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Here's where new-home builders are cutting prices the most right now

Home builders are cutting prices harder in some U.S. cities. Realtor.com's new data shows exactly where buyers can save

Jason Peters / Unsplash

Buying a newly built house usually costs more than buying an existing one nearby. New construction comes with fresh materials, updated systems, and the fact that nobody else has lived there yet. That gap has quietly disappeared in 2026. Builders sitting on unsold inventory have started cutting prices harder than individual homeowners are cutting theirs, and in some parts of the country the discounts run deep enough to change what a monthly payment actually looks like. For a buyer who assumed new construction was permanently out of reach on price, that assumption no longer holds everywhere.

Several forces pushed builders into this position. Mortgage rates near 6.8 percent have kept many buyers on the sidelines through three straight years of rising home prices, and builders can't simply pull a listing off the market the way an individual seller can. They have loans to service and land to turn into revenue, so unsold inventory becomes an active cost rather than a passive one. Construction costs also run lower in the South and West, which encouraged builders to concentrate new supply there just as demand cooled, leaving those cities with far more finished homes than buyers willing to pay list price. The result is a rare inversion. The median price of a newly built home has slipped below the median price of an existing one. That kind of reversal almost never happens.

Realtor.com tracked builder pricing behavior across the 100 largest U.S. cities as of June, measuring the share of new-home listings that carried at least one price cut. Discounts vary sharply by region. Cities in the South and West saw nearly 70 percent of new-home listings carry a price cut, compared with 11 percent or less through most of the Northeast and Midwest. Five cities posted the steepest cuts in the country, and each one shows what happens when a builder ends up with more finished homes than the local market can absorb.

Grant Porter / Unsplash

Fresno, Calif., topped Realtor.com's list after 68.8 percent of its new-home listings carried at least one price cut as of June, the highest share of any city the company tracked. National builder Lennar has cut prices by as much as $22,000 in certain Fresno communities to attract buyers, and another builder in the area is offering discounts of up to $50,000 on some units. Those numbers translate directly into lower monthly payments. A $22,000 reduction on a 30-year loan can shave more than $100 off what a buyer owes each month, even before accounting for a lower down payment.

Fresno's position at the top of this list traces back to construction decisions made well before demand cooled. Builders concentrated new supply in California's Central Valley because land and construction costs there run far below the coastal cities that dominate the state's........

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