There's a number in your home search you can see, and a number you can't. Most buyers in Sioux Falls make their decision based on the first one and never even find out about the second.
Let's fix that.
When you start house hunting, the first thing you do is set a price filter. You know your budget, you punch in your max, and you let the results sort themselves out. Totally reasonable — staying within your means is exactly what you should be doing. But there's a whole world that the filter doesn't show you, and it comes down to how new construction actually gets priced.
Currently, Empire Homes offers 3% back on the new homes we build in Sioux Falls. On a $300,000 home, that's $9,000. Which means a brand new home sitting a few thousand bucks above your budget in the search results might not be above your budget at all. The filter showed you the sticker. It had no idea the credit existed.
That's the gap. And once you know it's there, the question stops being "can I afford new construction?" and turns into the much better "what do I want to do with that 3%?"
The simplest way to think about it is this: it's a check. A brand-new Empire home comes with one. An existing home never will. And what you do with that check is completely up to you.
It's also worth understanding how the offer is built, because not all incentives are created equal. You'll sometimes see a flat number dangled out there — $10,000 back on select homes, that kind of thing. Ours plays differently. It's 3% on every home we build — not a chosen few, not the ones nobody's buying, not "select." And because it's a percentage, it grows right along with the price of the home. On plenty of our homes, that 3% quietly outruns the flat-dollar offers — and you don't have to go hunting through a list of "qualifying" homes to get it. Every home. Every time. That's the fun part.
So what can you actually do with it?
If new construction already fits your budget, a lot of buyers put the 3% toward upgrades — the finishes, the fixtures, the little decisions that turn a brand-new house into your house before you've even unpacked a box. Others just take it at closing. No strings, no catch, no asterisk. It's your money.
If you're a buyer trying to make the numbers work, the check becomes a tool — and two of the best ways to spend it are closing costs and a rate buydown.
Closing costs are the part of buying a home nobody loves, and everybody forgets to budget for — and surprise, they don't disappear just because you scored a deal on an existing home. That 3% can take a real bite out of them. One more thing the check quietly handles.
The rate buydown is the one worth slowing down for, because the term gets tossed around constantly with almost no explanation. Here's the plain version: when you buy down your rate, you pay a little up front in exchange for a lower interest rate for the life of the loan. That upfront money buys what the mortgage world calls "points" — each point runs about 1% of your loan and shaves roughly a quarter percent off your rate. So on a $300,000 home, the credit could take you from, say, 6.5% down to around 6.25%. Not exactly fireworks, I know. But that's roughly $45 to $50 less every single month, for as long as you own the home — and the check paid for it, not you. For a buyer sweating whether the monthly works, that's a real difference, not a rounding error.
Same 3%, different buyers, everybody comes out ahead. That's the whole point of it being flexible.
So why doesn't any of this show up when you're scrolling listings at 10pm? It's not a conspiracy, and your filter isn't broken. Online home search was built around existing homes, where the price you see is more or less the price you pay. Builder credits don't fit neatly into a little search box. They live in a conversation — which is exactly why so many buyers never bump into them until late in the game, if at all.
The fix is easy. As you're searching, mention to your realtor that you'd like new construction in Sioux Falls in the mix — not instead of everything else, just part of a thorough look. And for comparison's sake, ask them to walk you through an Empire home. You never know what you might find once you're actually standing in it.
Worst case? You confirm the home you were already leaning toward is the right one. Best case? You find out the number you'd been working around this whole time was a whole lot friendlier than your filter let on.
Either way, you walk away having seen both — the number you can see, and the one you couldn't.