think so. Probably at some level they could all, our little one, all tell a story that, you know, I can remember when you came home it didn't look good. But they've never verbalized that to me. And I tried not to bring work home with me. When we got home, we all sat down to dinner every night. We all had lots of things to talk about. We had school, we had kids' sports, we had what we're going to do next as a family. And so we never really had to get into, boy, this is tough.

Lisa Belisle: So not only did you have to stick to it despite everybody else's concerns on your behalf, but also you were showing up and putting the best face forward for your family. So that showed some pretty significant, I would think, inner fortitude and an ability to frame things in a very...

Chris Lynch: Don't they call that compartmentalism? Maybe.

Lisa Belisle: Maybe that's what it is.

Chris Lynch: Compartmentalizing.

Lisa Belisle: I mean, I suppose you could take it also as a negative. But I was just thinking, the ability to, I mean, you clearly had to frame it in such a way that you could actually yourself continue to exist and move forward and also make it possible for your children not to be impacted. And maybe it's compartmentalizing, but I just think of it as just a really strong framing. Like your worldview is very specific and this is the one you're going to go with and we're going to go in this direction together.

Chris Lynch: Well, where I'd come from, obviously working on Wall Street, was super hard. It was really rough and tumble every day. You could go in and lose your job, and there wasn't any margin for error. And so that was really stressful and that was really hard. And part of the reason we moved to Maine was that my kids never saw me. I left the house at five and five thirty in the morning on a good day, got home at nine thirty, ten o'clock at night. On the weekends, Saturday, usually napped half the day to catch up. And Sunday morning I went back into work for a couple hours. And that was a lifestyle that was fantastic when I was 25 to 35, 36, started to get a little tiresome at 37. And then a month after my 38th birthday I said, let's do something different. And this is what different was, and what different brought to us. So even in the toughest days in real estate, it was still a little bit easier than my easiest day on Wall Street, in fairness. It was really tough. And so I had that background. I was so happy to be where I was and doing what I was doing, even if it wasn't working at the time. That's what got me through.

Lisa Belisle: I'm interested in your experiences in leadership, because if what you're describing is going from kind of a much smaller or manageable organization to now a hundred people. And is this a hundred agents that are working?

Chris Lynch: A hundred agents. So that's a hundred, about 12 employees.

Lisa Belisle: So that's a lot. You're talking managing a very large group of individuals, and I'm sure that you're not day to day managing every single one of these people yourself. But it still requires leadership skills that I think are more highly developed than perhaps people understand.

Chris Lynch: Leadership's an interesting thing. And I went from 400 people under me, but I had department heads on Wall Street, to zero and now up to a hundred. And most of the hundred, I have a chief operating officer, I have a chief financial officer, and I have a brokerage manager. And that's our infrastructure. In five of my six offices, I don't have in-office management. I manage those offices along with my team. Real estate agents, by and large, are independent contractors. They like to do their own thing. They work for themselves. They're focused on themselves. And we try to let them do what they need to do and not burden them with management responsibilities, and try to get people around them to focus on their priorities.

And so we do that at the corporate level. And that's been a huge difference between us and other real estate companies. Most of them have in-office managers, in-office management, oftentimes they are or were top producing agents and they just ran out of things to give them. And so they said, we'll put you in charge. And management is different. Management is, you have to put your people's needs and their desires and their goals ahead of yours. So I have a list of things every day that I need to do. Very few of them ever get done. If someone has a problem, my agenda comes second. And I think that's the most important part of management.

Lisa Belisle: I'm also interested in the fact that you're describing people who work independently, which is excellent and wonderful. And I love working with high performing people. And I do, because I work with doctors and nurse practitioners and other people who are very high performing, very intelligent, very motivated. And also, there's still a need to maintain a culture. There's, in your case, the need to maintain a brand. So you're kind of doing parallel processes there.

Chris Lynch: Yes. It's something we talk about a lot and we review every year, funny, this time of year, mid-December really to mid-January is our, let's look back, let's look forward. And what we realized is we're very, very particular about who we bring on. Even though they're independent contractors, there's a lot of business models out there that's just, if you get a license, certain real estate companies will hire you whether you have any potential or talent or not. And you either sink or swim. We only hire swimmers. Most of them have to have swum before. And we have high functioning people. What makes us different is all of our agents, without exception, are pulling the rope in the same direction. We don't have big teams that will kind of disrupt the culture and the organization. We really work super hard to make sure the individual gets seen, the individuals are recognized, the individual is assisted every way that they need to be, to be as successful as they want to be. But we're people first and real estate agents second. And while that may seem subtle, it's not. We have really, really good people. And you put good people with a good brand, with pretty good management and a good company. It just works. It really works.

Lisa Belisle: Having worked with several of your agents and also personally familiar with your agents, that definitely comes through, the importance of relationships and the importance of really being known as an individual versus just a client, at least from my vantage point, which is really important, really powerful.

Chris Lynch: I don't go to a lot of real estate events. I go to some, but the ones I do, the Greater Portland Board of Realtors, Association of Realtors events, they're great, but what I love most about them when I go, I talk to agents from other companies and they all consistently say, I love working with your agents. And to me that's the biggest compliment I can get at an event like that. Really proud of everybody that I work with.

Lisa Belisle: So do you ever think about, if you've been doing this for this company for 17 years and you've now expanded across the state, do you ever think about the number of places that you drive by that you're like, oh, we touched that place and that place and that place and that place?

Chris Lynch: Yes, I'll turn a corner somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and there's our sign right there. So we did, I think we're in 12 counties in 87 towns last year in terms of where we did business and where we transacted business. And so it's pretty neat. Most of them are beautiful places and beautiful locations. And we are expanding. We now do business in New Hampshire, mostly in the Seacoast, and we just added an agent further up in what they call the Upper Valley, which is near Hanover, New Hampshire and Dartmouth College up that way.

Lisa Belisle: What do you think the opportunities are in your field over the next five years, let's say?

Chris Lynch: So you hit on one earlier, it really could be development. Maine does need more residential development. There is plenty of land to develop. Maine, in certain places, has grown hostile to development, which is hard. City and town regulations make it very difficult for people to build homes, even developers to build homes, certainly speculative builders, to build homes and actually make a profit. And so regulations, hopefully the state and some of the cities and towns that have been very strict with regulations will start to loosen up, recognizing that no one's going to build there and no one's going to be able to live there unless we can afford to build there and people can afford to buy there. So the biggest opportunity I hope is on the legislative side, local and state.

Lisa Belisle: Have you seen any shifting in the Portland area as far as that's concerned? Because I know that new builds, there's just not a lot of that going on.

Chris Lynch: So Portland obviously has been probably one of the more legislatively aggressive cities, certainly in Maine, but maybe even in the country. And there was just a conference, the MEREDA conference, which is the commercial real estate conference, big conference every year. And what came out of that, there were a lot of headlines, but that Lewiston and Auburn, which has struggled for many years, particularly Lewiston, is doing really well, and that the city has grown very developer friendly, much more business friendly, and is now starting to pick up the people who weren't going to develop or thinking about developing in Portland. And now they're looking at Lewiston as being a great place to help the community, but also make a profit.

Lisa Belisle: You know, Portland, it seems like, is making some positive strides, but maybe not quite as many positive strides as other places.

Chris Lynch: I think Portland is increasing regulation and making it harder to develop.

Lisa Belisle: Oh, so the opposite of what I just said.

Chris Lynch: The opposite. So, you know, rent control is making it hard for the property owners and a lot of people. And then it's a cascade. Rent control has been tried in many other places around the country and my understanding is it hasn't worked very well just about anywhere. And who knows, maybe it'll work better in Portland, but that remains to be seen. There's just a lot of regulation. It's super hard. It takes a long time. It's expensive. There's a lot more information, there's a lot more that the developers have to give to the community before they can get a permit to build. And then the neighborhoods by and large are hostile to development too. So while there's a demand for it, maybe even an unlimited demand for people who want to live in Portland, it's hard to develop there.

Lisa Belisle: And I find that somewhat distressing, to be honest. I'm sure you probably do too, because I think about all the large companies that have been able to create beautiful locations in Portland. I even look at the VA, the Veterans Administration. They have a beautiful new location in the middle of Portland, even has some parking, which is amazing. Not always the case in every VA. But if you want to work at that VA and you can't afford to live in Portland, you're commuting from somewhere else. Or any of the companies really.

Chris Lynch: So commuting distance to Portland has gotten very expensive for all the aforementioned reasons. You run out of space here, people start moving west, they move to Westbrook, then they move to Gorham, then they move to Standish, and they move to Buxton. Then they keep going farther, farther afield. They're up to Gray and New Gloucester towards Auburn. And I know in your field, the doctors who are on call sometimes particularly want to be close to the hospitals, so they don't usually want to be more than 15 minutes, 20 minutes in case they get called to an emergency. And most of the hospitals are in areas that are pretty popular.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. It's an interesting conundrum.

Chris Lynch: It is.

Lisa Belisle: I always wonder about this, if you have such disparate stakeholders. You've got people who want development, people who don't want development, people who think about environmental impact, all the other considerations. How do we get the stakeholders to a place where they can perhaps start understanding how to make concessions, so that's going to be better for the ecosystem as a whole?

Chris Lynch: I think you first have to stop it from continuing to go the other way, where the stakeholders are getting more entrenched and farther apart. I don't think that outward movement has actually stopped yet. Maybe once it stops, maybe we'll start to come back together. But it might take a crisis. Sometimes it does. I mean, if everybody wakes up in the morning and says, you know, it's going to be okay today, this really doesn't force change. And so far, I think most everybody in Maine still wakes up and says, by and large, on average it's going to be okay today, we're going to get through the day, it's going to be okay. And then that raises all kinds of other issues and questions. But I do think the stakeholders are still moving farther apart. I haven't seen a lot of movement to bring those stakeholders closer together from my perspective.

Lisa Belisle: Yes.

Chris Lynch: But you're right. That's where we need to be.

Lisa Belisle: That's where we need to be. And I don't have the sense that Covid has actually improved this.

Chris Lynch: No, it's exacerbated it. No question. It's forced this demand for living here on a state that wasn't ready or used to it. Net in-migration was 0.05% for like a decade. And if you look at the numbers, I think it was North American Van Lines showed the last two years, Maine has had the largest percentage of net in-migration, number one in 2021, and number two in 2022, of any state in the country. So people are coming. And they're figuring it out somehow.

Lisa Belisle: Which I think is great. And also, I still come at it from a how do we help make sure that our communities stay healthy? We currently, my field, healthcare, we can't really get enough people to come here in the first place. Once we get here, there aren't enough places to put them to actually live so that they can work for our organization and other healthcare organizations. And then how do we help them to stay? I think this idea of how do we make sure that we have ongoing good healthcare, education, other community resources, for me, I just think it's such a critical issue right now. I don't know if that's the crisis point, when we stop being able to take care of people because we haven't addressed the need for our development.

Chris Lynch: Well, it puts a lot of pressure on the healthcare system to potentially get into other businesses. If you buy a hotel in Bar Harbor, none of your employees for the summer can afford to live there. And there's not a lot of housing for employees in that market. And that's just one example. Every city and town up and down the coast of Maine has it. The hotel owners buy properties in and around, over time, and they house all their own staff. So they're in the hotel business, but they really didn't want to be in the landlord business in a meaningful way for seasonal staff. But that's what they have to do to get them housed and to run their business. And maybe these other organizations and industries are going to have to do more of the same, be more creative, be more energetic about solving their own problems, as opposed to waiting for the stakeholders to come together and solve them for them.

Lisa Belisle: Considering the margin that healthcare is running right now, I don't know how we would afford to get into more of that business.

Chris Lynch: I understand.

Lisa Belisle: Well, we've now generated even more questions than I had before we started.

Chris Lynch: That'll be our next show.

Lisa Belisle: That's right. We'll figure out all the problems of the world and then we'll move forward. But I do enjoy having this conversation with you, because I like hearing, we went from Maine being the sort of aging population, and we didn't actually have the resources to care for people because our aging population doesn't actually have the financial wherewithal to help care for themselves. But now we have people, when you bring them into the state, we can actually contribute to the tax base and contribute to the local economy, and maybe we can actually take care of people from Maine. So I like that it's kind of a good and a bad thing. There are new people we are going to take care of, but the new people coming in, maybe they're helping us take care of the people who are already here.

Chris Lynch: There's no question.

Lisa Belisle: I just don't know how to make all the...

Chris Lynch: But it's also, the building blocks, to your point, the resources, is where are the people who need independent but helpful living situations, and then where they might need a nursing home or they might need memory care. And again, it's the Noah's ark. There was kind of enough for everybody who needed it going back five years ago. And now there's been a lot of people who were going to move out of the state of Maine and said, we're going to go somewhere else. We're going somewhere warm. That's what we hear a lot. And people, particularly in their sixties, seventies, and even eighties, three, four years ago, said, we're going to put our house, in January of 2020, we're going to put our house on the market in the spring. March of 2020. Covid hits. So they didn't want people in their houses, they didn't want to go, they couldn't go elsewhere to look for a home. And that went on for an extended period of time. And then there were people who wanted to buy, but they couldn't come here and they didn't want to go into the homes people lived in. And so we had this whole sort of lock on people, and many are still saying it. So they were all saying, well, we're going to sell as soon as Covid is over. And I don't know if Covid is over yet or not, but it's mostly over, it seems for most people. And then over the last six or seven months, we've had mortgage rates go from 3% to as high as 7%. Now they're about six and a quarter. And so now if you sell, you pay off your 3% mortgage, you take a 6% mortgage, and you lose about $300,000 worth of buying power. So you sell your home, you buy something $300,000 less, but your mortgage rate doesn't go down. And so now people are saying, for that reason, we have people that for three, four years have decided they were going to sell that still haven't put their house on the market. And that backlog is preventing that whole cycle of turnover, not just here, it's happening in other parts of the country as well.

Lisa Belisle: So I guess I'm going to go back to what you said before, that everything runs in cycles. So let's not panic. We have some new problems and some problems that we've probably dealt with before, but we'll get through this. We'll figure it out. Because everything runs in cycles, it'll be okay.

Chris Lynch: And Maine sometimes moves so slowly that we miss cycles altogether. So right now, I've been other places recently where the real estate markets are softening, inventories building aggressively, prices are going down. And now we're starting to get buyers coming here from those places thinking that Maine's the same way. And it's not. Maine prices haven't gone down. Our market's strong, it's stable. Which will create, to your cycle point, it will create opportunities for those people now to go elsewhere and buy something of value for less than they could have during the pandemic. And that break is what we need to create opportunities for people to sell and get to where they wanted to get to three years ago. Charleston, South Carolina, Naples, Florida, two very popular places for Mainers to go. Savannah, Georgia, which I know you know. And those beautiful places that are nice in the winter too. Not that Maine isn't, I love Maine in the winter.

Lisa Belisle: Well, it'll be interesting to see how things evolve over time. And it'll be interesting to check in with you in a year or so, let's see where things go.

Chris Lynch: I think a year is about right and I think we're going to wake up and say, boy, we did really great. We did really well. We weathered the storm. Things are getting more normal again. There's some infrastructure development. Those stakeholders have figured out a way to come together. We're seeing new development. And there are different areas that have been particularly thoughtful about trying to get more people and more development, and other places, as you know, we're happy where we are, we don't need to make any changes. And so that's all going to unwind, and people are going to have to come together to figure out a way to make it all work.

Lisa Belisle: All right. I'm going to take that as the gospel.

Chris Lynch: Well, I've really enjoyed getting to have this time with you.

Lisa Belisle: I know you're a busy person, so spending time with you to learn more about what's been going on in your business.

Chris Lynch: Great to see you.

Lisa Belisle: It's good to see you. I've been speaking with Chris Lynch, who is the owner of Legacy Properties Sotheby's International here in Maine. And I encourage you to learn more about his organization. We actually have taken advantage of their services. They're wonderful brokers. And Chris is a wonderful individual, and I thank you for coming in with us.

Chris Lynch: Well, thank you for having me, and we'll see you in a year.

Lisa Belisle: See you in a year. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you have been listening to or watching Radio Maine.