Price Reductions for New Homes at an All-Time High

Nearly one in five new homes saw price cuts in late 2025, overtaking the resale market for the first time in recent history, according to Realtor.com Quarterly New Construction Insights. In the same quarter, the share of existing homes with cuts was 18.3 percent, signaling a shift in how builders and existing-sellers are competing for homebuyers.

Price reductions in the existing-home market are generally concentrated in the South and West, and the data reveal that new construction homes also follow this geographic pattern, with some exceptions. Although they are in the Midwest and Northeast, Indiana, Minnesota, and New Jersey have more price reductions on newly-built homes than the national level.

"New construction has been one of the steadiest parts of the housing market over the past few years, but builders are clearly responding to today's affordability pressures and higher-levels of existing-home inventory," said Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com. "Nearly one in five new homes cut prices, more than in the resale market for the first time in recent history. This is not just a reflection of regional divergence and where new homes are built; we are seeing builders compete more directly on price to keep sales moving, even as overall new-home prices remain relatively stable."

There are seven states, Nevada, Indiana, South Carolina, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Texas, where the rate of price reductions is higher than the national level (18.3 percent). In these states, there are more price reductions among new construction listings than existing listings, though most of them have relatively high levels of existing home price reductions as well. Four of them are in the South or West, where new construction activity is highest and general home inventory is elevated, but the other three (Indiana, Minnesota, and New Jersey) truly stand out. Four of these are situated in the South or West, regions characterized by high levels of new construction and elevated inventory. Indiana, Minnesota, and New Jersey represent the three notable exceptions.

In the fourth quarter of 2025, the median listing price for a newly built home was $451,128, up just 0.3 percent from a year earlier, while resale home prices were essentially flat. But those topline numbers mask a widening divergence by property type. Newly built condos and townhomes carried a substantially higher premium (30.7 percent) over existing attached homes, while newly built single-family homes were priced just 10.7 percent above existing single-family homes — a gap that has been shrinking.