Homebuilders spent late spring and summer grinding through a tougher-than-expected housing market that, by most accounts, has only gotten more challenging in recent weeks. Cautious buyers are more apt to sit on the fence, and builders are having to sweeten the pot to get them to act by leaning harder on rate buydowns, price discounts and closing-cost incentives.
That environment is also changing the math of sales and marketing. When demand is plentiful, builders can think in big numbers. Benchmarks like traffic, leads, absorption rates and the three, four or five orders per community per week that traditionally define a healthy sales pace are in wide use. When buyers are scarce, however, success increasingly comes down to little numbers: finding the households with the means and motivation to move, understanding where they are in the buying journey and converting them one sale at a time.
Against this backdrop, data shared exclusively with HousingWire TBD from Audience Town, a marketing platform that partners with homebuilders, offers a more granular look at where discounting is deepest, who’s actually buying and how builders are reaching them.
For 2027 planning, the report points builders toward greater precision. In other words, looking beyond broad national benchmarks to market-specific and household-level data. That means understanding local competition, identifying the buyers most capable of moving, tracking their journey and focusing increasingly limited marketing dollars on what actually gets them to convert.
Builder discounting varies by market
The report reinforces what many homebuilders already know. Price discounting and incentives are prevalent across nearly every market, though the degree varies. Analyzing more than 201,000 closed sales across 25 markets during the 12 months ending in August 2026, the report found that builders, on average, sold homes below asking price in every market.
On the low end, 47% of homes in Kansas City sold below asking. Meanwhile, 92% of homes in Celina, TX, a suburb north of Dallas, sold below asking. Perhaps unsurprisingly, slower markets had higher discounting, and Celina, where the typical home took 105 median days to sell, was the slowest market analyzed.
Celina, a magnet for high-income immigrant households in recent years, was among the hardest-hit submarkets by the Trump administration’s restrictions on H-1B visas. Builders that expected a steady stream of H-1B visa buyers were left with a highly diminished buyer pool and an excess of standing inventory, which likely explains the area’s weak performance.
A slower market isn’t the only indicator of stronger discounting. Markets with a higher concentration of large, publicly traded homebuilders, which typically have greater financial capacity to offer discounts and incentives than regional, private builders, also saw higher levels of discounting.
Therefore, in slower markets, where buyers are more hesitant, public homebuilders can increasingly set the market price by leaning on discounts and incentives like mortgage rate buydowns, adding yet another headwind for their private homebuilding counterparts.
Kansas City, with 13% national builder share, had the highest share of homes holding at asking price. Meanwhile, St. Cloud, FL, a suburb of Orlando, had 84% national builder share and only 24% of homes holding above asking price.
However, the data suggests that Texas may have been an exception to the broader relationship between builder mix and discounting. Even among suburbs where national builders make up at least 60% of the market, Texas markets are much more likely to see homes sell below asking price. Just 6% sold at or above asking, compared with 27% outside Texas, while 80% in Texas were discounted by at least 5%, versus 41% elsewhere.
The large volume of homes being developed in suburbs north of Dallas and west of Houston may be contributing to this trend.
Overall, only 18% of new homes in Texas metros sold for at or above asking price. That share rose to 24% in Florida, 25% in the Southeast and the West, and 42% in the Midwest.
Equity and savings give buyers an edge
If winning sales increasingly requires builders to identify the households most capable of moving, Audience Town’s buyer data offers a clearer picture of who those customers are.
Audience Town analyzed 47,373 recorded home sales between January and September 2026 across seven markets and tracked community tours from 2,188 households.
The typical homebuyer in Audience Town’s data is not a first-time buyer stretching to qualify for a mortgage. More than 90% of buyers already owned a home, while 45% had lived in their existing home for at least a decade. Nearly half owned a home worth between $250,000 and $500,000, a price range that equates to roughly $100,000 to $300,000 in equity.
That suggests that existing equity plays a significant role in the ability to move, and touches on why first-time buyers with no built-up equity are the most strained buyer segment right now.
Income may also be an incomplete indicator of purchasing power. Almost half of buyers earned less than $100,000, but 33% of all buyers had a net worth above $1 million and 22% exceeded $2.5 million. Meanwhile, 76% had credit scores above 690. Due to built-up equity and savings, about one in three buyers could afford a home priced above $1 million, even though just 12% currently owned a home worth that much.
Audience Town’s data reveals that households that ultimately toured a home had much more wealth than the broader pool of engaged website visitors. More than half of touring households owned a home worth at least $500,000, compared with about one-third of engaged visitors. Touring households also had higher incomes, with 40% earning more than $150,000, compared to 23% of website visitors.
The buyer profile in the report is also more local than national migration narratives suggest. In a four-market relocation analysis, most buyers came from within the same state, often from the same metro or nearby suburbs. In Celina, Texas, for example, almost all 2026 buyers came from within Texas, with 91% coming from neighboring communities. In Kansas City, 86% of buyers came from within the Kansas City metro area.
Even in Port St. Lucie, FL, a rapidly growing market north of Palm Beach that is popular with retirees from the Northeast and Midwest, 72% of buyers came from within Florida.
The lock-in effect begins to wear off
With the typical 30-year mortgage rate now averaging around 7.0%, many homeowners who locked in significantly lower rates have been reluctant to move. This dynamic, known as the lock-in effect, has kept some would-be sellers and buyers on the sidelines.
However, Audience Town’s data reveals that a significant number of homeowners are willing to give up historically low mortgage rates to make a move, whether for personal or professional reasons.
Among the most recent 3,499 sales in the dataset, 23.9% of sellers had a mortgage rate between 2% and 3%, and another 25.8% had a rate between 3% and 4%. Put together, nearly half were giving up a mortgage rate below 4.0%.
How homebuilders are finding and converting buyers
For homebuilders trying to win sales one household at a time, understanding how buyers navigate from the initial research phase to a community tour can help determine where marketing dollars go the furthest. Audience Town’s data suggests the home tour is the key conversion point in that journey.
Audience Town found that buyers spend between 76 and 159 days researching before going on a home tour. However, once they tour, a sale typically follows within a few weeks. Therefore, for homebuilders, marketing efforts shouldn’t be designed simply to generate website traffic, but instead to identify, engage and ultimately convince prospects to move to the touring phase.
Organic search accounted for 45.9% of first website visits, but its share fell to 39.8% on the final website visit before a tour. Meanwhile, direct traffic jumped from 14.3% of first visits to 24.7% of final pre-tour visits.
This suggests that builders can rely on search and other discovery channels to introduce themselves to buyers, but repeat engagement and brand recognition become increasingly important when prospects near a community visit.
Builders may also need to pay closer attention to AI-assisted marketing. AI-assisted visits are now 12 times higher than in 2025, growing to 111,700 monthly sessions in July 2026. About 95% of builders received some AI traffic, indicating that AI is becoming an increasingly important discovery channel.
Three questions for 2027 planning
Builders are entering the final quarter of the year with plenty of uncertainty. Elevated mortgage rates, tariff-related cost pressures, the impact of immigration enforcement on labor, weak consumer confidence, inflation and other factors beyond builders’ control could continue to weigh on the market heading into 2027.
What builders can control is how precisely they go looking for the buyers who remain in the market — and how effectively they move those prospects from awareness to a community tour and, ultimately, a sale.
The report offers builders concrete guidance on how they benchmark, measure and execute their marketing strategies, along with three questions to bring into 2027 planning:
- Are we comparing our discounting and pricing against national figures or against our own metro?
- How much of our first-visit traffic arrives already knowing our name, and what is producing it?
- What share of our reported traffic represents an engaged visit?
