A New-Construction Home Gave Them What Resale Couldn’t: Lower Bills and a Sense of Community

At first, Rolando and Clarissa Requeny thought new construction was out of reach.

They had heard the common warnings: Builder fees could pile up, closing costs could be higher—and, as a brand-new home, it was just more expensive.

“We weren’t really looking at new construction, to be honest with you,” Rolando tells Realtor.com®. “We thought we would never be able to afford to have that.”

So the couple focused on resale homes instead. But after a deal fell through, they stumbled upon Tucker’s Cove at Babcock Ranch, a Southwest Florida master-planned community designed around sustainability, storm resilience, green space, and a central town square.

And suddenly, the math changed.

They're not alone. New construction, long assumed to be the more expensive option, is becoming more competitive with the resale market. As of early 2026, the median list price for newly built homes was $448,393, down 0.3% from a year earlier, while the price premium compared with existing homes fell to its lowest first-quarter level since 2020, according to research from Realtor.com®. 

For buyers squeezed by affordability, that shift has turned new construction into an unlikely bright spot in an otherwise unforgiving market.

The deal hiding in plain sight

Part of what's making new construction so compelling right now is that builders are offering what many individual sellers cannot: rate buydowns, closing cost assistance, warranties, and other incentives that can reduce both upfront and monthly costs.

As first-time homebuyers without existing equity to leverage in a tough market, the Requenys found that these perks made all the difference.

Their four-bedroom home was listed at just under $400,000, according to the couple—a price point Clarissa says would have bought “a studio” in Miami, where the couple had lived for 25 years.

Then came the builder incentives.

Rolando says their builder offered roughly $40,000 in such incentives, including help with closing costs and money to buy down their mortgage rate. The Requenys closed in the summer of 2025, when mortgage rates were still well above 6.5%, making the rate buydown especially meaningful.

“We went from like almost 7% or around 7% to 5.5%,” easily saving them “a couple $100 every month,” Rolando says.

The builder also covered their homeowners association dues for a year, Clarissa adds. Other buyers they know received even flashier incentives, like brand-new golf carts and pools.

To Clarissa, it’s proof that builders are competing hard for buyers. “The builders need to meet their quotas,” she says. “Right now, especially, it’s a buyer’s market.”

Research from Realtor.com confirms this and shows that this type of deal isn’t just isolated to the couple’s experience. In 2024, new-home buyers paid lower mortgage rates than buyers of existing homes, by about half a percentage point—6.1% compared with 6.6%.

For the Requenys, those savings changed the entire equation.

“For us to have a community that we just absolutely love, a brand-new home, it would have been worth it, even if we were paying more,” Rolando says. “But we’re actually paying less.”

When new construction means new innovations

The Requenys' savings may just be getting started, too, according to new research from Realtor.com. Over the first decade of ownership, a newly built home can save buyers an estimated $25,000 through lower utility bills and fewer repairs compared to a 20-year-old existing home—and potentially even more once insurance savings are factored in.

Babcock Ranch offers a particularly stark example of why. Its homes are built with newer materials, systems, and storm-resilient features that make them less costly to run. For the Requenys, that showed up almost immediately.

Their previous home in Miami was an 1,100-square-foot townhouse. Their new home is roughly twice the size, at about 2,200 square feet. Yet Rolando says their energy bills have been noticeably lower.

“We pay a fraction of what we used to spend,” he says.

In recent months, he says, their electric bill has hovered around $100—a figure he found almost hard to believe compared with the $200 monthly bills they were used to in Miami.

“Everything’s brand new, everything’s higher standard,” Rolando says, pointing to the home’s energy-efficient appliances, gas systems, insulation, and newer HVAC system.

Those newer features have also helped with insurance—an especially important consideration in Florida, where homeowners face some of the highest premiums in the country. In 2024, the median annual home insurance premium in Florida fell between $2,000 and $2,499, according to an analysis of American Community Survey data.

For the Requenys, the difference came down to how their house was designed. All homes in Babcock Ranch are built to withstand winds of up to 160 mph and sit 30 feet above sea level to reduce flood risk. Clarissa says these features along with their impact windows, hurricane shutters, new roof, and storm-resistant doors all helped lower their premium.

“When we were looking for insurance, there was like a whole list of items that would help us lower our premium,” she says. Because their home checked many of those boxes, they were able to secure a more affordable policy.

Research at Realtor.com has found that insurance premiums can be up to 38% lower for newly built homes than for older homes, adding another layer of savings beyond the purchase price. Over the first 10 years of ownership, that can amount to $7,000 or more in additional savings

And in places like Florida, the gap may be even larger.

“The difference [between new-construction and older homes] may be more pronounced in regions exposed to severe weather because newer homes and roofs are generally better equipped to withstand storm-related damage,” Julia Taliesin, economic analyst and licensed insurance agent at Insurify, tells Realtor.com.

What this means for buyers

For buyers who have been priced out of the resale market, the Requenys' experience points to a bigger lesson: New construction can't be judged by the list price alone; the better comparison is the full cost of ownership.

That means looking at the monthly payment, mortgage rate, closing-cost credits, HOA fees, taxes, insurance, estimated utility bills, warranty coverage, commute, and the repairs or upgrades an older home may require in the first few years.

“The real story here is that choosing new construction expands a buyer's budget,” explains Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com. “What buyers thought they could afford in an existing home, when they accounted for operating costs, is less than what they can afford in a new home because of the savings we highlight here.”

It doesn’t mean every new-construction home is automatically the better deal; but it does mean affordability may be hiding in places buyers don't always think to look. For the Requenys, those savings helped make ownership possible, while delivering something harder to put into a spreadsheet.

“In the eight months that we’ve been here, we’ve made more friends and good friends than we did in the 25 years we lived in Miami,” Rolando says.

That sense of community has become part of the savings, too. When one of their palm trees died, Rolando says a neighbor came over with a chainsaw, helped take it down, and hauled it away—saving them what could have been hundreds of dollars.