New-Construction Insights: New Home Demand is Driven by Shoppers from Other Metro Areas

Highlights

• New construction listing prices held steady in 2026Q2, but falling existing home prices have driven up the new construction premium nationwide to 10.3% from 8.2% a year ago.
• For a third straight quarter, the share of new homes receiving price cuts exceeds the share of existing homes receiving price cuts (20.0% vs. 18.6%%)  as builders try to find the right price point to entice buyers.
• New-home demand is more likely to come from out-of-metro shoppers than existing-home demand. This is true overall (67.2% for new construction compared to 65.4% for existing homes), and also across town, suburban, and urban new construction listings.
• The metros that get the most views from other metro areas on their new construction listings tend to be Southern and affordable, and they also tend to have more price cuts on their new construction listings.

National Overview

The median listing price for a newly-built home in the United States came in at $450,256 in the second quarter of 2026. This is a slight increase from the first quarter of 2026, as seasonal trends would predict, but it represents a 0.1% decrease from the second quarter of 2025. This is the first year-over-year decline in the median listing price for new homes since the first quarter of 2025. All of the recent price changes for new builds are really quite small, as the new construction median listing price has been right around $450,000 since the fourth quarter of 2023. Existing homes have been driving the nationwide listing price decreases we have seen in 2026, and the median price for existing homes in 2026Q2 fell 2.0% year over year to $408,317.

After several years of existing home inventory growth far outpacing new home inventory growth, we have now seen two consecutive quarters of nearly equal, slow growth for both the number of new homes and existing homes on the market. There were 3.1% more existing homes for sale in 2026Q2 than in 2025Q2, down significantly from from the 20%-plus growth rates of 2024 and 2025. The pace of inventory recovery has cooled as home sellers reckon with a market characterized by weaker homebuyer demand and falling prices, as well as the fact that many of them are locked into low mortgage rates from the pandemic period. Simply put, it’s a tough time to sell a home and many would-be sellers are opting out. New home inventory growth, at 2.8% year over year, is more in line with the recent trend but slowing as well. Single-family new construction activity has been a bit muted in 2026 as builders face the same demand challenges as resellers, and fewer new builds are hitting the market. 

One of the more interesting developments in the market for new construction is the growth in the prevalence of price reductions, even as resellers have begun to cut prices less often. For the third straight quarter, new homes for sale have been more likely to see their prices reduced than existing homes. 20.0% of new builds had price reductions in 2026Q2 compared to 18.6% of existing homes. That’s a 1.9 percentage point increase year over year for new homes and a 1.7 percentage point decrease year over year for existing homes. While home resellers are adjusting to the realities of the market and pricing more realistically off the bat, builders are instead choosing to list high, and dynamically adjust prices to meet the market as needed.

Another recent development in the new home market is that new builds for sale are getting bigger. The median newly built home for-sale came in at 2,050 square feet, up from 2,045 last year in the second quarter. This is a reversal of the trend of 2023 and 2024, when new builds were becoming smaller (the median new build in 2023Q2 was 2,098 square feet). With the slight bump in square footage, the median price per square foot of new homes has fallen in the second quarter of 2026 to $217 from $219 in 2025Q2. Existing homes had their price per square foot fall as well, from $226 to $222 in the past year, and we find ourselves again in the odd scenario of existing homes being priced higher than new homes on a per square foot basis. This appears to be a seasonal trend, as existing home prices jump during the peak spring selling season, but the increase to new home square footage plays a role as well. The primary driver of this gap though is the location of newly built homes, which tend to be both larger and  more suburban than existing homes, resulting in lower values adjusted for size.

To understand the interplay between new and existing homes for sale, we focus on the new construction premium and new construction share of listings. Price softness in the existing home segment has led the new construction premium (the difference between the median new home price and the median existing home price) to rise in the second quarter of 2026, to 10.3% from 8.2% a year ago. The acceleration of price cuts in the new home segment suggests that new home prices may be on their way down, eroding this premium in the coming quarters. The similar inventory growth rates for new and existing homes has led the new construction share of listings to hold basically steady at 17.1% compared to 17.2% last year. New homes make up less of the market than they did in 2023 when existing home inventory had not yet started to recover from the pandemic shock, but they still offer buyers plenty of newly-built options in many markets.

Cross-Market Demand Trends for New Construction

As a leading marketplace for home shoppers, Realtor.com has access to information about the trends of where home shoppers are located and what types of homes they are looking for. To understand some general patterns of new construction buyers, we look at the urbanicity classifications of both where new homes and their viewers are located. The chart below shows nationally aggregated data on new homes in rural, suburban, town, and urban zip codes and whether the people viewing them come from rural, suburban, town, or urban zip codes. If you’re interested in general cross-market trends, not specific to new construction, see our recent Cross-Market Demand report which shows a steady increase in out-of-market home shopping in recent years.

Immediately clear is a preference for shoppers’ own type of location. The largest share of rural shoppers across the four categories occurs on rural new builds, the largest share of suburban shoppers across the four categories occurs on suburban new builds, and so on. This not only stems from people shopping locally, but the pattern holds for out-of-metro area viewership as well. One interesting point of comparison comes from looking at the same breakdown for existing homes, where suburban resale properties get a higher share of views from urban shoppers (40.57%) than suburban new homes do (37.60%). This holds true for only in-metro shoppers and only out-of-metro shoppers as well, suggesting that urban buyers looking to move to the suburbs of either their own city or another city are more likely to look for resale homes. This is despite the fact that many suburban zip codes have relatively low new construction premiums, so perhaps a knowledge gap about the affordability of new homes in the suburbs exists for urban buyers.

To see where views are coming from for new construction listings in different areas, the chart below shows the percentage of views that originate inside or outside the listing’s metro area.

All four categories of urbanicity see a majority of new construction views come from outside the metro area where the listing is located. This is not the case for existing homes, where urban resale listings get most of their views from in-metro (51.55%). Urban new construction listings also have the highest percentage of views coming from within their metropolitan area, roughly half, while suburban new construction listings get about two-thirds of their views from other metropolitan areas. 

Long-distance shoppers (from one metro to another) are essential to the demand makeup for new construction homes. Nationally, 67.2% of views to new construction listings come from different metro areas than the one the listing is located in. For existing homes, it’s 65.4%. Put simply, new-home demand is more likely to come from out-of-metro shoppers than existing-home demand, and this is true both overall and across every urbanicity category except for rural homes. 

In some markets, out-of-metro home shoppers are even more important to the local new construction market. The map below shows the metros where the highest share of new construction shoppers come from different metros.

With the lone exception of Stockton, CA, it’s Southern markets that dominate this ranking. Florida and the Carolinas are well represented. It’s also the case that most of these metropolitan areas have new construction priced near or below the national median. Affordability and Sun Belt lifestyles are driving cross-market migration into new construction homes. The table below shows the top 3 metro areas where these out-of-market views to new construction homes originate.

For many, the top out-of-market viewing metro is a nearby, more expensive one. Miami is the top viewer of new construction homes for all of the featured Florida markets and Stockton draws views from the Bay Area. The far-flung viewers tend to come from large, expensive metros like New York, Chicago, and DC.

Out-of-metro viewership tends to be consistent across new construction and resale listings, meaning that metros where resale listings get lots of attention from other metros tend to see high shares of out-of-metro viewership to their new construction listings as well, and metros with low out-of-metro viewership tend to have it for both resale and new construction listings. There are some notable exceptions where new construction out-of-metro viewership is higher than resale out-of-metro viewership. Each of these is a large, expensive, coastal metro with an out-of-metro viewer share for new construction that’s lower than the national average. In each of these metros, new construction is pricing out locals, who prefer to search for resale homes. 

Finally, we find a weak positive correlation between the metros with high shares of out-of-metro viewership and the metros where new construction listings are receiving the most price cuts. The implications here could cut one of two ways. Either the price reductions are doing a good job of attracting viewers from other metropolitan areas, or builders are being forced to cut prices in metros where they are not attracting enough views from within the metro area itself. The table below shows the top metros with new construction price cuts and their share of out-of-metro views to new construction listings.

Methodology

Realtor.com housing data as of June 2026. Listings include the active inventory of newly built single-family homes and condos/townhomes/row homes/co-ops for the given level of geography on Realtor.com. Realtor.com new-construction data history goes back to January 2023. ZIP codes are categorized based on RUCA codes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, household counts, and square mileage provided by Claritas, and pedestrian/public transit scores provided by Local Logic.