New home sales are running at their slowest pace of the year, and transactions are still happening. We analyzed who is actually buying, from 47,373 recorded home sales across seven markets.
This analysis describes who's buying, and who tours. It's not a recommendation for who to target, but it may be useful for determining if what you're selling matches who is actually transacting.
Our proprietary home mover intelligence engine, the Whengine®, matched 47,373 recorded home sales across seven markets to household attributes for January through September 2026, and the buyer was not who most builder marketing assumes.
The seven: Kansas City, Charlotte, Seattle, Phoenix, Milwaukee, Port St. Lucie and Celina, Texas.
When we look at the income bands of people purchasing homes in 2026, we don't see one curve. Income runs highest under $50,000 at 17%, holds near 14.5% through $100,000, drops to 8.5% in the $100,000 to $125,000 band, then climbs back to 13% above $250,000.
If this sounds low, remember: this is just reported W2 income. Lots of people have multiple income streams and may have a financial health profile that income just can't capture. (After all, even Jeff Bezos reports an income of about $80K per year.)
Occupation spans a similar spread. Health and medicine leads, ahead of tech, and together with management and executive roles those three account for 44% of everything recorded. Military and veteran households are the fourth largest group. Another 8.3% are retired.
Age doesn't split the same way. It has a single peak at 35 to 44, which accounts for 26% of buyers, and declines steadily from there. Just over half of buyers are under 45.
This is a national pattern, and it shouldn't overwrite your own market area if you know it to behave differently.
Assets explain what income can't. Roughly a third of buyers hold net worth above $1 million, and 22% hold more than $2.5 million. Credit scores run high across the whole population, with 76% above 690.
These households are buying on equity and assets.
Income is the weakest predictor of buying power in this data.
Ninety-three percent of buyers already own a home. Forty-six percent own one worth between $250,000 and $500,000, the single largest group by a wide margin. That band represents roughly $100,000 to $300,000 in equity, enough for a meaningful down payment on a move.
Forty-five percent have lived in that home for a decade or more.
This buyer is an established homeowner with equity and a reason to move. Equity is the qualifier. A 38-year-old earning $90,000 and a 70-year-old who retired last spring have that much in common.
A third of buyers can afford a home above $1 million. Twelve percent own one today. The affordability distribution sits roughly one bracket above the home value distribution across the entire range.
Set that against median sale prices across the report's 25 markets, which run from $268,000 in Indianapolis to $920,000 in Seattle, and most buyers are purchasing well below their assessed capacity.
Across all of 2026, a third of buyers held a rate between 2% and 4% on the home they left. Among homes sold in the last month, it's nearly half.
Those are 2020 and 2021 rates. The open market hasn't offered them in years, and no builder incentive reaches that low. That looks like a growing share of buyers walking away from pandemic-era financing because the reason to move outweighed the rate they were giving up.
The recent cohort skewing further toward low rates is also what tells us the figure is trustworthy. It describes the mortgage a buyer already held, not the one they just took; a field capturing new originations would drift toward current market rates, not away from them.
Most home buyers are moving from within their state, and in many cases from a neighboring city or town.
Celina, Texas is the clearest case. It's one of the fastest-growing markets in the study, and every 2026 buyer came from within Texas. Nine in ten came from Celina itself or three neighboring North Dallas suburbs. People are moving from Plano to Celina.
Even a destination market is mostly local. In Port St. Lucie, 72% of buyers came from within Florida and 70% of those from Port St. Lucie itself. The out-of-state remainder is real but scattered: Massachusetts at 7%, New Jersey at 3.5%, Wisconsin at 3%, then Virginia, Texas, California, New York and Minnesota all between 1% and 2%.
At the state level those out-of-state transplants look unreachable, but our data resolves them to specific ZIP codes, so we can show you exactly where people are moving from when they come to your area.
Buying a home is also a suburban act. In six of the seven markets, between 95% and 97% of buyers purchased in a suburban area, and that includes Seattle and Phoenix.
Comparing households with tracked tours against engaged website visitors, the Whengine finds existing home value separating the two groups more sharply than any other attribute.
More than half of households that tour already own a home worth $500,000 or more, against a third of engaged visitors. Income and tenure move the same way, less steeply.
Builder website traffic is far broader than the group that tours, and the clearest difference between them is existing equity. Sessions count everyone the same, so that gap never appears in traffic reporting.
One caveat when reading the two groups together: the buyer profile above describes people who closed, and this comparison describes people who toured.
These data points look like an audience, but some of them sit close enough to prohibited basis characteristics that we wouldn't build one from them, and we're not suggesting you try.
What they support is a different set of questions before the 2027 plan locks.
Does your available inventory sit at the price band where transactions are actually happening, given that most buyers purchase a bracket below what they qualify for?
Is income doing work in your targeting that it can't support, when net worth and existing equity separate buyers far more cleanly?
Are you comparing yourself against a national benchmark at all, and how accurate is that for you?
We've seen builders act on exactly this. One found the financial profile of its website traffic didn't match the price of its available homes, repositioned the community, and adjusted pricing. Another found paid search delivering real in-market buyers whose income didn't match a $1M-plus inventory, and moved creative and budget onto the homes that matched the traffic it was already getting.
If you're ready to learn more about how to actually apply this data,join us for a live discussion with practical tips for winning in 2027.