What Builders are Doing to Attract First-Time Buyers to New Homes

Who is Buying a Home in 2025?

The U.S. housing market has been volatile since 2020 to say the least. Historic levels of inflation and high interest rates have created a market that is difficult to navigate and even harder to break into. The median cost of a new home sits around $437,300, according to census.gov data. That begs the question: who’s buying new homes in the U.S. in 2025, and what are builders doing attract first time buyers to the market?

The number of first-time buyers has fallen from 32 percent in 2023 to just 24 percent in 2024, the lowest since 1981 according to the National Association of Realtors. They also found that the median age of first-time home buyers has jumped from 35 in 2023 to 38 in 2024, with 64 percent of them claiming that their primary motivation was simply owning a home of their own.

Many people entering the market for the first time struggle with a lack of knowledge about the process of buying a home. For first-time buyers, this article is a good place to start.

How are Builders Attracting First-Time Buyers?

With both the average age of homeowners and the price of homes rising, builders have been searching for ways to bring in first-time buyers for their new projects.

One of these methods has been reducing the size of their homes. Tiny homes have been a popular trend among homeowners in recent years, and while these homes aren’t quite that small, the reduction in square footage helps lower the cost. The goal is to bring in new clients who are frustrated with resale home prices. If you’re curious about the difference between a new home and one up for resale, this article compares the two to help buyers make a more informed decision.

Building in specific areas, while not a new strategy, has been instrumental in builders’ efforts to bring in new buyers. New developments have been cropping up all over the U.S., in both high-density urban areas and rural locations. Some of the most popular metro areas for home-building include Austin-Round Rock, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas, Jacksonville and Tampa, Florida, and Charlotte, Concord and Gastonia in North and South Carolina. Rural developments are typically measured by county, given their sporadic placement. Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, and Maryland have seen some of the highest numbers in rural home construction since 2020.

Builder incentives are another important strategy builders use to pull in new clients. Incentives can range from lower interest rates to builder warranties to upgraded features, to name a few examples. They tend to vary from builder to builder; to learn more about builder incentives, check out this article!

These are just a few of the methods that builders are using to bring in first-time buyers to their new builds. For more information about all things home-related, visit NewHomeSource.com.