Seven months ago, in December 2025, we set out to map exactly how a new construction home buyer actually buys in 2026. Not how the 2015 funnel said they bought. How they really do it.
This is article two of a series. Click here to read the first article.
We pulled survey data from NAHB, NAR, Zillow, Bokka Group, the NextGen Homebuyer Report, Clever Real Estate, and McKinsey. We analyzed Ahrefs search behavior across more than 10 million keywords. We tracked AI adoption across six independent studies. We mapped the journey from the first "should we move" thought to the day a contract gets signed.
Here's what we found.
For 30 years, the buyer's journey was a linear path. Awareness, then consideration, then decision, in that order. That's not how it works anymore.
NAR's joint study with Google found that buyers now "bounce back and forth at their own speed in a multichannel marketplace," cycling between stages, devices, and platforms repeatedly. NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers surveyed 6,103 recent buyers. 100% of them used the internet during their search. Only 21% contacted a real estate agent first.
The stages haven't disappeared. Awareness, Consideration, and Decision still describe what a buyer needs to figure out. What's changed is the path through them.
Buyers bounce between decision clusters across all three stages. They research financing while they're picking communities. They compare builders while they're still figuring out cost. The model home isn't the discovery moment anymore. It's the confirmation step at the tail end of the journey, and the sales rep meets them there.
When we cross-referenced the public research with our own search data and 15 years of working with home builders, the journey resolved into a clean framework. Three stages. Eleven decision clusters inside those stages. Thirty-three distinct questions buyers need to research and answer before they sign a contract.
A decision cluster is a group of related questions that all hang on the same major decision the buyer has to make. Build or buy. How much can we afford. Which community. Which builder. Each cluster is a single decision point. Each question inside the cluster is one of the inputs the buyer needs to make it.
Here's how the framework breaks down.
Awareness is the earliest stage and the one that's changed most dramatically since 2015. The biggest single change: financial feasibility used to be a Consideration question. Today it's the first filter.
Three decision clusters live here. Twelve questions across the three.
This is where the buyer is deciding whether building is even on the table. The four questions:
These are framing questions. The buyer hasn't decided to build yet. They're deciding whether building belongs in the conversation at all. And the "build or buy" question has solid US-wide search volume behind it (roughly 2,300 monthly searches per Ahrefs), which means demand for an honest answer is sitting there and going somewhere.
This cluster does more work than any other in the journey. The affordability environment is the reason it front-loads now instead of showing up later. The four questions:
The volume is enormous. "How much does it cost to build a house" pulls roughly 23,000 monthly searches in the US per Ahrefs. "How much house can I afford" pulls 115,000. The buyer is doing math before they fall in love with a community, not after.
Mortgages, down payments, credit scores, rate buydowns. The four questions:
"Construction loan" alone pulls roughly 27,000 monthly US searches per Ahrefs. According to U.S. News' 2024 survey of new construction buyers, 61% plan to use the builder's preferred lender. That's not a small share. The financial conversation has moved from "after I pick a community" to "before I decide to build at all," and the builder who answers those questions earliest is the builder who gets the lender capture.
The data on pre-search duration is thin. NAR doesn't measure it. Zillow doesn't publish it in the free version. What we do know: Clever Real Estate's 2025 American Home Buyer Report surveyed 986 buyers and found 40% spent 3 months or more on their search. 19% spent 6 months or more. That's after they started actively searching. The pre-search awareness window before that, where the buyer is asking financial questions and figuring out whether to build at all, is the silent half of the journey. It's where buyers leave Google for ChatGPT, browse builder sites without identifying themselves, and form opinions that are nearly impossible to change later.
The questions are getting asked. Builders who answer them earn the buyer's first real touchpoint. Builders who don't, hand it to AI, to lender partners, or to whoever ranked best two years ago.
Consideration is the longest stage of the modern journey and the one where 2026 looks least like 2015. Five decision clusters live here, more than any other stage. Three of them didn't meaningfully exist in the 2015 buyer's mind.
Fifteen questions across the five clusters.
The four questions:
NAR's 2024 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers shows neighborhood quality and proximity to friends and family now outrank job location as top purchasing priorities. That's a 15-year inversion. Most builder community pages still lead with floor plans and pricing, not neighborhood context.
The three questions:
The shift here is that the new construction market is dominated by production builds. Per NAHB's analysis of Census Survey of Construction data, 73.1% of new single-family homes started in 2024 were built-for-sale. Custom builds (contractor-built or owner-built on the buyer's land) accounted for 17.5%. Built-for-rent was 9.3%. And per a separate NAHB analysis of BUILDER Magazine data, the top 10 builders alone captured a record 44.7% of all new single-family home closings in 2024. The top 15 cleared 51%.
Buyers know this. They're searching for personalization within production, not fully custom. The content they find rarely speaks to that gap.
This cluster barely existed in 2015. The three questions:
NAHB's 2024 "What Home Buyers Really Want" survey of 3,008 respondents found that 83% rated ENERGY STAR windows as essential or desirable. 81% wanted ENERGY STAR appliances. Per NAHB's smart-home findings, 16 of 19 technology features tested had at least 50% of buyers calling them essential or desirable, led by programmable thermostats (78%), security cameras (76%), and video doorbells (74%). And home office space appeared on NAHB's most-wanted features list for the first time in 2022. None of these existed as research priorities a decade ago.
The three questions:
The supply chain reset is what makes this cluster more urgent than ever. Per AGC's 2024 Construction Hiring and Business Outlook, 34% of contractors reported supply-chain-driven project delays in 2024 (down from 63% in 2023, but still more than one in three). Buyers know about delays. They're asking. A "Our Process" page with a six-step graphic isn't an answer.
The two questions:
This is the cluster where buyers either put you on the shortlist or quietly remove you. Most of what they read about builders here is written by someone else. Reddit. Court records. Local news. AI summaries pulling from all three. The builder-vs-builder comparison gap is one of the biggest the research surfaced.
Zillow's 2023 New Construction Consumer Housing Trends Report surveyed more than 2,500 new construction buyers and found that 91% used at least one digital homebuying tool during their search. That's the highest of any buyer segment. Higher than existing-home buyers across the board. Zillow measured tool-by-tool: 51% used video tours, 47% used 3D virtual tours, 49% used digital paperwork, 34% used self-guided mobile tours.
The same Zillow data shows 48% of buyers wanted to self-tour with a phone unlock. Only 34% got the option. That gap is the Consideration stage in a single data point. The buyer wants to research without being chased. Builders who design for that win. Builders who chase, lose.
Decision is short, fast, and structurally different from the other two stages. The buyer has two or three builders on the shortlist. They're choosing.
Two decision clusters live here. Six questions across the two.
The three questions:
Almost no builder publishes content that addresses the comparison question. The buyer compares anyway. The only question is whether your point of view is in the comparison or not.
The three questions:
Two data points make this cluster urgent.
First, per the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, 67% of builders offered incentives in December 2025, the highest in the post-Covid era. 40% were cutting prices, the highest share in over four years. Buyers are walking in expecting to negotiate. They're researching what's reasonable.
Second, Zillow's 2024 New Construction Consumer Housing Trends Report shows 44% of new construction buyers reported regret over unexpected costs, delays, or communication breakdowns. Clever's 2025 American Home Buyer Report adds the texture. 85% of buyers said they were surprised by at least one aspect of the purchase process. 44% discovered problems after move-in that weren't disclosed. 46% found the process more stressful than they expected. 58% of first-time buyers said the same.
That regret is a direct consequence of information gaps that decision-stage content could close. Builders who publish here look uncomfortable. Builders who don't publish here lose buyers to regret-driven negative reviews after the fact.
The 33 questions are the spine. The research also surfaced three cross-cutting patterns that apply across all three stages.
Buyers research with specific tools, and the mix is generational. The NextGen Homebuyer Report 2025 (a National MI study of 1,000 buyers ages 18-44, fielded March 2025) shows 66% of buyers use YouTube for homebuying education (74% of Gen Z, 64% of Millennials). 61% use real estate platforms like Zillow and Redfin. 35% use ChatGPT or AI tools (Gen Z 43%, Millennials 34%). 28% rely on Reddit and forums as helpful sources. Friends and family remain the top influence at 68%.
Video and social proof are now infrastructure. Matterport's analysis of more than 143,000 MLS listings found that homes with a 3D tour drew 87% more views, sold for up to 9% more, and closed up to 31% faster than listings without one. And here's the counter-intuitive finding on reviews from Northwestern University's Spiegel Research Center: products rated 4.2 to 4.7 stars convert better than the perfect 5.0s. Buyers trust the near-perfect score more than the perfect one. The review portfolio that converts isn't the wall of fives. It's the wall of solid-fours-and-a-half with recent dates on the pages.
The B2B parallel is too clean to ignore. Gartner's B2B buying journey research found B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total purchase journey in meetings with sales reps and 45% on independent research. And per Gartner's March 2026 survey of 646 B2B buyers, 67% prefer a rep-free sales experience. The parallel to new construction isn't direct. B2B isn't B2C. But the directional finding is the same. High-consideration buyers self-serve through the majority of their journey before any vendor contact. Cox Automotive's 2025 Car Buyer Journey Study of 2,300 buyers, the most structurally analogous B2C category we could find, reaches the same conclusion. Most buyers research thoroughly online before visiting a dealership. Self-serve digital tools improve buyer confidence and satisfaction.
The 33 questions are the map. The three cross-cutting findings are the terrain. Together they describe a buyer who behaves nothing like the 2015 version most builder marketing is still built for.
Zillow's 2025 New Construction Consumer Housing Trends Report puts it plainly in the very first finding:
"Builders are missing opportunities to connect with buyers. Most buyers do not interact with a builder or sales center during their home search."
Not "some." Most.
The journey is happening. You're just not in it.
The hard part isn't the data. The hard part is what to do about it. The answer isn't "publish more blogs." If you've been paying attention to the four shifts I laid out in the last post, you already suspect that.
Next post drops in a few days. I'm going to walk through why the old SEO playbook is now actively losing ground, what content actually does in 2026, and the architectural shift most builders haven't made yet.
Read it. That's where the picture really locks in.
~ Jeff, Founder, Velocity23
This is article two of a series. Click here to read the first article.