The median new home sold for $398,300 in June 2026, about $42,300 less than the median existing home. Here is how to price a builder buydown.
Your pre-approval was fine three months ago and now the number dropped. The usual suspects: a rate that crept from 6.4% to 6.49%, a new car payment, and the 28/36 DTI rule doing exactly what it was built to do. Here is the math lenders run, plus a copy-paste AI prompt that runs it for you in five minutes.
Skip the hot takes. Zillow publishes its home value (ZHVI) and rent (ZORI) indexes as free CSV downloads, and a chatbot can turn them into your own price-to-rent ratio and monthly cost gap in five minutes. Nationally the math is close: a typical $370,320 home vs $2,000 average rent works out to a ratio around 15, right in the gray zone.