112,000 Finished Homes Are Waiting. Can Buyers Find Yours?

Almost every builder we've talked with this fall has some version of the same story. The framing is done, the landscaping is in, the lights are on and the house is finished. It just isn't sold.

If that sounds familiar, you have plenty of company. According to Census data reported by HousingWire's The Builder's Daily, there were about 483,000 new homes for sale across the country at the end of August. At today's sales pace, that's 8.5 months of supply. And 112,000 of those homes were already complete and ready for a family to move in tomorrow.

We've been helping builders sell homes since 1987. We've been through rate spikes, recessions, the 2008 collapse and the whiplash of the pandemic years alongside our clients. So we'll be honest about something most people in this industry already feel in their gut. A finished home without a buyer is one of the most stressful things in this business. Every month it sits, you're paying taxes, insurance, utilities and interest on the construction loan. And every month, the pressure to knock a little more off the price gets louder.

The incentive treadmill

Right now, most builders are reaching for the same lever. The Builder's Daily cited Cotality's chief economist estimating that somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of new home sales now involve a mortgage rate buydown. The median new home price in August was down 5.8 percent from a year earlier.

We get it. When the phone goes quiet, an incentive feels like doing something, and sometimes it's exactly the right call.

There's one thing that keeps nagging at us, though. An incentive only works on a buyer who already knows your home exists. A $20,000 buydown on a house nobody has seen is a $20,000 offer nobody is using.

The buyers haven't disappeared, either. On KB Home's latest earnings call, the company's executive chairman said community traffic was down roughly 10 percent. Ten, not fifty. People are still out there looking. They're cautious and they're taking their time, but they're looking. The real question is where.

Where buyers actually look

The property a buyer sees on Zillow, Realtor.com, a brokerage website or their agent's app almost always started life as an MLS listing, whether the buyer knows it or not. And the agents guiding move-up families, relocating professionals and nervous first-time buyers through this market search the MLS every single day for homes that fit their clients.

When your spec home isn't listed there, a big share of active buyers will simply never come across it. They didn't look at your home and say no. They never had the chance to say yes.

We hear the hesitations all the time. We have our own sales team. We don't want to pay a co-op. Agents don't understand new construction. We'll lose control of our leads. Every one of those is a fair concern, and that last one is the one we hear most. It's also the reason HMS exists.

What we do for builders

HMS is a national broker that works with homebuilders on new construction, and that has been our focus from day one. We get your homes listed on the MLS in the markets where you build, accurately and with the details agents need to sell them. We handle the paperwork, follow each local MLS's rules, and keep your listings current as prices, incentives and availability change, so you're never advertising last month's deal.

We also tend to the relationship side. Agents are far more willing to show a new home when they trust the builder will treat them and their client fairly. We help you build that trust market by market, so the local agent community starts to see your communities as an easy recommendation instead of a headache.

And your leads stay yours. When a buyer reaches out through one of your listings, that inquiry goes straight to your sales team. We don't work your buyers, we don't hand them off to someone else, and we don't use your inventory to build our own pipeline. We've helped builders list, market and sell more than 24,000 homes across the United States, and every one of those relationships was built on that promise.

No two builders need exactly the same thing, so we don't hand you a fixed package. Some clients have us list every home in every community. Others call us for a handful of aging specs in a single market. We're glad to do either.

A different kind of math

We're not going to tell you to stop offering incentives. But it's worth putting the numbers side by side. A rate buydown can run into the tens of thousands of dollars per home, and every dollar of it comes out of your margin. Putting that same home in front of every active agent and shopper in your market costs a small fraction of that. It also makes the incentives you do offer work harder, because more of the right people actually see them.

Timing matters too. Buyers often spend months researching before they ever schedule a tour. A home that hits the MLS this week starts showing up in saved searches, agent alerts and portal feeds right away, in front of people who are already partway through that journey. A home that waits another 60 days to get listed misses those buyers entirely.

With mortgage rates moving higher again this fall, nobody we know is expecting demand to snap back overnight. That makes the next few months less about waiting out the market and more about making sure every buyer who is shopping right now can find you.

Let's look at your inventory together

If you have finished homes that have been sitting longer than you'd like, give us a call at 855-467-2255. We'll look at what you have, the markets you're in and how you're marketing today, and we'll tell you honestly whether MLS exposure makes sense for you. Sometimes it won't, and if that's the case, we'll say so.

You built a good home. Let's make sure the people looking for one get to see it.

To talk with our team about your standing inventory, contact us today.

Schedule with HMS: Your new home communities deserve to be found. Let's make sure they are. HMS has helped homebuilders across the United States list more than 24,000+ homes on the MLS through strategic marketing and support services.  For an overview of services and pricing, schedule an introductory meeting today: T |  855-467-2255 E |  sam@newhomemarketing.ai W | NewHomeMarketing.ai