.gif)
.png)
The U.S. housing market added $2.6 trillion in value this year, hitting a record $52 trillion in mid-2025.But if you’re in home builder marketing, you already know inventory remains tight, mobility is down, and affordability is under pressure.
Here’s a quick pulse check from your peers. At the Audience Town's Plan to Win home builder strategy forum, builder marketers shared what they’re focused on, and what’s keeping them up at night:
- 60% said hitting or exceeding sales goals is their definition of “winning” in 2026.
- 45% said interest rates are their biggest wildcard.
- 41% described their outlook as cautiously confident.
- 17% are fully optimistic.
The pressure is on, uncertainty is high, and success is being defined in more realistic (and performance-driven) terms than ever.
Let’s dig into what 2025 taught us, what’s shifting beneath the surface, and how marketers can adjust strategy for the year ahead.
New Construction’s Quiet Affordability Advantage
In Q2 2025, the median price of a new home ($410,800) was actually lower than the median price of an existing home ($429,400), according to the NAHB. This is something we haven’t seen in decades. This reversal is no accident.
Builders made that possible by adapting quickly: smaller footprints, leaner lots, and strong incentive packages.
New construction accounted for nearly one-third of all housing market value growth in 2025, per Zillow. If you’re marketing new homes, you have the product buyers are actively turning to, especially in markets with tight resale supply.
Audience Town data revealed the following for all residential new construction this year:
- $508.29 per sq. ft (average)
- 5.82% average rate
- 93% are fixed rate
While the average price per square foot of used homes is significantly lower - at $228 in August 2025, according to the Federal Reserve - that only tells part of the story. The other part of the story? Location, financing, and maintenance costs.
In other words, new construction has a quiet advantage over used homes right now: affordability. Here’s why:
- New construction communities tend to be built in up-and-coming markets that are more affordable and/or have more upward potential.
- Builders are able to work with buyers on financing the home.
- New construction maintenance costs are significantly lower than that of existing homes.
Let’s dig into that a little more.
Skylar Olsen: The Maintenance Math No One Talks About
Here’s one of the most overlooked advantages of new homes: maintenance savings.
NAHB research shows that buyers of pre-1960 homes should expect to save nearly 1% of home value annually just for maintenance. That can be thousands of dollars every year. For newer homes, that number is closer to 0.2%.
Former Zillow Chief Economist Skylar Olsen shared in her keynote at our recent Home Builder Strategy Forum, Plan to Win, that, “new construction is often more affordable, especially when you factor in maintenance costs.”
In a market with stalled price appreciation forecasts, the cost of being house poor is higher than ever. As Olsen explains, “If your home isn’t going to appreciate like it did in the boom years, those upfront savings really matter.”
Builders in affordable regions, especially in the South and parts of the Midwest, can offer long-term financial value that’s hard to ignore.
In a time when many buyers are stretched thin, affordability is a meaningful differentiator (no matter where you’re located).
What home builder marketers can do right now:
- Feature total cost savings and maintenance predictability in your messaging. You might consider a calculator, or a storytelling moment like “What to do with an extra $300/month.”
- Consider showing new vs. used comparisons into your creative.
- Build campaigns around “Why New Makes More Sense,” or “The Dollars and Sense of New Construction,” especially in tight or high-priced markets.
Audience Town helps you generate more traffic, and better quality leads, by allowing you to see detailed demographics about who is visiting your site, and where your best leads are coming from. Imagine testing a new campaign, and being able to see if it drove the qualified traffic to your community. That’s the magic of Audience Town. See how it works.
Inventory Is Low. Mobility Is Lower.
While new homes are more available than existing ones, it’s still a supply-constrained market. Many homeowners remain locked into ultra-low mortgage rates, reluctant to sell. As a result, mobility is at a multi-decade low.
As Audience Town CEO Ed Carey shared in his recent Ed-Itorial: “In 2019, 40 million Americans moved. This year, we’ll be lucky if it’s half that.”
One of the most fascinating takeaways from Skylar Olsen’s session was how moving behavior has shifted across different age groups…and what that means for how we market new homes.
In her words, there’s “a lot of potential demand in the market,” but that demand is unevenly distributed and shaped by generational factors.
You Need to Understand Your Buyer
Skylar showed that younger adults are now more likely to move than they were in 2016, especially buyers in their late 20s to early 30s. She connected this trend to life-stage transitions and a renewed urgency among Millennials and older Gen Z to finally enter the housing market. It’s not just theory either; Zillow’s 2025 New Construction Buyer Report found that 17% of new construction buyers in 2024 were Gen Z.
“There’s a lot of what I would call potential demand in the market. That demand is uncertain…but it’s there.”
Employment is also a factor here; remote work remains sticky. Demand continues to shift toward distant, affordable suburbs and homes with WFH-friendly features.
On the flip side, mobility among middle-aged adults (roughly 35 to 54) has declined since 2016. Skylar cited one of the strongest correlating factors: the rising share of adult children living at home. This group is more likely to be rate-locked, stable in their careers, and cautious about taking on a new mortgage, even if they have equity to work with.
Interestingly, older adults (55+) are slightly more mobile than they were in 2016, particularly in markets that offer better affordability or lifestyle flexibility. Skylar highlighted metros like Charleston, SC as examples where job growth, affordability, and community amenities are attracting not just first-time buyers, but also downsizers and retirees.
So what’s the takeaway for us as marketers? If you’re still relying on a 2019-era persona map, it’s probably time for an update. The most active movers today are younger, more pragmatic, and often more financially savvy than we give them credit for. And while older buyers may be quieter, they’re still moving - just more selectively, and often with higher expectations for simplicity, low maintenance, and value.
Every move matters more, and builders can’t afford to miss when demand does show up. This makes lead quality, speed to lead, and buyer targeting more important than ever.
What you can do:
- Use real-time referrer and behavioral data to prioritize qualified traffic sources
- Tighten your paid budget to the ZIPs and channels showing conversion-ready activity
- If you’re not already tracking attribution beyond form fills, it’s time
In other words, you need better insights about which prospects are qualified, and you need to dial in your attribution of home sales to key marketing and sales touchpoints.
That shift is already underway. When we polled marketing leaders during the forum, nearly half (48%) said attributed sales is their primary measure of campaign success. A further 17% look at form submissions or sales volume, and just 8.7% track website traffic.
It’s clear that the best marketers aren’t just chasing leads anymore; they’re looking for proof. Attribution is no longer a nice-to-have - it’s the (gold) standard.
Audience Town’s Attribution Add-On does exactly that. Our platform gives you more transparency and clarity, without the guesswork. Book a demo to see how.
Regional Disparities Are Growing
2025 made one thing clear: this is not a national market. Olsen introduced the term “industry thrash” to describe the weirdness we’re all feeling: some markets are strong, others softening, and they’re changing quickly.
Southeastern metros like Charleston are still growing. Coastal California and parts of the Midwest are pulling back. Inventory is high in some places, nonexistent in others. The point is: your national trends don’t help if you’re selling homes in zip 29492.
Market performance is increasingly uneven by sector and location. “You can’t plan by averages. You have to plan ZIP by ZIP.”
In other words, you need hyperlocal competitive intelligence to win in 2026. The good news? That’s available today from Audience Town.
What to do now:
- Use ZIP-level data to inform your strategy from land purchases to sales strategies.
- Don’t set your 2026 goals based on last year’s regional averages. You need more detailed insights about your market and its buyers.
- Talk to sales. Market-specific insight from your team is gold right now, especially when combined with trustworthy data.
Audience Town’s Market Assessment provides a clear picture of what’s really happening at the ZIP-code level: who’s buying, what’s being built, what’s selling, and what kinds of homes are outperforming in your competitive set.
If you haven’t already, it’s worth looking at that data before you finalize next year’s plans. It can be a game-changer for how you position pricing, amenities, and even which communities get more marketing budget.
Planning for 2026: Optionality Is the Strategy
The Builder’s Daily outlines four possible futures for homebuilding: status quo, resilience, disruption, or collapse. Most builders aren’t betting on just one. Instead, they’re building strategic flexibility into their 2026 plans.
That means:
- Using buyer data to understand who’s ready to act—and who’s not
- Prioritizing market-level decision-making, not just regional
- Investing in tools that track performance and prove ROI
- Staying agile as Fed policy, inflation, and AI continue to evolve
“You can’t control mortgage rates,” Olsen reminded attendees. “But you can control your offer, and how well it meets this moment.”
The Bottom Line
This market doesn’t reward noise. It rewards clarity, relevance, and timing.
New construction still has the advantage - but only if you market it like it’s 2026, not 2019.
Want to know what’s working in your market?
Let’s talk. Book your custom demo here.
.png)
