Going into this year, half the builder marketers we polled were raising their budget and few were very confident in the plan it funded. What other builders are putting in the spreadsheet, and how to decide before the 2027 numbers lock.
Builders are spending more with less confidence. When we polled builder marketers at our Home Builder Strategy Forum, 9 of 18 said their budget for this year was increasing. Only 2 of 11 described themselves as very confident in the strategy that budget funded.
That gap is what happens when you're asked to prove marketing drove home sales using data that can only show you traffic.
You can see sessions and form fills. You cannot see which of those visitors was actually moving. So the reasonable response, when sales are slow and leadership is asking, is to put more behind everything and hope the aggregate moves.
Budget season is the moment to break that loop, because it's the one time a year you get to change the shape of the plan and not just its size.
As of this summer, NAHB expected single-family starts to rise about 5% in 2027 to a 984,000 pace. That's modest growth. Chief economist Robert Dietz has said a sustained sub-6% mortgage rate will likely wait until 2027, while a compilation of independent forecasts from Fannie Mae, the MBA, and NAR has 30-year rates staying above 6% beyond 2027, with most projecting 2% or less growth in total starts.
The fall numbers were rough. Existing home sales fell to a 3.75 million annual pace in October, the slowest since August 2010 and 8.8% below a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors. New home sales ran at a 676,000 annual pace in September, 5.3% below September 2025, and the median new home price fell 3.9% from a year earlier to $400,400, according to the Census Bureau. Mortgage rates went above 7% in September and reached 7.4% in early October.
The planning implication: budget for a market that stays essentially the same. In other words, tough.
Builder marketing spend generally lands between 1.5% and 2.5% of revenue based on conversations with industry leaders, with the mix breaking down close to this:
Two patterns cost builders money every year.
The stop-start cycle. It's common to cut channels and pivot strategy too quickly. Our data shows that home buyers research for 76 to 159 days before they tour. A campaign cancelled at month four never lives long enough to convert the interest it created, so it produces nothing measurable, which makes it easier to cut again next year.
Incentives influence the marketing budget. With 63% of builders running incentives in NAHB's August survey and the average price cut at 6%, a meaningful share of customer acquisition cost has moved out of marketing and into the deal. At September's median new home price of $400,400, a 6% reduction gives up about $24,000 on one closing. When you consider your media spend, it's helpful to keep this in context.
Most builders can report spend by channel and almost none can report mover concentration by channel, which means renewal decisions get made on volume reported by vendors who benefit from volume.
With Audience Town, you can see which channels are driving your best quality leads. If you opt for the Attribution Add-On, you get CRM integration that shows the entire path-to-purchase from first touch to closed sale.
National forecasts don't tell you much at the community level. In our report, how often homes sold below asking ranged from 47% to 92% depending on the market. The plan should be weighted to where the movers are, not spread evenly across the footprint.
In our recent State of Home Builder Marketing Report, we shared how local markets are performing compared to national benchmarks. Get the report.
If a community is closing on concessions, some of that margin is buying attention you could have bought upstream for a fraction of the cost.
Builders tend to default to last year's line items. What each option actually does:
Audience data pushed into channels you already run. The cheapest upgrade available: the same Meta spend, aimed at likely home movers instead of broad interest-based audiences. It needs no new channel or creative.
Geofencing. Reaches the shopper who already showed up. Perimeters around your communities, competitor communities, and model home showcases capture visitors, then follow them across their devices while they keep shopping. It's the fastest to launch and the fastest to read.
Addressable CTV. Reaches the household before they start searching, with exposure matched back to site visits, so it reports like a performance channel instead of an awareness buy.
Household display. The retargeting layer that keeps the community in front of a mover through a long, hesitant decision. Cheap per impression, valuable when the audience is right.
Direct mail. Reaches the mover who isn't browsing yet. The targeting input is a household address, not a device match, so the format still performs when the list is built on real household data.
Measurement across all of it. Analytics that show you the households visiting your site who never fill out a form, then tie every channel back to on-site behavior and mover concentration. It's the line item that lets you defend the rest of the plan in January.
Most builders we talk to land between 1.5% and 2.5% of revenue. If sales are soft, it's tempting to go to the bottom of that range. Before you do, make sure what's left can keep each community visible for a full buying cycle, because buyers in our data research for 76 to 159 days before they tour.
Pull last year's spend by channel and mark the ones you can prove brought in likely home movers, not just sessions or form fills. The blanks are where you have room to move money. It's common to find a contract that's been renewed for years and brings in almost no new buyers. Cutting one like that in half can pay for precision targeting and measurement across every community.
Put a fixed amount toward mover data and measurement before you split up the rest. It's usually a small slice, around 3% of the budget, and it's what tells you whether the other 97% worked. It's a minor investment that makes the rest of your budget work more efficiently and helps you defend your choices and win, no matter the market. Audience Town Foundation shows you which channels bring engaged households to your site, and the Attribution Add-On connects to your CRM so you can follow them through tours and sales.
Look at each market before you look at the national numbers. Where are likely movers, where are you discounting the most, and which communities need to sell next? Put more behind those communities, so the plan follows demand instead of last year's budget.
For each community, cover three jobs: reach, retarget, convert. Our data shows that the tour is the center of the journey; buyers are highly active online immediately before and after the tour. Here's what that can look like: Reach likely movers who don't know your brand with targeted advertising like CTV. Retarget the households who visit your site, and those who visit competitors, with display and geofencing. And stay engaged through the conversion with Meta.
A campaign cut at 30 days gets judged before most of its buyers have finished researching. Budget for flights long enough to read, and agree on that with leadership up front so a slow first month doesn't end the test.
Incentives are a cost of winning a buyer, too, and at about $24,000 per closing on a median-priced home, they add up fast. Decide the incentive budget at the same table as the marketing budget, and look at where better targeting could do the job a discount is doing now.
Pick one soft community and plan a 60 to 90 day precision test for early 2027. By spring you'll have your own numbers to plan from instead of a vendor's case study.
At 2% of revenue, a builder doing $50 million a year has about $1 million to plan with. Using the ranges above, that splits roughly like this:
Then split each line by community using step 4, so the communities with the most demand get the most support.
As our CEO Ed Carey puts it: spend less, then spend more, better.
Want to see how your markets compare before you lock the plan? Get the State of Home Builder Marketing 2026 report.