Trends in New Construction Home Sales

How is the U.S. new home market faring?

That’s a more difficult question to answer than usual because the U.S. Census Bureau isn’t publishing data on new residential sales with the federal government shutdown still dragging on. That matters because when we assess the relative health of the U.S. new home market, the primary data we employ is the Census Bureau’s new residential sales data that tells us both the estimated number of new homes sold each month and the average price at which they sold. We multiply these figures together to produce an estimate of the total value of new homes sold within the U.S. each month. We then calculate the trailing twelve month average to smooth out seasonal variation in the data, shifting it “backward” in time so it becomes more of a contemporary indicator of the trends being experienced by the new home market.

But if that government-compiled data is not available, does that mean we’re dead in the water for producing that kind of analysis?

Don’t be silly. As with most data the government publishes that’s useful, there are alternative sources available from private sector sources that provide a similar window for looking into the state of the new home market. We’re going to use one of those alternative sources to do that today, which will give us a different but still useful picture of the.

We’ve tapped Zillow’s monthly data for new construction homes, which covers single family residences and condominiums, which is based on sales data for this class of real estate from major metropolitan areas in the U.S. to produce a national figure. That’s a subset of the data that’s compiled in the Census Bureau’s new residential sales data, but should work to give us an idea of how the market is for the new construction homes in the markets that Zillow covers.

And also for which it has sales data. Because Zillow obtains its data from state and local sources that are slower to report their monthly new home sales figures, it lags a bit behind the national and regional estimates of new home sales data reported by the Census Bureau. Zillow provided its first estimate for August 2025 just two weeks ago.

Although Zillow has data extending back to January 2018, it has greatly expanded its coverage in recent years, which makes its older data less directly comparable to its more recent data. For our analysis, we’ll focus on the period from January 2024 through August 2025 because this data is most similar in its scope of coverage to the data for August 2025.

From here, we’ll treat Zillow’s data for new construction sales for single family residences and condominiums just like the Census Bureau’s new residential sales data for our analysis. The following charts present the U.S. new home market capitalization, the number of new construction sales, and their average sale prices as measured by their time-shifted, trailing twelve month averages from January 2024 through August 2025.

Starting with the chart showing the total valuation of new construction from January 2024 through August 2025, we’ll start by noting August 2025′s total valuation of $22.26 billion from Zillow’s new construction is about 73% of our initial estimate of $30.53 billion for the total value of all new homes sold based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s data in August 2025. That’s large enough for Zillow’s data to provide a good indication of the overall state of the U.S. new home market.

The trend data, indicated by the time-shifted trailing twelve month average (orange) in the chart shows the new home market was largely flat from January 2024 through August 2024, but has been slowly falling off in the year since.

That mirrors similar trends for the number of new construction sales over the same period of time.

The trend for the mean sale price of new construction shows a different pattern. Here, average sale prices rose from May 2024 through December 2024, but have fallen off in the months since. First slowly from December 2024 through May 2025, then more steeply.

That pattern indicates 2025 has been a difficult market for the builders of single family homes and condominiums. Although they’ve been lowering prices since the end of 2024, it hasn’t been enough to reverse the downtrend in the number of sales. A good portion of that problem has been tied up with elevated mortgage rates, which have made new homes less affordable than they would otherwise be had these interest rates been lower. The problem of unaffordability is harming the market for new homes. And by extension, Americans seeking to become new homeowners.

The analysis that falls out from using Zillow’s data on new construction homes largely squares with the analysis we’ve been doing for years with the Census Bureau’s new home sales figures. The government shutdown isn’t an obstacle for reading the state of the U.S. new home market.

References

Zillow. New Construction Sales Count. [CSV Document]. 16 October 2025. Accessed 28 October 2025.

Zillow. New Construction Mean Sale Price. [CSV Document. 16 October 2025. Accessed 28 October 2025.

Image credit: U.S. Census Bureau: New Single-Family Homes Sold Not as Large as They Used to Be.