PORTLAND (AP) – The real estate slump is resulting in declining real estate transfer tax collections across northern New England.

Maine officials project that they will take in $18.9 million in transfer taxes for the current fiscal year, which runs through June. That’s a 44 percent drop from the peak three years ago.

That amount makes up just a small portion of the state’s overall budget, but half of it goes to the Housing Opportunities for Maine Fund, which helps create and preserve affordable housing.

“That’s huge, and it’s causing us to need to focus the small amount of HOME Fund (money) we have on the safety net for the very low-income, the housing safety net,” said Dale McCormick, director of MaineHousing.

When people buy and sell real estate in Maine, they pay a transfer tax equal to $4.40 for each $1,000 in property value, with the buyer and seller each paying half. The state gets 90 percent of the revenues, and counties get 10 percent.

With home sales and home prices both down, transfer taxes have fallen sharply – and not just in Maine.

In New Hampshire, officials say real estate transfer tax collections for November totaled $8.8 million, which is $4.8 million less than expected and $2.6 million less than the same month last year. Year to date, transfer tax collections were 33 percent below projections and 21 percent behind last year.

In Vermont, receipts for the property transfer tax plunged more than 14 percent in the first six months of the fiscal year, compared with the same period last year. In 2007, revenues from the tax in the first half of the year were $20 million. This year, they’re down to $17.2 million.

“Definitely, it’s fewer transactions and sales values that either aren’t appreciating or are depreciating,” said state Tax Commissioner Tom Pelham.

MaineHousing’s HOME Fund may be feeling the pinch as much as anyone.

The fund was allotted $10.7 million in 2002-03, and last fiscal year it received just over $7 million. But recent revenue forecasts indicate it will receive just $4.7 million in 2008-09, McCormick said.

In response, the agency has eliminated a subsidy program that aims to persuade developers to set aside portions of their subdivisions for affordable housing, and cut another program that seeks to keep previously affordable housing units from being sold at market rates.

A program to make energy-efficiency repairs to homeless shelters also has been scrapped, along with a program that helped people replace inefficient mobile homes built before 1976.

The decline is also being felt on the county level.

In York County, real estate transfer taxes dropped more than a third between 2007 and 2008, from $591,000 to $392,000. Besides transfer taxes, fees paid to have deeds and mortgages recorded with the county fell from $1.3 million in 2007 to $1.1 million in 2008 because of slow sales.

“In August, it looked like we were going to be OK, and then it just dropped,” said York County Registrar Debra Anderson. “October, November and December have just been decline, decline, decline.”

The drop in real estate transfer tax revenues and recording fees comes as Maine’s real estate industry continues to struggle.

Existing home sales in November were down 23 percent from the same month a year earlier, with median home prices falling 8 percent.