How Buying a New Home Could Save You Money

For many, buying a new construction home is the dream. Everything is fresh and on-trend, there’s no haggling with emotional sellers, and you may even get a say in the home’s layout, features and amenities. In today’s market, buying new—rather than an existing property—might be an economical choice, too. As the median payment on a new mortgage creeps toward $2,200, most buyers are desperate to save cash wherever they can. And while improving your credit scores or shopping around can often help you snag a lower mortgage payment, builder-offered incentives—which have been on the rise in recent months—can also lead to notable savings. “We’re seeing builders sweetening the pot for buyers,” says Nick Bailey , president of Re/Max LLC, a real-estate brokerage based in Denver. Those extras—plus some built-in insurance advantages—could theoretically save a buyer with a $500,000 budget $40,000 or more in just the first year of homeownership (though actual savings, if any, will vary quite a bit from buyer to buyer). Here’s how buying new could help make your home purchase more affordable.

1. Builders are slashing prices

Though new homes typically cost slightly more than existing ones—the median sale price was $418,800 vs. $394,300 in September—builders have increasingly been cutting price tags. In fact, nearly a third of home builders reported reducing their prices in October, according to a survey from the National Association of Home Builders. It’s the highest share in nearly a year and roughly triple the share of price cuts seen July 2022. The size of the reductions are worth mentioning, too. Almost 40% of builders say they cut prices by 6% or more in October. So, a home on the market for $500,000 a month ago could be listed at just $470,000 today.

2. They’re offering lower mortgage rates

If slashed prices aren’t enough to get a mortgage payment in your budget, builders have another offer: A lower mortgage rate. In response to today’s decades-high interest rates , some builders are now offering “buydowns,” chipping in to get home buyers reduced mortgage rates—at least for a time. (Essentially, the builder prepays the lender the interest for the years the mortgage rate is reduced). NAHB’s data shows that 29% of builders offered mortgage rate buydowns in October. “Many builders are using sales incentives—including mortgage rate buydowns—as a method of addressing housing affordability headwinds,” says Robert Dietz, chief economist at NAHB. Buydowns can be permanent, lasting for the entire term of the loan, but more often—at least with builder buydowns—they’re temporary, lasting for the first one to three years of the mortgage. Home builder Lennar, for example, offers what’s called a 2-1 buy-down. This allows home buyers to reduce their mortgage rate by 2 percentage points in the first year—say, down from 7.5% to 5.5%, for instance—and then by one point the following year. By the third year, the loan would revert to that original 7.5% rate (or you could refinance if rates had become more favorable). In the above scenario, the buy-down would save you over $10,000 in interest during just the first year of a 30-year loan. Another perk: Builders are also offering to pitch in on closing costs. These typically clock in around 2% to 6% of your total loan amount, or up to $30,000 on a $500,000 loan. According to the NAHB survey, 35% of builders offered to pay closing costs last month.

3. New home insurance is more affordable, too

The last way a new home could save you on your mortgage payment has little to do with builders—but instead, how much it costs to insure a property. And according to insurance pros, home insurance premiums —which are typically paid as part of your monthly mortgage payment—are often much more affordable on newer homes than older ones. “Older homes may have issues like roof leaks,” says Angel Conlin, chief insurance officer at Kin Insurance in Chicago. “New homes, with fresh materials and construction, pose less risk to insurers.” (Just keep in mind: A new home—and new materials—doesn’t necessarily mean the place is perfect. So if you do opt for new construction, always get a home inspection.) According to data from Policygenius, a new home costs 13% less to insure annually than a 10-year-old one and 32% less than a 30-year-old home. As of 2022, the average premium on a new home was just $1,200 per year. A 30-year-old home’s premium was $1,776. “If you’re looking at two properties that have a similar size, construction type, and location with the difference being that one was built 30 years after the other,” says Pat Howard, a home insurance expert at Policygenius, “you can likely bank on the newer home having cheaper home insurance premiums.”

James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.

The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.

Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.

The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.

For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.

But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.

Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.

New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”

Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.

And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”

Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.

“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.

From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.

Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.

Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.

In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.

A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.

“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.

The Patterson family’s basement retreat ‘encapsulates the joy in the things that we love in one room.’ John Cole

Screen-Free ‘Escapes’

“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”

Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.

Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.

“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”

A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.

Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.

Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.

“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.

As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.

“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”

Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.

The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.

When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”

Analog Accessories

Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?

“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.

Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”

More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.

For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.

Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.

Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.

“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.

In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.

Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.

The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.

Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.

The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”