Last spring a neighbor of mine — she lives over on Chicon, been there almost as long as I have — mentioned she’d been driving out to some of the new communities in Pflugerville on weekends, just looking. She told me one of the sales reps at a Taylor Morrison community off Heatherwilde had handed her a sheet with a $30,000 incentive package on a spec home that had been sitting since the previous fall. She hadn’t asked. They just offered it.

That’s the market right now. Not everywhere, not on every floor plan, but in enough places that if you’re buying new construction and you’re not asking about incentives, you’re probably leaving money on the table.

Where the Discounts Are Actually Showing Up

The biggest gaps I’m seeing — and I mean in terms of what builders are willing to give versus what they’re advertising — are in communities with finished spec inventory that’s been sitting 90 days or longer. Out in the suburbs, particularly the northern DFW corridor and some of the outer-ring Austin communities toward Buda and Kyle, builders started the last couple of years with ambitious absorption projections and then watched mortgage rates stay stubbornly high. The result is completed homes with carrying costs ticking up every month.

Builders face a tougher math problem as completed inventory rises — that piece spelled out exactly why those sitting specs become negotiating leverage for buyers. When a builder has money tied up in a finished home, property taxes accumulating, and HOA dues sometimes coming out of their own pocket to keep the community looking occupied, they have a real incentive to move it. The list price starts to feel flexible in a way it doesn’t on a to-be-built home where they haven’t broken ground yet.

Here’s roughly where I’d concentrate attention if I were shopping right now:

  • Outer Austin suburbs — Kyle, Buda, and the newer sections of Hutto where there’s been a lot of speculative building. Communities off Kohlers Crossing and around FM 685 have had visible inventory sitting.
  • North Fort Worth / Alliance corridor — west of I-35W out toward Haslet and Northlake. Enormous growth, enormous supply. Some blocks out there look like they were built all at once with nobody moved in yet.
  • New Braunfels and Seguin — the San Antonio growth market absorbed a lot of product fast, and now some of those outer communities are softer than the builders expected.
  • Far northeast DFW — Royse City, Fate, and Caddo Mills. These got a lot of attention from buyers priced out of McKinney and Frisco, but the pipeline filled up.

I’d be more cautious expecting big concessions in closer-in locations — Celina’s inner sections, South Austin near Slaughter Lane, or established parts of Sugar Land — where resale competition is tighter and the builder isn’t sitting on as much finished product.

What the Discounts Actually Look Like

This is where I want to be careful, because “discount” means different things in different conversations. Builders, especially the nationals, have gotten very reluctant to cut the base price on paper. That price shows up in comps, and they don’t want to torpedo the value of the other 40 homes they’re still selling in the same community.

What they’ll do instead is load the deal with incentives. As of recent conversations I’ve had and things I’ve been reading, the packages I’m hearing about most often look something like:

  • Rate buydowns — sometimes buying the rate down 1.5 to 2 points for the life of the loan, or a 2-1 buydown for the first two years
  • Closing cost credits, somewhere in the $10,000 to $20,000 range on mid-priced homes
  • Free or heavily discounted upgrades — cabinets, flooring, appliances — that can represent real value if you’d have chosen them anyway
  • On larger specs, occasionally a straight price reduction of $15,000 to $40,000, though this is less common and you may have to ask directly

The rate buydown piece matters enormously right now. Builders cut prices as new home supply holds at 8.5 months touches on exactly this — when builders can subsidize your rate through their in-house lender or a preferred lender relationship, the effective monthly payment difference is real enough to change whether a buyer can qualify at all.

Who Is Still Buying New Construction Right Now

Honestly, the buyer pool has narrowed and shifted, and it’s worth understanding who you’re competing with — or in some cases, who you’re not competing with.

The first-time buyer relying entirely on a conventional loan with a modest down payment is having the hardest time. Insurance costs alone on some of these outer-ring communities have climbed to a point that genuinely affects debt-to-income ratios. A neighbor of mine who works in lending told me she’s seen insurance quotes on new builds in Bastrop County come in around $400 a month, which nobody budgeted for two years ago.

The buyers who are active right now tend to fall into a few categories:

Cash or low-leverage buyers. Retirees, people selling an appreciated home in California or the Northeast and arriving with equity. Where are boomers and Gen X moving in 2026? has some useful context here — this cohort is real, it’s substantial, and it doesn’t feel the rate environment the same way a 32-year-old with a 5% down payment does.

Corporate relocation buyers. DFW in particular still has consistent inbound relocation demand from companies that moved headquarters or expanded operations. These buyers often have employer-assisted housing benefits, relocation timelines that don’t allow for sitting on the fence, and sometimes relocation company involvement that helps with closing costs.

Investors buying for long-term rental. Smaller operators, not the iBuyers, who are doing the math on a new construction home with a warranty, lower maintenance costs in the early years, and a tenant pool drawn from people who can’t yet buy.

Move-up buyers with existing equity. Someone selling a home they bought in 2018 or 2019 in Leander or Cedar Park at a decent gain, rolling proceeds into a larger new build. The rate lock-in problem hits them too, but if they’ve got $150,000 in equity to work with, the math can still close.

What to Actually Do With This

If you’re thinking about buying new construction in the next few months, here’s what I’d tell you to do before you walk into a model home:

  1. Drive the community on a weekday. Count the for-sale signs. Count the occupied driveways. If you see a lot of dark houses and nobody coming or going, that builder has a problem and you have leverage.
  2. Ask the sales rep directly how long the spec home has been in inventory. They’ll tell you. Sometimes they’ll volunteer the number before you ask.
  3. Ask what incentives are available on that specific home, not the community in general. Incentives vary by lot, by plan, and by how desperate they are on a particular unit.
  4. Run the full payment with insurance before you fall in love with anything. Climate risk is turning insurance and resilience into deal factors — this is especially true in flood-adjacent or wildfire-adjacent Texas zip codes where new builds are going in fast and insurance underwriters are getting pickier.
  5. Don’t assume the incentive you’re offered on day one is the best they’ll do. Come back. Ask again. Bring a competing offer from a different community if you have one.

The builders who have inventory sitting right now are motivated. They’re not going to hang a sign that says “we’ll negotiate” — but they will, and they already are. You just have to show up and ask.