What $750,000 Gets You in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region and North Country
Same price. Four completely different relationships with a house.
Most people shopping at a given price point assume the variable is location. Which town, which lake, which school district. The number is fixed; everything else moves around it.
But spend some time looking at what’s actually on the market in the Lakes Region and North Country right now, and something else comes into focus. At $750,000, you can buy a house built in 1900 — two of them, actually, on the same compound — or one that received its certificate of occupancy last month. You can buy a 1917 farmhouse on a Sugar Hill ridge with mountain views that don’t ask permission, or a carefully tended 1988 Cape on 2.25 wooded acres with a stream behind the deck and gardens someone has been keeping up for thirty-seven years.
Same number. Completely different question.
The question, it turns out, is what kind of house are you looking for. Or, more interestingly, what kind of life are you looking to build?
829 Bearcamp Highway, Tamworth | $729,000 | 4 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms | 4,300 sq ft | Built 1900 | 1.69 acres
Most listings at this price are one house. This is a lifestyle.
Two complete homes — one a primary residence, one that has been used as a rental — with combined square footage over 4,300. A 30x50 barn with electricity, solar panels paid off, and a full loft above. A detached three-bay garage with walk-up storage. A woodshed. A playhouse tucked into the property overlooking Cold Brook, which runs along more than 600 feet of the lot and leads, via walking trails, to swimming holes and a waterfall that the listing correctly describes as a private backyard wilderness.
Tamworth has no zoning. That detail, combined with two addresses on a corner lot, means the possibilities here are genuinely open. Multi-generational living. A rental unit. An Airbnb. A workshop, a studio, a barn full of cars, a serious vegetable garden with the sun exposure to back it up. The property can hold a lot of different versions of a life.
The Barnstormers Theatre — oldest continuously operating summer theater in the country — is in town. So is a farmers market, Tamworth Distillery, and Remick Farm.
189 days on market. This property is waiting for the person who can see what it is — which is not a house, exactly. It’s a place to build a different life.
1196 Route 117, Sugar Hill | $749,500 | 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms | 3,081 sq ft | Built 1917 | 2.59 acres
Sugar Hill sits above Franconia Notch on a road that opens into views of the Kinsman and Franconia ranges without warning. In June the lupine fields pull people from across New England. The rest of the year it sits there being quietly extraordinary without making a fuss about it.
A 1917 farmhouse on 2.59 acres: four bedrooms, four bathrooms, just over 3,000 square feet. Seventeen years younger than the Tamworth house, which doesn’t sound like much until you remember that 1917 had its own particular ideas about how a house should be built and what it should ask of the people living in it. This one has had about six weeks to find its buyer.
A house this old rewards buyers who ask the right questions — about systems, about updates, about what’s original and what’s been changed. But the bones of a well-placed 1917 farmhouse on a Sugar Hill ridge are genuinely hard to replicate. The views aren’t something you renovate into a property. They’re either there or they’re not.
This is the house for someone who has decided they want the mountains more than the lakes. Who wants elevation and character and a town with a strong identity. Who is drawn to the idea of a house that has already proven it knows how to weather time and events.
490 Meredith Center Road, Laconia | $750,000 | 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms | 2,362 sq ft | Built 1988 | 2.25 acres
1988 doesn’t get the same treatment as 1900 or 2026. It’s not old enough to carry history and not new enough to carry a warranty. It’s the vintage that gets described, accurately but without poetry, as “well-maintained.” Which is a way of saying: someone has loved this house carefully for a long time, and it shows.
This one is a Cape on 2.25 wooded acres just outside downtown Laconia — wood-beam ceilings, wide-plank hardwood floors, floor-to-ceiling windows that bring the trees inside without asking you to go outside to find them. A propane stove for winter nights. A back deck overlooking a stream. Blooming flowers along the walkways that someone planted with intention and kept up with every season since.
The kitchen has been updated: quartz countertops, glass-front cabinetry, new appliances. The primary suite has a steam shower. These are not the original choices of a 1988 house. They’re the considered choices of someone who knew what they wanted and did it right, which is a different thing and usually a better one.
What 1988 gives you that 1900 doesn’t: systems that have grown up alongside modern expectations. What it gives you that 2026 doesn’t: a property that already knows what it is. The gardens are established. The trees are mature. The stream has been running behind that deck for thirty-seven years.
This is the house for someone who doesn’t need a project and doesn’t need everything new. Who wants to walk in and recognize immediately that the people before them had good taste and took care of things. Who understands that a well-loved house from 1988 on 2.25 acres near downtown Laconia is not a compromise. It’s a find.
103 Ladd Hill Road, Belmont | $749,000 | 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms | 2,644 sq ft | Built 2026 | 0.89 acres
And then there’s this one.
Certificate of occupancy dated 2026. Four bedrooms, three bathrooms, 2,644 square feet on just under an acre in Belmont — a town with good access to the Lakes Region’s core: Laconia, Meredith, Gunstock, the lakes themselves. New systems. New decisions. Nobody else’s choices embedded in the walls, which sounds like a small thing until you’ve owned an old house.
For buyers who have looked at the 1900 Tamworth house and felt the weight of what that project might ask of them — in time, in money, in the particular patience that old houses require — this is the honest alternative. You don’t have to want a house with history. Some people want to be the history.
67 days on market suggests it’s waiting for the right buyer rather than the wrong price. At $327 per finished square foot, it’s priced like a new house in the Lakes Region because that’s what it is.
This is the house for someone who wants to open the door and have everything work. Who would rather spend their weekends on the lake or the mountain than on the house. Who isn’t interested in a project, and knows it.
What the Year Tells You
These four listings don’t answer the same question. They answer four different ones.
The Tamworth compound and the Sugar Hill farmhouse ask whether you want to step into something with a past — one with the scale and infrastructure to become almost anything, one with the character and setting to become exactly one thing, perfectly. The Meredith Cape asks whether you’d rather inherit someone else’s good decisions than make all your own from scratch. The Belmont house asks whether you want the next chapter of your life to start without a renovation in it.
None of those is the wrong answer. But one of them is probably more yours than the others. And at $750,000 in this region, knowing which one matters more than almost anything else about the search.
We talk to a lot of buyers who come in with a price and a lake and find out, somewhere in the middle of the process, that what they actually needed to know was what kind of life they’re hoping to build. It’s a better question than it sounds.
Here’s to knowing the answer before you start looking.
🧭 Jenn & Andrea
Keys to the Lakes
